‘We’re not having our voices heard or our issues prioritized’: Researchers say diverse candidates disproportionately underfunded

2021/09/20 Leave a comment

Erin Tolley’s work on representation and the various filters along with various anecdotes:

Voters will be able to choose from an increasingly diverse slate of candidates in this election, but recent data shows women, racialized and Indigenous candidates are still disproportionately underfunded by their own parties, often while running in districts where they already face an uphill battle to win.

A team of Carleton University researchers led by Erin Tolley, Canada Research Chair in gender, race and inclusive politics, has collected data from the previous four election cycles, beginning in 2008, showing a distinct upward trajectory in the overall diversity of candidates, but only incremental progress in electing more multicultural Members of Parliament.

“Parties have caught on, correctly, that Canadians are looking at the candidates and scrutinizing the diversity, and so parties have felt that pressure to show more diversity on the candidate slate,” Tolley said in an interview.

“But often the scrutiny stops there. People have the impression that, if on election day, more women, racialized or Indigenous candidates are not elected to Parliament, then that is simply the voters’ choice. But that conclusion ignores the control that parties have over the placement of these candidates and the level of financial support they are giving to each candidate while they are campaigning.”

Tolley’s research team followed the money and found evidence that, even when parties nominate women, racialized and Indigenous candidates, “they continue to transfer more financial resources to white male candidates, rather than to these candidates that, arguably, would need more party support in order to win their ridings, especially because parties are nominating them in the most difficult ridings to win.

“So, yes, women, racialized and Indigenous candidates are being nominated more often, but it is a longstanding pattern — and it remains the case — that they are nominated disproportionately in less winnable ridings.”

Party leaders have some control over which candidates will run, but Tolley said those decisions are often left to local riding association executives.

“It’s a relatively unseen feature of democracy in Canada, but these riding association executives — this small cabal of party faithful — really shape the choices that voters ultimately have.”

There are exceptions, however, and the research and data pattern doesn’t align with Huda Mukbil’s experience running as a first-time candidate for the NDP in Ottawa-South.

The NDP’s candidate in 2019, Morgan Gay, made some inroads for the party with 16 per cent of the Ottawa-South vote and had been set to compete for the party’s nomination again this year.

Conservative Eli Tannis secured 24.5 per cent and will again challenge incumbent Liberal David McGuinty, who won in 2019 with 52 per cent of the vote. (The Tannis campaign did not return an interview request.)

Mukbil and Gay went through the nomination process. “But, when he and I met and he saw that I was very serious about winning (the Ottawa-South seat), he stepped down,” Mukbil said in an interview.

“He said, ‘I want you to have the opportunity to do this,’ realizing that Ottawa-South has a very diverse population with the largest Arabic-speaking population within all of Ontario and a sizeable Black community and Somali community. With all that diversity, we determined together that I would be the candidate to represent Ottawa-South,” Mukbil said.

“But I know that in other ridings and with other parties, there have been challenges with fundraising. There’s a challenge in the support you can get from the party at the national headquarters level, in terms of which ridings they feel are winnable, and which ridings they feel the need to invest in.”

Federal parties have “heeded the call” to nominate a more diverse set of candidates, Tolley said, “but they haven’t made a lot of progress on addressing the longstanding disparities in the financial support they give to candidates, or in the party’s confidence in women, racialized and Indigenous candidates to actually win.”

That theory doesn’t apply to the Greens, said Lorraine Rekmans, Green Party candidate for Leeds-Grenville-Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.

“Because we’ve come up from the grassroots and we’ve never had a huge central party to draw funds from,” she explained.

“The Greens are small and mighty. We have small campaigns, we’re never fully funded, but we’re still able to make gains with all the odds stacked against us.”

Rekmans is a mother and grandmother of Anishnabe heritage, a member of the Serpent River First Nation who served as the Green Party’s Indigenous affairs critic for the past 12 years, and last month was elected national party president.

“Our national executive council is very diverse, we’re all representative of minority groups on the council, and I believe I’m the first Indigenous woman to be the president of a national political party in Canada,” Rekmans said.

“So we’ve been making headway. We’ve been advocating for diversity everywhere in this country, and we believe that any system in Canada has to reflect and represent the population that it serves.”

And Canadians are beginning to listen, Rekmans said.

