Current high levels not an issue with no substantive differences between the candidates and little substantive discussion given debate format:
Asked about “the right number” of immigrants to bring into Canada in light of about 400,000 landing in the country in 2021, Aitchison, Brown and Poilievre framed the question as a workforce issue and called for more immigration. [Charest noted issue was integration more than levels]
Brown said Canada has a skilled labour shortage and it is not meeting the need.
“We need to unleash the Canadian economic potential through immigration,” he added.
Aitchison, while also calling for more, said whether the number of immigrants Canada settles is 400,000 or more, the country needs a targeted approach.
Article over-dramatises even if there is a need for a review.Margins in many of these ridings were relatively small. Moreover, in Ontario, the provincial conservatives swept most of the same seats and, as the article notes, active outreach by Conservatives allowed them to make inroads.But beyond the 41 ridings, there are an additional 93 ridings with between 20 and 50 percent visible minorities which should also be looked at:
The Conservative Party is only beginning to sift through the data from the 2021 election, but there is at least one warning light flashing red on the dashboard: the party has been nearly wiped out in Canadian ridings where visible minorities form the majority.
Of the 41 ridings in Canada where more than half the population is racialized, the Conservatives won just one in the 2021 election — Calgary Forest Lawn — despite winning 119 seats overall.
While the Conservatives have never been dominant in vote support among new Canadians, they have at least had a solid footing. In 2019, the party won six of those 41 seats. In 2015, when they were reduced to 99 seats overall, they still won three seats on that list. And when they won a majority in 2011, a whopping 20 of the 41 seats went Conservative (using adjusted borders to account for the 2012 redistricting.)Heading into this year’s election, Conservative MPs had represented some of the heaviest concentrations of racialized voters in the country, including Ontario’s Markham-Unionville (84.6 per cent visible minority in the 2016 census), B.C.’s Richmond Centre (77.8 per cent), and Alberta’s Calgary Skyview (69.5 per cent); all have now flipped Liberal.
Many Conservatives point out they fielded a very diverse slate of candidates in the 2021 election. But the problem is in the final results. For a party trying to form government, being nearly shut out of these ridings is a critical issue to solve.
“If the Conservative Party can’t compete in the suburbs, it’s going to lose,” said Phil Triadafilopoulos, a University of Toronto professor who studied Conservative support in immigrant communities during the Stephen Harper era. “And those suburbs, that’s where immigrants and their children live.”
It appears that a huge number of Chinese Canadians turned against the Conservatives during the 2021 campaign. The reasons are being investigated internally, and many Conservatives believe — including at least one defeated candidate, Kenny Chiu — that there was a deliberate misinformation campaign carried out on Chinese social media apps that wasn’t picked up in time by party headquarters.
But there is also a larger trend over the past decade, and people in the party know it.“Among a lot of new Canadian communities, the party has taken on serious brand damage over the years, and repairing that damage is not something that’s going to happen overnight,” said one Conservative campaign official.
There is of course no such thing as a monolithic “ethnic vote” in Canada. It’s split among many different communities, and varies within those communities. Historically, the Conservatives have had their most robust support from some European immigrant communities, such as Ukrainian, Polish, Greek and Italian Canadians.
But in the early years of Harper’s leadership, the Conservatives began a concerted effort to improve their standing in other immigrant communities, particularly among South Asian and East Asian Canadians. They believed the party’s emphasis on low taxes, tough-on-crime laws and family values should find a natural home there.
Famously spearheading this effort was Jason Kenney, who built out a massive network of contacts and kept up a punishing schedule of two dozen events every weekend. The party also paid deep attention to local ethnic media outlets, both in its advertising and in granting interviews.When they won a majority government in 2011, the Conservatives were boosted by a collapsing Liberal Party and an NDP surge. But they also reaped the benefit of earning support among new Canadians. Media reports from the time cite internal party data that put the Conservatives above 40 per cent support among visible minority voters.
That number has since plunged. In its post-election polling, Leger found the Conservatives earned 26 per cent support among visible minority voters this year, roughly tied with the NDP. The Liberals were at 39 per cent.
Leger vice-president Andrew Enns, who did internal polling for the Conservative Party during the Harper years, said building and maintaining Conservative support among immigrant communities has always required a committed strategy.“(This support) is not something that comes naturally to the party,” Enns said. He said the individual effect of Kenney has taken on a bit of myth-making over the years, but it still represents a successful larger effort by the party. “It was a very deliberate task that the prime minister set him out to accomplish,” Enns said. “And that hasn’t been replicated, as far as I can see, by the party since then.”
Triadafilopoulos said the Conservatives during that time successfully combined a boots-on-the-ground game plan with a strong ideological message.
“(Kenney) had a conscious project of building a conservative ideology, a set of principles, that was also very much conscious of and responding to Canada’s really intense transformation since the late 1960s,” he said. It focused on low taxes, support for entrepreneurs, anti-crime measures, religious freedom and family-oriented policy.“A lot of people in academia saw this as purely cynical vote-grabbing,” Triadafilopoulos said. “There was a degree of that, maybe. But if you parse the speeches, if you listen to what (Kenney) was actually saying…There was a real effort to re-establish the conservative approach and to make it fit with a changing Canada.”
Most people who spoke to the National Post, both on and off the record, pointed to the 2015 campaign as a catastrophic setback for the Conservative Party brand among immigrants.
The party pitched a “barbaric cultural practices hotline” that was widely denounced as an anti-immigrant snitch line, and for which numerous Conservative politicians have since apologized. (“It’s why we lost,” said former immigration minister Chris Alexander in 2016, apologizing for his role in announcing the policy.)The Conservatives had also passed a bill to strip Canadian citizenship from dual citizens convicted of a terrorism or treason offence, leading to confusion and concern in immigrant communities that other types of crimes would follow. Justin Trudeau counter-attacked with the line: “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”
Balpreet Singh, of the World Sikh Organization of Canada, said that while some Conservative politicians — he singled out Alberta MP Garnett Genuis for particular praise — have worked hard at building bridges, the 2015 campaign still haunts the party.
“They played towards a segment of the electorate that was intolerant,” Singh said. “These things remain in the collective memory.”But Singh didn’t let Erin O’Toole off the hook. He said many Sikhs are keenly aware of the federal parties’ stances on Bill 21, the Quebec law banning public servants from wearing religious symbols. “All the parties have been weak when it comes to Bill 21,” he said. “But the Conservatives were the worst of all the positions. They ruled out a legal intervention and didn’t even come out and say it was discriminatory.”