“In previous elections, people may have expressed concern about drinking water quality and housing standards and conflicts between the RCMP and Indigenous people protecting their land — and that did resonate with Canadians — but it was the shock of the unmarked graves that was a wakeup call,” Rekmans said.

“So, as an Indigenous candidate, I think it’s important for my voice to be at the table to advocate for Indigenous issues, and that is a challenge to me because I am running to be a Member of Parliament, and I understand that constituents want to be represented,” Rekmans said. “So the question becomes: when the constituents look at me as an Indigenous woman, do they feel I can represent them?”

Until Canadians elect a more diverse Parliament, and until there is real representation among the key decision-making roles in government, Mukbil said, “then we’re not having our voices heard or our issues prioritized.”

Mukbil recently participated in Ottawa’s Black candidates debate, where she challenged Hull-Aylmer Liberal candidate Greg Fergus on his government’s record in addressing systemic discrimination.

Fergus, one of seven Black MPs in the House of Commons and co-chair of the Black Parliamentary Caucus, defended his government’s efforts and investments supporting Black and other racialized communities, while outlining further cultural and heritage investments in the party’s 2021 platform during Monday’s debate.

“Justin Trudeau was the first prime minister to acknowledge the existence of systemic anti-Black racism,” Fergus said. “In the last six years, but especially in the last year, we’ve made big steps in recognizing where the government has been weak in providing supports to Black communities, whether that is in the very public issue of entrepreneurship and prosperity, our justice and public security system, whether that’s in terms of representation within government with a good (proportion) of Black people at all levels of the public service, and then the issue of culture and heritage.”

Fergus highlighted early Liberal priorities that have yielded $6.5 billion for mental health, while ensuring the investment is “focused on Black communities, racialized Canadians and Indigenous Canadians and youth — people who should have appropriate mental health responses.”

Fergus also touted the government’s own data-collection efforts, with Statistics Canada tracking disaggregated data since 2018 on vulnerable populations, including immigrants, Indigenous people and visible minority groups.

“It’s a very non-sexy issue, but one that I think has the biggest impact,” Fergus said during the debate. “We need to start asking these questions. How are our policies and programs serving the Black community? And if they’re not, then people will have the data so we can act on it. You can’t change what you can’t measure.”

It’s a start, Mukbil agreed, though a tentative one.

“For years we’ve just been talking about collecting disaggregated data, but what’s the plan once that’s done? We already know that systemic racism is part of all our institutions and yet we have not seen action or substantial changes,” she said.

“But we’re at a time when there’s an awakening, and a conversation about these issues, which wasn’t happening in the past.”

Source: ‘We’re not having our voices heard or our issues prioritized’: Researchers say diverse candidates disproportionately underfunded

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Rethinking politics: A better path to faithful citizenship [on Catholics and politics]

2020/02/17 Leave a comment

On Catholics, politics and partisanship:

For the last 44 years, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has published Faithful Citizenship, a “teaching document on the political responsibility of Catholics.” There is much in Faithful Citizenship to recommend it. Yet, it has begun to seem to me like it is time for something new. I say this only partly because the bishops proved unable to offer a new version of the document for this election that would revise the document, last re-written in 2007 before Pope Francis had begun his ministry. I say it also because there are persuasive signs that the whole approach of Faithful Citizenship has failed.

The Pew Research Center released figures last year that paint a devastating picture of how Catholics approach politics. On issue after issue, whether we discuss extending the border wall or whether climate change is caused by human activity, there was no measurable difference between Republicans and Catholics who identify as Republicans, between Democrats and Catholics who identify as Democrats. The discouraging picture is clear: 44 years of “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” has left Catholics looking just like non-Catholics in American political life. Being Catholic makes no discernible difference. In politics, we are not Catholics. We are partisans, just like everybody else.

Considering how much effort the bishops have devoted to Faithful Citizenship, the scale of this calamity should stop us dead in our tracks. Especially as we look around at our world and the role Catholics have played in fueling our polarized political climate, now seems like a good time to re-think how we engage with politics as faithful citizens from the ground up. In fact, I think we are obligated to do that. For that reason, I am asking readers to join me on a journey for the next six months. In these next six columns, I will take some space to reflect on a better way to be faithful citizens. My hope is that I can raise some good questions and provoke some thought.

I’d like to begin by asking an elemental question: What is politics?

The question seems simple. Politics is familiar. We use the word all the time. The Corpus of Contemporary American English places politics at 954th out of more than 170,000 words in frequent usage (top 1 percent). There is little that could be more familiar to us. And yet, we use the word politicsincorrectly almost every time.

The study of politics began in the ancient Greek polis. The best way I can translate the original sense of what politics meant (politeia) is to say that it refers to “what the people share in common.” This is the sense that is closest to how Catholic social teaching understands politics, as well. Too often when we say politics, we mean partisanship, taking sides in a divisive conflict. But narrow self-interest is the opposite of what politics really means. When we misuse the word, we are cheating ourselves. We are depriving ourselves of the best hope we have against narrow self-interest: a sense that politics calls us out of ourselves, toward something greater.

When President Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961, he called on young people “to sacrifice their energies and time and toil to the cause of world peace and human progress.” He was calling them away from individual self-interest toward a greater common good. We do not need to sacrifice our consciences or our convictions. But we must sacrifice our certainty that other people are proceeding from bad motives. Politics in this better sense is about learning together how to disagree together, while still working together toward justice, peace, and the common good. Somehow, we Americans became captives to a different idea. And, because we are indistinguishable from other Americans, Catholics became captive to that idea too.

If our politics ever is going to be something better than a football game, it falls on Catholics to bear witness to a real alternative, a different way to think about politics that focuses on the common good instead of endless conflict. And the best way to approach this is by living our Catholic faith in politics less like a checklist of issue positions and more like an ongoing invitation to dialogue and engagement. We must recognize that we share the community with everyone, and everyone belongs to the community. We can—and, must—dialogue with those who disagree with us. After all, we cannot expect them to listen to us if we will not hear out their deepest concerns, too.

If Catholics want to shape a public conversation more concerned with protecting the most vulnerable, then we must change ourselves and how we engage the conversation. We must experience a conversion. We must offer something different, instead of reflecting back the partisanship our politics already offers. We must do better.

Source: Rethinking politics: A better path to faithful citizenship

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Federal riding profiles: A visible minority view

2019/06/22 2 Comments

How does Canada’s political map of 338 ridings look in terms of the percentage of visible minorities? How do visible minority rich ridings compare to ridings with fewer visible minorities in terms of demographic, economic and social characteristics, and electoral results? 

Their electoral importance is clear, with 41 ridings in which visible minorities form the majority and an additional 93 ridings in which visible minorities form between 20 to 50 percent of the population.

By looking at ridings grouped by their percentage of visible minorities, the changing nature of Canada’s political landscape can be seen. As party electoral strategies focus on defining a winning approach given the needs and make-up of each riding’s population, having a comprehensive look at the demographic, economic and social characteristics helps one understand the various factors at play in electoral strategies. Political parties, of course, have their own more detailed data at the polling station level; this analysis aims to level the playing field, so to speak, for the rest of us.

This analysis provides a visible minority lens to ridings and their relation to demographic, economic, social and political characteristics. Given the ongoing trend of increasing immigration levels, that close to 80 percent of immigrants are visible minority, and the increased number of Canadian-born visible minorities, this approach provides a future-centred perspective to the political map.

While political parties collect some of this and other data at a much more granular level (postal code and polling station), the riding level provides a good sense of the diversity between ridings, and helps explain some of the political strategies employed to reach voters.

The higher unemployment rates, lower median incomes and greater prevalence of low income, suggest that economic issues are as significant as immigration-related issues such as family reunification in visible minority majority ridings. With their younger age profile and larger number of families, family-friendly policies are also important but childcare may be seen more though a family reunification perspective (parents and grandparents) than through government programs.

Identity politics play out differently depending on the percentage of visible minorities as the experience of the last election shows. Efforts by the Conservatives with respect to the “barbaric cultural practices” tip line and the effective distinction between Canadian-only and dual citizens in their citizenship revocation provisions, while appealing to many, created unease among visible minorities and provided an opening for the Liberal “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” language.

However, a likely common thread among most Canadians, whatever their origins, is that immigration and citizenship need to be managed and that the fairness and integrity of the processes is maintained. Public concern regarding irregular arrivals (“queue jumping”) and increased numbers of birth tourists are but the obvious examples. While for some, expressing these concerns may be driven by xenophobia, for most it is more likely driven by concerns over fairness and people taking advantage of policies and processes. 