The party’s messaging on China is also under the microscope, given the shocking loss of Richmond Centre, a seat thought to be a safe Conservative riding. A pattern is clear in the 2021 results: Richmond Centre, Markham-Unionville and Steveston-Richmond East all have very high populations of Chinese Canadians — and all flipped from Conservative to Liberal.
Conservative officials strongly suspect they were attacked by misinformation, possibly orchestrated by pro-Beijing groups.“Something weird has happened there that cannot be explained by normal voting patterns,” one party official said, speaking on condition they weren’t named. “We need to find whatever that is. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy kook, but something very strange has happened there.”
There may be other factors at play as well. O’Toole’s attempt to attract working class votes has seen a big emphasis on attacking Canada’s trade relationship with China. Slamming the Chinese Communist Party is nothing new for the Conservatives, but O’Toole may not have taken enough care to avoid attacking China as a whole.
Tung Chan, a former Vancouver city councillor and former member of Richmond Centre’s Conservative riding association, said he does believe the party’s China messaging wasn’t careful enough. But he also said the party was not paying enough attention to the misinformation issue.He saw it firsthand during his regular Chinese-language radio appearances during the campaign. Kenny Chiu — the Conservative MP who was defeated in Steveston-Richmond East — had earlier tabled a private member’s bill to set up a registry for agents of foreign governments.
“We got tons of calls coming in and almost every single one was afraid of what Kenny Chiu had tabled, and everything that they said was exaggerated, misinformed,” Chan said. “The party did not devote enough resources to try to combat that. Kenny did buy some advertisements, and tried to explain…It wasn’t enough.”
Chan, who was CEO of the immigrant service agency SUCCESS while Kenney was immigration minister, said the party needs to make its ethnic outreach work a top priority again. However, he cautioned against letting it become too focused on one individual’s effort.“They fail to institutionalize it after Jason left, the notion that the party needs support from minority groups,” Chan said. He was very critical of the fact that the word “racism” did not appear once in the Conservative platform this year.
Tenzin Khangsar, a Tibetan Canadian who was a chief of staff to Kenney during the Harper years, said the party has a problem when you look at where it’s winning seats right now, but he also expressed optimism.
“The results speak for themselves, but the history speaks for itself too,” he said. “We could get back there. We did it with Harper, we did it with Mulroney. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The playbook is there. The supporters are still there. We just have to work more structured, more strategically, more collaboratively.”
Khangsar argued the Kenney model worked, and can work again.
“We should fully support — with resources and moral and political support from the leader — a lieutenant that will be given the mandate to do what Jason did,” he said. “And that lieutenant should be as important as the Quebec lieutenant, and I say that as a proud former Quebecer.”
The Conservatives are doing an extensive post-election poll, and when those numbers come in over the next few weeks, it may show a more hopeful picture. As O’Toole’s team frequently points out, despite the lower seat count, the party did substantially improve its vote in Ontario from 2019.
Conservative Sen. Yonah Martin, who is Korean Canadian, said she was shocked by the unexpected Conservative losses in Richmond and Markham. She argued, however, that it’s missing the larger picture to focus solely on the seat count when the party put forward such a diverse group of candidates, including three Korean Canadians.
“As a party, we have continued to do outreach, genuine outreach,” she said. “And we do have better diversity within the party membership.”
But she said caucus needs to listen to what some of the defeated candidates have to say, given these losses, and think hard about what needs to change.
“It is disappointing, so this is something we have to look at carefully,” Martin said. “And do things better for the next election, if that’s what it takes.”
Somewhat bloated commentary, where Kheiriddin picks up on earlier arguments made by Tom Flanagan regarding the “fourth sister” of Canadian politics but broadens her arguments to include other issues:
In the aftermath of Canada’s 44th federal election, the Conservative party is at a crossroads. Under two successive leaders, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, it has attempted to rebuild its fabled “big tent,” and failed.That tent has taken different forms over the years. From 1984 to 1993, with party leader Brian Mulroney in the Prime Minister’s Office, it was composed of an amalgam of Quebec nationalists, Ontario Red Tories and Western fiscal hawks. From 2006 to 2015, with Stephen Harper at the helm and in power, it comprised a microtargeted mix of suburban and exurban Ontario families, “bleu Québécois,” and the Western remains of the Reform Party.
In both cases, however, the tent wasn’t the only factor for Conservative success. Other elements included fatigue with previous Liberal administrations, and weak Liberal leaders. In 1988, Canadians rallied to the grand cause of free trade; in 2011, a split in the progressive vote allowed the Conservatives to conquer the 905 area surrounding Toronto. And in both cases, the party was headed by two strong leaders, one who excelled at cultivating caucus loyalty, the other a master tactician and strategist.
It is fair to say that neither Scheer nor O’Toole is cast in either mould. But the failings of the Tories cannot be laid solely at the feet of the messenger; the message is also the problem. As in 1993, the party is divided and struggling to define itself. Is it in favour of carbon pricing, or does it not believe climate change is real? Is it going to ban assault-style weapons, or keep them around? Is it a party of fiscal prudence, or post-pandemic largesse?A political party is not an all-you-can-eat buffet. The more choices on offer, the greater the likelihood they will be bland and unappetizing, since it is impossible to cook every dish equally well, or appeal to every type of palate. The party needs a signature dish, a recognizable menu, and most importantly, an authentic atmosphere. A French bistro that suddenly offers takeout sushi is not what patrons — or voters — want. They don’t trust the chef to make what he does not know.
Thus, when O’Toole morphed from right-wing leadership candidate to centrist party leader, he was doomed to fail. Things looked bright for a while, but voters caught on. O’Toole flip-flopped on the gun issue, could not explain his carbon savings account policy in fewer than 1,000 words, and tried to out-nationalize Quebec nationalists. Voters were left wondering what the party really stood for, and who he really was. And now the party is left wondering what to try next, after its latest attempt at reinvention has failed.
The answer lies in the future of Canada itself. In the wake of this election, Canada is a nation divided, torn between new and old, East and West, urban and rural, rich and poor, right and left. If the Conservatives cannot offer a path forward to heal these divisions, they will be consumed by them. If they are successful, however, they can create not a “big tent” of convenience, but a grand coalition that will endure.