Tables and analysis

This article uses 2016 Census Profile federal electoral district along with Elections Canada voting results by electoral district to highlight similarities and differences. The three broad groups of ridings — 41 ridings in which visible minorities form the majority, 93 ridings in which visible minorities form between 20 to 50 percent of the population, and 169 ridings with less than 20 percent visible minority — are subdivided to provide greater granularity. The groupings with the smallest number of ridings have the lowest variation or range in any of the indicators.

The full analysis can be found: Federal riding profiles: A visible minority view

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Nanos: Liberals, Conservatives playing in politically ‘dangerous field’ by using racism as tool to mobilize their support bases, says Nanos

2019/05/01 Leave a comment

More commentary encouraging the parties to cool the language:

The governing Liberals and opposition Conservatives are playing in a politically dangerous field by using the divisive issue of racism as a tool to mobilize their support bases for the next election, which could backfire resulting in “mutually assured destruction” for both federal parties, says a leading political analyst.

“We’re seeing an increase in weaponization of racism as a political tool to mobilize voters in Canada,” said Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research in an interview with The Hill Times.

“If we stick with our analogy, if they weaponize this, like in the old Cold War, basically, it’s mutually-assured destruction, where if either or both of those parties go too far, not only could they destroy their enemy but they could destroy themselves in the process. So, it’s a very dangerous field to play in.”

Mr. Nanos said both political parties are using this issue as a “dog whistle” where, by implication, Liberals are saying that anyone who disagrees with their stance of open immigration, including “irregular” immigration, is a “racist.” And the Conservatives are using this to tap into Canadians’ anxiety about the impact of new immigrants on their economic security, jobs, and personal security. The “subtle implication” from the Conservatives, he said, is that anyone who disagrees with them doesn’t care about Canadians and Canadian jobs. He said social media platforms have made the politically-polarized situation even worse, where now people have numerous outlets where they can express their frustrations by using racist language, openly or by remaining anonymous.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been blasting Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer, not pictured, accusing him of not being tough enough on racism issues. But, pollster Nik Nanos says, both the Liberals and the Conservatives should be careful not to play politics with racism. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Mr. Nanos said the best way to address the issue of racism is by making a case to Canadians that more immigrants are good for the future strength of the economy. Also, he said, the political leadership needs to create an environment where hard-working Canadians can earn a decent living to take care of their families.

“The reality is that probably the best policy is somewhere in the middle, where we can balance Canadian economic interests and anxiety with our needs of the country,” he said.

…

Source: Liberals, Conservatives playing in politically ‘dangerous field’ by using racism as tool to mobilize their support bases, says Nanos

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Polarized politics could shatter Canada’s fragile ‘virtuous cycle’ of immigration

2019/04/26 Leave a comment

While I agree with the critique of some of the statements and approaches by those on the right, greater recognition of how both major parties practice identity politics and virtue signalling for partisan advantage is needed as highlighted in the yesterday’s articles by Terry Glavin (Why race and immigration are a gathering storm in Canadian politics) and Andrew Cardozo (Could all the parties just cool the rhetoric on racism and immigration?):

Support for diversity is fundamental to the Canadian sense of identity, our patriotism and our economic success – so much so, that it can be easy to forget just how exceptional Canadians’ peaceful view of diversity is among Western nations.

The United States sees hate crimes jump 226 per cent in counties that play host to rallies by President Donald Trump. The Paris banlieue suburbs are ghettos of disaffected non-citizens resentful of an antagonistic domestic culture. And in her masterful 2012 study of Canadian exceptionalism on immigration during the era of the Harper government, Irene Bloemraad – a sociology professor at University of California, Berkeley – wrote that it was “remarkable how peacefully Canada’s major cities have transitioned from being predominantly Christian and white to highly multicultural and multireligious.”

But Dr. Bloemraad’s critical finding is this: “What at first seems a paradox – high support for immigration in a country with very high levels of new and existing migration – becomes an explanation. Immigrants to Canada generally feel welcomed. Given the predominantly permanent nature of Canadian immigration, government policy promotes integration because it is presumed that both sides are together for the long haul. At the same time, integration does not mean assimilation, given the policy and ideology of multiculturalism articulated by the government. Finally, the overwhelming majority of immigrants acquire citizenship, making it hard for anti-immigrant politicians to gain a foothold. Immigrant votes have consequences for electoral outcomes.”