There are a number of areas where the party needs to do better. Since the election, commentators have addressed many of these: the need to appeal to younger voters and to women; the need to be unequivocal on such issues as abortion and same-sex rights; the need for fulsome policies on climate change and Indigenous reconciliation; the need to focus on prosperity and affordability; the need for bilingualism and an understanding of Quebec.To date, few have addressed one critical issue: demography. Canadian women have one of the lowest replacement fertility rates in the Western world: 1.5 children as of 2018. (By comparison, U.S. women have 1.7; Mexico, 2.1). With labour shortages even worse than in pre-pandemic times, someone’s got to fill in the gap if the economy is to keep growing, and that someone is immigrants and their children. Canada is a country not only built on immigration, but beholden to it.
For those of us who are first- or second-generation Canadian, the experience of Canada is different than for Canadians whose families have been here for generations. We are the “third solitude,” and increasingly, a visible one. By 2036, if current trends continue, Canada will be a nation “as brown as it is white”, with 30 per cent of its citizens born outside the country, in Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa. The division is not about racial difference, however; it is about lived experiences and political expectations. Many of these new Canadians’ political experiences will bear little resemblance to those of native-born, mostly white, Canadians of European origin. Many newcomers will not have lived under a liberal democracy; for some, right-of-centre parties are more likely to be associated with military juntas than the ideas of Edmund Burke.
Add to this the fact that Conservative “heroes” of yore like John A. Macdonald are now vilified as Indigenous peoples seek an end to colonialist policies, and it becomes apparent that the Conservative party has more than an image problem: it has an identification problem. For a new Canadian, it is the Liberal party that has staked the claim as “the party of immigration” — ironic when you consider that the first leader of the federal Conservatives (yes, Macdonald) was an immigrant, and the first prime minister not of English or French descent was a Tory (John Diefenbaker, of German heritage).The Liberals, in contrast, have been consistently led by native-born members of the Laurentian elite. However, thanks to their initiatives over the years, including the multiculturalism policies of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the Charter of Rights, the Liberals benefit from an advantage denied to Conservatives: they cannot be tagged as intolerant. In contrast, the Conservatives routinely fall prey to this label, thus potentially deterring new Canadians from identifying with them and supporting their cause.
It also does not help that right-of-centre parties are also identified, not only in Canada but around the world, with anti-immigration policies. Here at home, it is not the Conservatives, but the People’s Party of Canada that claims that dubious status — but the tag sticks to the Tories anyway. People do not know that Harper’s Tories admitted more immigrants annually to Canada than Jean Chrétien’s Liberals had; what they remember is the proposed “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line and Harper’s foot dragging on the admission of Syrian refugees.
But those were not the issues that directly affected immigrants. The big change the Conservatives made was to prioritize economics over compassion, notably by reducing family class immigration. That had a personal, immediate and negative impact on millions of new Canadians who could no longer have their extended families join them. Unsurprisingly, this policy was reversed by their Liberal successors.
Ironically, at the same time the Tories curbed family reunification, they aggressively sought to capture the votes of so-called “cultural communities,” notably in the suburbs of Vancouver and Toronto. However, then-immigration minister Jason Kenney’s infamous “curry in a hurry” strategy produced little more than indigestion. The lesson here is that opportunism will not build connection. There has to be more on offer than the promise of a say in government, or the implicit benefits of siding with the “winning” party.
That something is making conservatism — the worldview, the philosophy, the vision — relevant to new Canadians. It is allowing them to identify with and see themselves in its future. To do this, the party has to both talk the talk, and walk the walk.
First, the walking. Today’s Conservative party is not diverse. Its elected membership is more akin to a 1950’s golf club: male, older, and white. Only seven of the 119 Conservatives elected in 119 ridings are Black, Indigenous or a person of colour (BIPOC) — six per cent. That is down from nine per cent in the past election. In contrast, the newly elected Liberal caucus is 30 per cent BIPOC. And despite the negative experiences of such former BIPOC Liberal MPs as Jody Wilson-Raybould and Celina Caesar-Chavannes, the Liberals can still legitimately claim to more accurately represent the diversity that is our country.
That must change. The golf clubs that have survived — and even thrived — have expanded their membership, attracting women and non-white players to their ranks. But why would an immigrant join the Conservative party? What would its appeal be? It’s a vicious circle: unless there is something that attracts new Canadians, the party will remain that of Harper’s “old stock” Canadians; unless new Canadians see themselves in the party, they will be less likely to join.
That something is the talking. If it is done right, it will not only attract new Canadians, but will also reinvigorate the party’s base. It will create a common bond between new and old, as opposed to emphasizing — or even exploiting — division.The key is to reconcile Conservative values with the solutions to people’s problems. For new Canadians, the problems to be solved are those of establishing themselves in a country often very different from the one they left. Finding work, building a home, raising their children and — as any child of immigrants will tell you, possibly the most important thing — enabling those children to do better than their parents. Education, opportunity and intergenerational advancement are the Holy Grail.
How do the values of conservatism, and the Conservative party, relate to the immigrant experience? Freedom is a pre-eminent value for Conservatives, and the ability to pursue one’s dreams depends on it. For immigrants who come from countries that are manifestly unfree, such as China, or Iran, freedom can be immensely appealing. Conservatives need to realize, however, that the gulf between our government and those of such nations is so wide that even the Liberals will appear to offer sufficient freedom for their purposes. The Conservatives do thus not have a monopoly on the term.Furthermore, in the mouths of some organizations, such as the People’s Party of Canada, freedom has become synonymous with hate. Hatred of vaccine mandates and hatred of government masqueraded as calls for freedom in the recent election. The rise of the PPC is a problem for the Conservatives, not simply in terms of votes lost, but in terms of perverting one of the core tenets of conservative thought. It is similar to what Donald Trump did to the Republican brand in the United States.
The discourse of freedom alone will thus not win the day. Enter the role of society — yes, Lady Thatcher, there is a society — which is also a cornerstone of conservative philosophy. For conservatives, society is built of “little platoons,” the often hyper-local organizations to which conservatives devote their energy, whether volunteering, donating, or meeting, and from which they draw strength, community and support. In the words of Burke, “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle … of public affections.”
The platoon can be village, town, church, mosque, Rotary Club, boys’ or girls’ club, or an immigrant women’s organization. The first platoon, however, is the family. This is why family reunification, far from being a drain on resources, needs to be embraced by Conservatives. It is consistent with the view that the family is the basis for society and that organizations exist to strengthen its bonds. Individuals should be free to make choices but be supported by the community in their realization.Key to keeping faith with both its base and new voters, is to emphasize that for conservatives, “community” does not equal “government.” Conservatives do not believe in big government, but in necessary government. The state’s sphere of action must be limited to the things individuals and the community cannot achieve on their own, or things that provide greatest economy of scale at the government level. Roads, bridges, borders, hospitals, schools, public security — all are legitimate domain for the state, to ensure that all citizens have access to adequate infrastructure and services.
That does not mean, however, that the state should have a monopoly on them either. When O’Toole was accused of supporting “two-tier” health care early on in the election, it backfired, in part because Twitter called out the Liberal party for stripping his words of their context. But when pressed on the issue in subsequent debates, O’Toole did not defend the position he had taken, which is that he was in favour of more private health care while maintaining the public system. He watered down his discourse to supporting “more innovation” by the provinces and repeating his assertion that he would increase transfers to the public system. He passed up an opportunity to move Canada towards a system that strikes a better balance between individual choice and state support — one that exists in every OECD country save the United States.
Ironically, balancing individualism, communitarianism and state engagement lies at the heart of conservatism. As the pandemic has shown us, we are not meant to be islands. Nor are curbs on freedoms during times of crisis a permanent state of affairs, or un-conservative. Winston Churchill did not impose wartime rations in Britain because he was a Bolshevik. He pursued a manifestly un-conservative policy because it was necessary to help win the war. Similarly, a compulsory vaccination policy for your candidates is a means of winning the war on COVID-19. Yet O’Toole could not bring himself to take this stand, over fear of driving votes to the PPC or offending his base in Western and rural Canada where there has been greater opposition to vaccine mandates.
This is another issue that the Conservatives must address. The Conservative vote is heavily concentrated in rural and Western Canada. Despite garnering 33.7 per cent of the national popular vote, greater than the 32.6 per cent achieved by the Liberals, it was not reflected in the party’s seat count. This produces two outcomes: first, the impression that the Conservatives are the party of Western and rural alienation, and second, actual Western and rural alienation.Western alienation is nothing new. It has waxed and waned over the decades. It flared in the 1970s due to Trudeau senior’s infamous National Energy Policy, which birthed a bumper sticker that read, “Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark.” It found its political home in the 1990s in the Reform Party, whose slogan was “The West Wants In.” Today, for some, that slogan is “The West Wants Out,”,as embodied by the Wexit party and the “Free Alberta Strategy,” which would “exempt” Alberta from the application of federal laws.
Central and Eastern Canada may scoff at these sentiments, but they are no laughing matter. The terrible situation in Alberta today, with its health system failing in the name of “freedom,” is a direct result of alienation. Jason Kenney acted the way he did not merely because he thought it was the right call, but because he thought his electorate would, too. This has important ramifications for the federal Conservative party, as it saw during the final days of the past election. Because the Conservatives draw an important part of their base from Alberta, they are identified with its sentiments. Voters in the rest of the country will not want to be associated with the Conservatives if they are seen as the “angry party of the West.” New Canadians will not either. And neither will Quebec.
One cannot discuss the Conservatives’ future without discussing Quebec, for its success there is intimately tied to its success in the rest of the country. Quebec voters are notorious for voting “en bloc,” and for voting for the federal party that is likely to do well in Ontario. But instead of playing to this reality, the Conservatives sought to satisfy Quebec demands directly, by means of a “contract” with the province, executed in the first 100 days of its mandate. The contract included giving Quebec full powers over immigration — powers it pretty much has already thanks to a long-standing memorandum of understanding with Ottawa. But even Premier François Legault’s blessing wasn’t enough to win the day. Instead, a debate question that decried Quebec’s Bills 21 and 96 as discriminatory legislation enraged the province’s political class, boosted the Bloc Québécois’s fortunes, and upended the Tory campaign.
In other words, promising more powers to Quebec did not work; this was not 1984, O’Toole was not Mulroney, and there was no sense of “honour and enthusiasm” about the Tories’ plans. They were pure electoral calculus. Strategically, the Conservatives would have been better to appeal to Quebecers on the basis of their pan-Canadian strength, and by focusing their efforts on the 905 belt — and yes, the immigrant vote — and delivering a strong showing there.
For Conservatives, earning the support of new Canadians is the key to unlocking the Grand Coalition. Unless the party can find a path to bridge East and West, new and old, and rural and urban Canada, it will not form government. It risks becoming a Western rump party instead of the national government. But this exercise isn’t just about “saving” the Conservative party, or finding the “flavour of the month” for the next election. It is also about preserving Canadian democracy. A democracy needs viable alternatives, real choices for voters to weigh. Conservatives owe it not just to themselves, but to all Canadians, to provide one.
A former Conservative MP who lost his seat in the recent election thinks the party could have done a better job speaking directly to Chinese Canadians.
Kenny Chiu was defeated in Steveston-Richmond East, a British Columbia riding with many residents of Chinese descent.
The party also saw the losses of longtime Conservative MP Alice Wong in Richmond Centre and Bob Saroya in Markham-Unionville, both home to many voters with Chinese roots. Neither responded to requests for comment from The Canadian Press.
The defeats have the Conservatives wondering what happened, and what connection the losses might have to the party’s stance and messaging on China.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has been an outspoken critic of China’s human rights abuses, calling on the Liberal government to adopt a tougher approach with the authoritarian regime.
Chiu says there’s no single reason for his loss, but points to online WeChat posts he says contained false information about the Conservatives and allegations a private member’s bill he tabled would discriminate against Chinese Canadians.
“Hindsight is always 20/20. I think there could be more proactive communication directly addressing Canadians of Chinese descent that we could have done,” Chiu said in an interview.
The party could have bought more targeted advertisements, he said, adding it’s clear the communication efforts weren’t enough to counter what he considers misinformation.
Improving how Conservatives speak to constituents is one of the issues Chiu said he had hoped to raise heading into the next session of Parliament. Another was how to reassure people that their criticism of the potential influence of the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t mean they are attacking China, a country with a rich and storied history, or its people.
O’Toole hasn’t addressed the issue specifically, but expressed general disappointment in last week’s election results, promising that what went wrong will be examined in a postelection review. Details have yet to be provided on its parameters or who will lead it.
Besides failing to grow the party in key areas like the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver, home to many immigrants and new Canadians, the Conservatives have five fewer elected people of colour because of defeats in and around these two cities, as well as in Calgary.
That comes as a hit to O’Toole’s pledge to grow the party, and make it a place where more Canadians and people of all backgrounds call home.
During the campaign he tried courting voters by telling them Conservatives were no longer their dad’s or grandfather’s party, despite having a predominantly white caucus.