This is the virtuous circle of Canadian immigration policy. Government policy promotes permanent migration over temporary; Immigrants feel welcomed; affinity with Canada overtakes the country of their birth; immigrants quickly become citizens and vote; political power of new Canadian voters mitigates anti-immigrant politics; the next group of migrants feels welcome in turn.

But now, the delicate cycle fuelling Canada’s exceptional success in creating a diverse and peaceful country of well-integrated newcomers – cultivated in no small part because of conservative parties that are moderate on immigration issues – may now be under threat.

In a new EKOS survey, 40 per cent of Canadians said too many of our immigrants are members of visible minorities, reflecting that “racial discrimination is now an equally important factor in views about immigration [as] the broader issue of immigration.” (The EKOS survey of 1,045 Canadians had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)

The results are more startling when attitudes to non-white migrants are broken down by party support. Of voters who prefer the Conservative Party, 69 per cent said too many immigrants are visible minorities. In contrast, the number of Liberal voters saying too many is just 15 per cent, with those who prefer the New Democrats at 27 per cent. That 52 percentage-point gap between Conservatives and Liberals was, as recently as 2013, only 13 points. There has been, it seems clear, a rapid politicization of opposition to non-white immigration.

This is a break from the past. Canada’s successful conservative parties were pro-immigration and celebrated diversity. The Harper government was laudably pro-immigrant compared with other centre-right parties globally, as were the Diefenbaker, Clark and Mulroney governments. In Ontario, the coalition that elevated Doug Ford to the premiership was notably diverse.

That makes sense, given our country’s long-time approach to immigration. As U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson said when he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”

While politicians in the U.S. or Europe can run against migrant groups because they often don’t become citizens, immigrants to Canada do become citizens – and quickly. Conservatives can find support among new Canadians concerned about taxes or social policy, so long as their tone remains moderate on immigration and diversity generally.

Dr. Bloemraad concludes that “unless established immigrant Canadians completely turn their backs on would-be migrants, the significant share of immigrants in the voting population will likely mitigate radical anti-immigrant politics.”

Unfortunately, that might yet be happening. Max Bernier’s People’s Party received 11 per cent of the vote in diverse Burnaby, B.C., running on a slogan of “Canada for Canadians” and linking migrants with crime. Much of their support came from Chinese-Canadian voters. This is consistent with the EKOS survey that found just under one in five non-white Canadians felt there were too many visible minority migrants.

And it doesn’t require white nationalists with swastika tattoos to break the fragile virtuous circle. U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell is no racist, but he doesn’t hesitate to exploit immigration issues if it’s to the Republicans’ advantage, before and after Donald Trump was elected. The lesson from Europe and the U.S. is that if centre-right partisans succumb to anti-immigrant sentiment among potential voters, politicized hostility can create a vicious cycle of alienated migrants, assimilationist policy, low citizenship rates and fewer first-generation immigrant voters to oppose the next round of anti-immigrant campaigning.

Canada’s economic future depends on high levels of immigration, and continuing public permission for it requires great care by political leaders to avoid disrupting our unique and virtuous circle creating peaceful diversity.

For instance, when federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer inaccurately depicts a “crisis” of asylum-seekers, he also potentially inflames that specific issue and sours attitudes toward rule-following and highly skilled new Canadians. According to Dr. Bloemraad, support for all types of immigration can decline when issues of irregular migrants are in the political and media spotlight.

In Quebec, Premier François Legault has argued for a religious symbol ban, saying, “If we want to avoid things getting out of control as happened with Trump and Le Pen, we have to give something to those who are a bit worried.” His “something,” it appears, includes normalizing unconstitutional infringements of minority rights with the notwithstanding clause.

No political party should be complacent, either. More than one in four New Democrats and one in six Liberals raised concerns about visible minority immigration. In some by-elections, they could be tempted to play to this sentiment, too.

Any party using immigration as a political cudgel threatens the Canadian exceptionalism that allows us to enjoy peaceful diversity. Instead, parties need to compete to address the economic anxieties and sense of powerlessness of all Canadians who are struggling in our globalized world.