For Tenzin Khangsar, who worked for Jason Kenney when the Alberta premier served as immigration minister under former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, success in making inroads with newcomer communities came down to having an authentic presence there before any election was called.
Under Harper, Kenney prioritized aggressive outreach with diaspora communities, noting that Canada’s demographics had changed.
Kenney was a key supporter of O’Toole’s when he ran to win the party’s leadership in 2020, with O’Toole crediting his former colleague for having helped grow the party when he served in Harper’s cabinet.
More recently, Conservative MPs including Alberta’s Tim Uppal have apologized for not speaking out when he was in Harper’s government against its efforts to ban face coverings during citizenship ceremonies and its 2015 election promise to set up a so-called “barbaric cultural practices” hotline.
Waiting for the final results and the breakdowns for all parties for women, Indigenous peoples, visible minorities and LGBTQ. In the meantime, am posting some of the group specific articles to date, starting with the CPC:
Only seven of the Conservative candidates leading or elected in 119 ridings across the country are Black, Indigenous or a person of colour (BIPOC) — a share of the total that’s even lower now than it was before the election because some Conservative incumbents lost their seats.
A CBC News analysis of the preliminary results shows the vast majority of the MPs making up the new Conservative caucus — nearly 95 per cent — are white, even as the country’s racial makeup is diversifying. Before this election, nine per cent of Tory MPs were BIPOC.
The Conservatives retained seats in rural areas and picked up some support in Atlantic Canada — parts of the country that are, generally speaking, whiter than others. But the party struggled in Canada’s urban and suburban areas, regions where racial demographics have changed dramatically over the last 40 years due to waves of non-white immigration.
The Tory caucus will be less diverse than the class of 2019 because at least five Conservative MPs — Kenny Chiu, Nelly Shin and Alice Wong from Vancouver-area ridings, Bob Saroya from the riding of Markham-Unionville (a suburb of Toronto) and Calgary’s Jag Sahota — are on track to lose to Liberal or NDP candidates.
A Liberal spokesperson said the party is still awaiting final results, with special ballots still left to be counted in some ridings. The spokesperson said that, based on preliminary results, more than 30 per cent of the Liberal caucus will be MPs who identify as Black, Indigenous or a person of colour.
A spokesperson for the NDP said of the four new NDP MPs elected in Monday’s vote, two are Indigenous.
Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party has had a lock on many of the country’s urban and suburban ridings and there’s some NDP representation in cities like Edmonton, Hamilton, Winnipeg and Vancouver.
Over the past three election cycles, the Conservatives have struggled to reach the high-water mark set in 2011 when former prime minister Stephen Harper cruised to victory thanks in part to strong suburban support in the Toronto and Vancouver areas.
The seven racially diverse Conservative candidates who were elected on Monday are Leslyn Lewis in Haldimand—Norfolk and Michael Chong in Wellington—Halton Hills (two more rural parts of Ontario), Jasraj Singh Hallan in Calgary Forest Lawn, Ziad Aboultaif and Tim Uppal in Edmonton-area seats, Alain Rayes from Richmond—Arthabaska in Quebec and Marc Dalton, who identifies as Métis, in the B.C. riding of Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge.
It’s a disappointing result for Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, who sought to bring more BIPOC Canadians into the Conservative fold as part of a push to unseat the governing Liberals.
O’Toole stressed the importance of diversity in his Monday concession speech after it became clear that the party was poised to lose some of the diversity in its caucus.
“We will continue to put in the time showing more Canadians that they are welcome in the Conservative Party of Canada,” O’Toole said at his event in Oshawa, Ont.
“Above all, we must continue to show Canadians, whether you’re black, white, brown or from any race or creed, whether you’re LGBTQ or straight, whether you are an Indigenous Canadian or came to Canada five weeks ago or five generations ago … you have a place in the Conservative Party.”
Some racialized voters ‘nervous’ about voting Conservative: activist
Sukhi Sandhu is a former Liberal voter from Surrey, B.C. who backed the Conservatives in this campaign. He’s also co-founder of Wake Up Surrey, a grassroots anti-gang violence group.
He said he has soured on what he calls Liberal “lip-service” and “performative politics” on issues that matter to his South Asian community, such as crime and gang violence, immigration fraud and international student exploitation.
Sandhu said many racialized Canadians are frustrated with the Liberal government’s record in office — and O’Toole and his team failed to capitalize on their disillusionment.
He said that, based on conversations with his neighbours, some Canadians from diverse backgrounds are still skeptical of the Conservatives.
The party’s platform made no mention of racism or systemic discrimination — a red flag for some would-be Conservative voters, Sandhu said. During the campaign, O’Toole faced pointed questions about why “Canada’s recovery plan” had more to say about dogs and animal welfare than marginalized communities.
“People were still nervous about what the Conservative brand stood for. They were asking, ‘Do they actually value inclusion and equity?’ I’m sure many second- and third-generation immigrants were looking for a political home and the Conservative approach wasn’t compelling enough,” Sandhu told CBC News.
“The issues of systemic racism, inequity and social justice — those issues have to be paramount in every party. There’s a responsibility for the Conservative Party to engage with these issues. It’s not just about star candidates from an immigrant background. It’s not about tokenism. You’ve got to understand what your potential voter pool really cares about.
“If you’re out to lunch on this or if you have your head in the sand, then you’re going to lose at the ballot box. On systemic racism, the Conservatives need to wrap their heads around it. It’s about setting the foundation and building trusting relationships, not hollow words.”
Sandhu said he’s not surprised to hear the Conservative caucus in the Commons will be 95 per cent white. He said the party hasn’t built strong relationships with racial and ethnic community leaders in the swing ridings that often decide which party will be in power in Ottawa.
“It tells me the Conservative Party is struggling. You need to develop a pipeline of activists from marginalized communities — and there’s still some concern that this party does not respect or understand our unique identity as racialized Canadians,” he said.
Will be preparing a comparative table when the platforms of other parties are out. While Conservatives have five priority themes: jobs, accountability, mental health, strategic stockpile of vaccines and PPE, and economy, the platform contains a myriad of commitments across most areas.
The immigration section is also detailed, covering the following themes: “addressing administrative backlogs, fixing a broken visitor visa system, innovation efficiency and cultural sensitivity, strengthening credential recognition, family reunification, super visas, pathways to permanence, advancing Canada’s interests, reforming Canada’s broken refugee system, and securing our border.”
Striking what is missing: no reference to citizenship and multiculturalism, racism reference pertain to Diefenbaker), no substantive references to diversity and inclusion, no reference to employment equity, no reference to antisemitism or Islamophobia, discrimination references limited to the CAF and (again) to Diefenbaker. Anti-Asian hate including in section “Standing up to China’s aggression.”
The other initial observation is the platform is silent on the question of levels, likely given that any suggestion of reduced levels would provide the other parties an opportunity to paint the CPC as anti-immigrant (unfairly, IMO).
Increasingly I think detailed campaign platform documents are terrible for governance.
They shackle entire governments, struggling with the unimaginable realities of life three years from now, to the best guesses a few campaign strategists were able to make last month. They crowd out the civil service’s policy-development function, because the first thing a new PM’s transition team says to the Privy Council Clerk who greets them is, “Shush. Do all of this.” They discourage agility amid changing circumstances because everyone’s busy ticking off stale boxes so they can run for re-election on “promise made, promise kept.” They practically guarantee fiscal trouble because who’d ever campaign on an appropriately pessimistic outlook for the economy?
Fie on the whole mess. The best way to run for high office would be to say, “You know me. Meet my team. Do we seem solid? Count on us to handle whatever comes our way.”
Of course I’m outvoted. Constantly. Whatever their worth as blueprints for government, thick platforms often work a charm in campaigns, especially if the goal is to rebut widespread worry that the leader in question is a lightweight or a nutbar. Modern campaign credibility-building was invented by Jean Chrétien’s Liberals in 1992 with Creating Opportunity: The Liberal Plan for Canada, instantly dubbed the Red Book. It transformed Chrétien from a yesterday’s man without a clue to a big thinker with an eye for detail. “It’s in there. Read it,” he’d say. Ontario’s provincial Conservatives under Mike Harris won power back in 1995, after a decade of Liberal and NDP governments, with the Common Sense Revolution pamphlet. And Justin Trudeau did a lot in 2015 to parry perceptions that he was a lightweight with Real Change: A New Plan For a Strong Middle Class (.pdf here). And even though each of those documents would have occasion to cause grief for its authors, they all worked, so they’ve spawned a hundred more or less successful imitators over the years.
This year the emerging novelty is a preference for early platform launches, a repudiation of the notion that you should dribble out your announcements for weeks on end, maintaining suspense and keeping campaign reporters from getting bored. Jagmeet Singh’s NDP went for a big bang last week with the release of the party’s entire platform, Ready For Better. And on Monday Erin O’Toole did the same, releasing the entire platform (Canada’s Recovery Plan) on the campaign’s first full day. Well, all of it except the costing: since it’s up to the Parliamentary Budget Office to check costing claims, and they couldn’t do that in a timely fashion because of the snap election, the costing will come later, Conservative campaign strategists told reporters on Monday. Meanwhile, apparently everything O’Toole is promising is free! I kid.
The problem O’Toole seeks to address is that, to borrow the language I used a few paragraphs ago, lots of people worry he’s a lightweight and a nutbar. A lightweight because a lot of his public pronouncements until now have been comically low on detail—Justin Trudeau got NAFTA wrong, we need a plan, the debate is over, whatever random combination of fridge magnets you want to assemble. A nutbar because he campaigned as a “True Blue” and then discovered his party doesn’t believe the Earth is round, or some such.
Canada’s Recovery Plan (rejected title: Erin O’Toole’s Hail Mary Pass) is an attempt to answer every question anyone will ever have about O’Toole and his party. Surely a doomed attempt—it’s always easy to come up with more questions, this week often featuring the words “nasal swabs”—but ambitious in the trying nonetheless. It starts out a little pre-school (Actual quote from the first page of text: “What is Canada’s Recovery Plan? It’s a plan. A very detailed plan.” Gee thanks, Einstein). But before it’s done it sprawls across nearly twice as many pages as Trudeau’s 2015 platform. The word “detail” and its derivatives appears 54 times, often in chapter titles that read like so much grim found poetry: “A Detailed Plan to Lift Up Working Canadians/ A Detailed Plan to Support Working Families/ A Detailed Plan to Lower Prices/ A Detailed Plan to Tackle Home Prices,” and on and frickin’ on.
Another word frequently spotted in the thing is “support,” also a favourite of the Trudeau government, especially since COVID-19. In Trudeauspeak, “support” means “give money to,” and I suspect O’Toole swiped it to convey the impression this year’s Conservatives are more spendy than previous generations. “Support” and its derivatives appear 190 times in the CPC platform, including a record 23 appearances over the four pages from 108-111. What’s the beneficiary of this four-page burst of support? I was surprised to discover it’s the rest of the world, for it’s in his platform’s foreign-policy section that O’Toole feels most, um, uplifting.
Among the very many things he wants to support: “Taiwan’s participation in multilateral fora”; “a climate-conscious, clean alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative;” “regional security” across “Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and beyond;” “Israel’s existence as a sovereign democratic Jewish state” and “the aspirations of the Palestinian people and a two-state solution leading to a Palestinian state;” and “East Africa with data and infrastructure development.”
So the gauntlet is thrown. If you don’t vote Conservative this year, I guess you just don’t want a digital East Africa. It’ll be interesting to see whether this brick dominates O’Toole’s campaign or whether, having dropped it, he never mentions it again. I’ve seen both happen in various campaigns. It’s a drag that the Parliamentary Budget Officer hasn’t checked the Conservatives’ math, though they swear they’ll fix that in future editions, once the PBO reports. It’s close to a sure thing that amid all these words, there’ll be something to upset Conservatives’ opponents and probably also some supporters. Whatever happens next, at least, O’Toole can tell himself he left everything on the field, and indeed that he put it out there early.
Will be interesting to observe the range of commentary on these ambitious targets. Hard to square this with Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem’s warning that the economy is unlikely to get back on track until 2023. Moreover, previous downturns and recessions tell us that immigrants who arrive during difficult economic times suffer economically in both the short and longer term::
In the midst of a second wave of COVID-19, Canada isn’t just maintaining its immigration strategy, but taking it up a notch, increasing the number of people it will bring into the country in a bid to stimulate the post-pandemic economic recovery.
On Friday, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said Canada will welcome more than 1.2 million new immigrants over the next three years, with an annual intake that could reach 401,000 in 2021; 411,000 in 2022; and 421,000 in 2023 — equivalent to one per cent of the population.
The previous plan, unveiled right before the onset of the pandemic lockdown in March, set targets of 351,000 in 2021 and 361,000 in 2022.
“Immigration is essential to getting us through the pandemic, but also to our short-term economic recovery and our long-term economic growth. Canadians have seen how newcomers are playing an outsized role in our hospitals and care homes, and helping us to keep food on the table,” Mendicino said.
“Immigration is essential to getting us through the pandemic, but also to our short-term economic recovery and our long-term economic growth. Canadians have seen how newcomers are playing an outsized role in our hospitals and care homes, and helping us to keep food on the table,” Mendicino said.
“As we look to recovery, newcomers create jobs not just by giving our businesses the skills they need to thrive, but also by starting businesses themselves. Our plan will help to address some of our most acute labour shortages and to grow our population to keep Canada competitive on the world stage.”
The much anticipated 2021-23 immigration plan was tabled amid a cloud of uncertainty over Canada’s economic future in the middle of a global pandemic that has seen the country’s jobless rate surged to nine per cent last month from 5.6 per cent before the pandemic. It peaked at 13.4 per cent in May.
Canada was on track to bring in 341,000 newcomers this year; 351,000 in 2021; and 361,000 in 2022 — with about 58 per cent of the intake being skilled immigrants, 26 per cent under family reunification and the remaining 26 per cent as refuges or on humanitarian grounds.
The new plan hopes to make up the shortfall over the next three years, with 60 per cent of the intake coming from economic class, 30 per cent from family reunification and 10 per cent under refugee protection and resettlement.
Last month, Statistics Canada’s latest demographic update showed the country’s population has reached 38 million but only recorded a 0.1 per cent growth or an increase of 25,384 persons between April and June — the lowest since 1972 — because of the pandemic.
In contrast, the growth rate stood at 0.5 per cent in each of the past two years at this time. In 2019, immigration accounted for 86.5 per cent of Canada’s population growth in the second quarter. This year, that dropped to 38.2 per cent (an addition of 9,700 persons).
Pre-release commentary by the Conservative and NDP immigration critics:
Conservative immigration critic Raquel Dancho said that whatever the Trudeau government announces today, it must have a concrete plan for bringing people safely into the country during a pandemic and for integrating them into Canadian society.
She said the backlog of applicants has grown during the pandemic.
“The immigration system has not been well-managed, I think to say the least, in the last eight months. So I will be looking for some sort of plan for how they’re going to improve it,” Dancho said.
“The number can be whatever it’s going to be, but unless they bring forward a plan for how they’re going to change course and get better at processing immigration applications, it’s really all for nothing.”
Dancho said Canadians must have a clear explanation of how immigration targets will meet Canada’s labour needs while upholding its humanitarian commitments.
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan urged the government to increase its capacity to help vulnerable people in need of protection in Canada, noting that persecution abroad has not stopped during the pandemic.
She said Canada also should give permanent residence status to people who want it and are already in the country, such as temporary foreign workers and international students with job offers.
“Canada can, in fact, take a true humanitarian approach by regularizing all those immigrants and refugees and undocumented people,” she said.
And Quebec continuing to have relatively low immigration targets, making the demographic gap between Quebec and the rest of Canada continue to grow:
Quebec could welcome between 44,500 and 47,500 immigrants in 2021.
The immigration targets for 2021 were announced as part of the Plan d’immigration du Québec 2021, released on October 29. This report coincides with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada‘s (IRCC) announcement of its multi-year plan, which is expected this week and will guide Canada’s immigration planning for 2021 to 2023.
In 2021, the majority of new admissions to Quebec — 62 per cent — are expected to come through the province’s economic immigration programs.
The new Quebec immigration levels represent a slight increase over its 2020 targets when Quebec’s goal was to welcome between 43,000 and 44,500 immigrants.
According to estimates in the plan released today, Quebec will admit a maximum of 30,500 immigrants this year, instead of the projected maximum of 44,500. The province says travel restrictions and the closure of federal offices and processing centres around the world make it difficult to meet immigration targets for 2020.
However, the province’s immigration ministry said its targets for 2021 include a rebalancing plan “with the admission of an additional 7,000 people, representing the deferment of some of the admissions that were not fulfilled in 2020 due to the health crisis.”
As a result of the health crisis, the province estimates the number of unrealized admissions in 2020 to be between 13,000 and 18,000 but plans to make up the shortfall over the next two years.
Quebec’s Admissions targets for 2021
For 2021, Quebec has set a range of between 27,500 and 29,300 new admissions for its economic immigration programs, including a maximum of 24,200 skilled workers.
In addition, a maximum of 800 admissions is set for “other economic categories” such as live-in caregivers and others.
Another 10,200 new permanent residents are expected to arrive through family sponsorship, refugee and other immigration programs.
2021 Quebec Selection Certificate targets
Under the provisions of the Canada-Quebec Accord, Quebec has the power to select all economic class immigrants and certain refugees to the province.
Those selected are awarded a Quebec Selection Certificate (Certificat de sélection du Québec, or CSQ) and can then apply to Canada’s federal government for a permanent residence visa.
Quebec’s plan calls for 26,500 to 31,200 selection certificates to be issued in 2021, slightly more than its 2020 plan, which called for a range of 20,100 to 24,700.
The majority — up to 22,400 — would go to skilled worker candidates.
The selection certificate targets are as follows:
Skilled workers: between 19,400 and 22,400;
Business immigrants: between 1,500 and 2,300;
Other economic immigrants: between 400 and 600;
Refugees selected abroad: between 4,400 and 4,700;
Other immigrants: between 800 and 1,200.
The targets set for 2021 include applications in process or waiting to be processed in Quebec and at the federal level. They also take into consideration the time it takes for candidates to complete all the immigration procedures.
Of interest given how Genuis defines his role and multiculturalism:
I am honoured to be officially taking on the role of Shadow Minister for Multiculturalism within the Conservative caucus. The government appoints a cabinet, responsible for administering the affairs of the nation. The “shadow cabinet” is a parallel structure that exists in the opposition, whereby specific members are tasked with leading the opposition’s response to the government on specific files. Shadow cabinet can also be about preparing to take on similar roles in government, although positions do often shift at that point for a variety of reasons.
My role as Shadow Minister for Multiculturalism involves holding the government to account in terms of their actions related to multicultural policy, and also working to ensure that our caucus is hearing and incorporating the unique experiences and perspectives of minority communities.
The Conservative caucus’s approach to multiculturalism is unique. We recognize and celebrate Canada’s identity as a community of communities. We are a country made up of distinct and different communities of people, who come together as part of a shared national community with common values and objectives. Attachments to the particulars of one’s own religious or ethnic community are good and reasonable, but they also must be transcended in the creation of a greater national community of shared commitments, of intertwining histories, and of unifying solidarity. This unity, in the midst of our diversity, is built on the foundation of freedom, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. New Canadians come here not principally because of our diversity, but because of the freedom and peace that characterize our country and how we live well together in it.
In this role, I will always emphasize the importance of unity in diversity, and work to build common ground. Our country is quite divided right now – divided in terms of region, politics, religion, culture, and other dimensions. A lot of this division is the result, in my view, of policies pursued in the last four years at the federal level. Albertans feel disconnected from the rest of Canada because of anti-energy bills like C-48 and C-69. Cultural divisions have been exacerbated by a government that fails to effectively manage our immigration system and accuses anyone who disagrees with them of being bigoted.
Other factors have also accentuated division, such as the passage of bill 21 in Quebec and a rise in fringe xenophobic rhetoric. People understandably want to preserve their own culture, but preserving one’s own culture and faith does not require the suppression of someone else’s.
Multiculturalism isn’t just about diversity of appearance and confession – it includes diversity of thought and opinion. I will continue to challenge the government to respect the rights of people who hold different opinions from them and still participate fully in Canadian society.
In the midst of all these challenges, I will always emphasize unity, the importance of finding common ground, and the necessity of protecting fundamental rights and freedoms.
I look forward to taking on this important challenge.
Amid political turbulence rocking Hong Kong, a pro-Conservative group is seeking to get out the expat vote in the city where an estimated 300,000 Canadians reside.
The recently-formed Canadian Conservatives in Hong Kong held two voter registration events at a bar in the city on Sept. 7 and 8, including on a day when pro-democracy protests shut down nearby streets. The group had also done online outreach in both English and Cantonese and drawn on the support of volunteers.
Organizers of the group, Canadians Brett Stephenson and Barrett Bingley, also enlisted the help of former foreign affairs minister John Baird for their two events as its special guest. The gatherings were advertised on the Conservative Party’s website but the group is unaffiliated.
For months, Hong Kong has seen large demonstrations that have posed a challenge to mainland China’s tightening grip on the semi-autonomous city. On Tuesday, during protests coinciding with China’s National Day, a teenage protester was shot in the chest by police.
Bingley, a senior director at The Economist Group by day, said political unrest in the city, as well as new liberalized voting rules for expats, are drawing their attention toward Canadian politics.
“It has to do with the election coming while there is this massive unrest happening in Hong Kong and people are looking to find a leader and a party who is going to stand up for them,” Bingley said in a phone interview last week.
“This year is not only when Canadians abroad are able to vote. There is a great desire by Hong Kong people to vote in the Canadian election this time.”
Amid that heightened interest, Bingley said their room-packed events were able to help register about 250 people. It was not only Conservatives attending but other Canadians wanting to vote. The Canadian Club in Hong Kong also hosted its own voter sign-up event on Sept. 20, with more than 200 people gathering.
The Supreme Court ruled in January that Canadians who have lived abroad for more than five years can vote.
Elections Canada’s figures show 1,588 Canadian voters have registered in Hong Kong as of Sept. 22. Voter registration abroad has now exceeded 31,000.
Canadians in Hong Kong consists of many Cantonese speakers with family in the city, as well as those working for multinational businesses.
Stephenson, a director at the Asia Business Trade Association working on Asia-Pacific trade, said Canadians who attended the events brought up issues including foreign policy, immigration and business concerns.
But the top issue was Hong Kong’s political situation and how federal parties will approach it.
Canadian Conservatives in Hong Kong’s logo. Photo courtesy of the group.
Stephenson believes the Tories are more inclined to support Hong Kong and the protection of the ‘one country, two systems’ model envisioned in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. That treaty spelled out, upon return to China’s rule in 1997, civil freedoms and a degree political independence for the city — something protesters say Beijing has moved to erode.
Stephenson said Scheer is the only federal leader to have “spoken up very forcefully” for Hong Kong. He pointed to an August tweet where Scheer said “now is the time for everyone committed to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law to stand with the people of Hong Kong.”
On the contrary, Stephenson said he has only seen “timid” responses from Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I think a lot of Hong Kongers don’t feel Canada under the Liberals have stepped up and said anything that would help them in this struggle,” he said.
The Hong Kong protests occur as Canada-China relations remain sour over the detention of two Canadians in China widely seen as punishment for the Vancouver arrest of a Huawei executive in December.
In August, Freeland issued a joint statement with her EU counterpart urging restraint amid “a rising number of unacceptable violent incidents.” That statement prompted China’s embassy in Ottawa to issue a response accusing her of “meddling in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs.”
But so far during the campaign, Hong Kong’s unrest and other foreign policy issues have received scant attention from all party leaders.
Stephenson said parties’ attention toward expat votes could increase if they observe any influence on key swing ridings, particularly in the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver.
That sentiment was echoed by Baird, now a consultant with much of his work centred in Asia. Bingley said the former Harper minister, who was in town the weekend of their events, had told the audience their votes especially matter if they are being tallied in battleground ridings.
Interest abroad may mean more groups like theirs spring up, but Bingley said their creation is barely novel. Existing already are expat organizations that support the U.S. Republicans, the Australian Liberal Party and U.K. Conservatives.
“What we’re doing is very much within the mainstream of centre-right parties,” he said.
“It’s just that because Canadians couldn’t really vote from abroad up until the Supreme Court changed the rules. There was no infrastructure to do this. So it feels strange to Canadians and yet is actually not strange at all.”
From his observation, there are no Liberal or NDP groups in the city.
The group will have to be mindful of Elections Canada’s third-party rules, which require Canadians spending more than $500 on regulated activities during the campaign to register with it. Agency spokesperson Natasha Gauthier said whether voter registration events are considered a third-party activity depends on the facts and context of each situation.
Conservative spokesperson Simon Jefferies told iPolitics that the group isn’t affiliated with the party but nevertheless agreed to host a webpage for its event.
Bingley said Canadians in Hong Kong live the impact of the world’s geopolitical challenges that aren’t being discussed enough in this election.
“They need to be addressed by leaders, and one of the biggest is the rise of China.”
The Liberal government’s $45-million anti-racism strategy isn’t going anywhere under a Scheer government, the Conservative leader says.
Asked by a reporter in Thorold, Ont., on Tuesday whether he supports the anti-racism plan put forward by the Trudeau government this year, and the approach it is taking, Andrew Scheer said he would continue to back such programs.
Multicultural Meanderings 