Source: Polarized politics could shatter Canada’s fragile ‘virtuous cycle’ of immigration Andrew Steele

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Identity politics, Israel style: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Good post on Ottomans and Zionists:

If there was a silver lining to the deal brokered by Prime Minister Netanyahu between Bayit Yehudi and Otzma Yehudit to run as a joint electoral list and the immediate furor that ensued, it is that it focused a spotlight on the most abhorrent prejudice and racism that is exhibited toward Israel’s Arab citizens. What made Meir Kahane, his Kach party, and his Kahanist followers so repugnant and led to Israel outlawing Kach was its advocacy for discrimination and glorification of violence toward Israeli Arabs. Kahane’s heirs in Otzma have continued in his footsteps, calling Arabs a fifth column with whom there can be no coexistence, proclaiming that less than one percent of Israeli Arabs are loyal to the state, advocating that Arabs who “speak out” against Jews be executed, working to prohibit Arabs from public life, and attempting to criminalize relationships between Jews and Arabs. It is evident – or should be – to anyone with an ounce of moral fiber that this type of incitement should not be welcome anywhere in Israeli society. But the new focus on Otzma has a downside in that it threatens to obscure a much bigger problem, which is the routine delegitimization of Israeli Arabs that takes place as a matter of course.

The most familiar example of this constant message that shunts one fifth of Israeli citizens into a rhetorical leper colony is Netanyahu’s infamous 2015 election day warning that Arabs were being bused to the polls in droves. The clear implication was twofold; first, that there was something untoward or dangerous about Arabs having a say in the composition of Israel’s next government, and second, that true Israeli patriots should come vote in order to counter Arab influence. It not only portrayed actual full citizens of Israel as being ominous but did it on the basis of their ethnicity alone. After all, Netanyahu did not say that his political opponents were going to the polls in droves, nor did he call out any individual parties. His message was straightforward: Arabs are voting, and no good result can possibly come out of that because they are Arabs.

In the current campaign, this same message is alive and well. But it is not just Netanyahu who is utilizing it. Across the political spectrum, there is a rush to assure Jewish Israeli voters that nobody is looking to form a government that includes Arabs; not Likud under Netanyahu, and not Kachol Lavan under Benny Gantz. Netanyahu, naturally, has made this pledge a centerpiece of his campaign. In the Likud party campaign kickoff on Monday, Netanyahu repeatedly trotted out the catchphrase “Tibi or Bibi,” referring to Ta’al chief Ahmad Tibi, who has been an MK for two decades. Netanyahu argued that the only way for Gantz to form a coalition is by including Arab parties, making the choice for voters one between Bibi – the current prime minister running for reelection – or Tibi – who is not running for prime minister and is not even the top person on the Hadash-Ta’al list but is Israel’s most recognizable Arab politician. It’s an effective rhyming catchphrase, and despite the fact that its logic is absurd, it works precisely because it plays on this notion that Arab parties, which overwhelmingly garner Israeli Arabs’ votes, are inherently non-kosher.

There are now two Arab party lists with very different politics, and the one that includes Tibi is the one that is more moderate, endorses a two-state solution (inherently accepting Israel’s legitimacy), and is a willing participant in Israeli institutions. But in singling out Tibi rather than the actual Arab extremists in the Balad party – whose representatives have called for Israel’s dissolution, have supplied intelligence to Hizballah, and have been convicted for smuggling cell phones to imprisoned terrorists – Netanyahu is purposely casting a wider circle of aspersions on Israeli Arabs as a group.

Sadly, Netanyahu is not alone, though he stands out in his bluntness and willingness to embrace the most extreme position. Gantz on Monday ruled out forming any coalition with Tibi as well, and lumped him in with Kahane, which is an unfair comparison by any measure. Unlike Netanyahu, Gantz and Yair Lapid have not explicitly ruled out using Arab parties to form a blocking coalition, as Yitzhak Rabin did, and it is to their credit – factoring in the soft bigotry of low expectations – that they have not definitively closed that door. But they are also obviously trying to walk a tightrope in their avoidance of directness on a host of issues so as not to be cast as leftists, and making any overtures that legitimize Arab participation in Israeli political life is a quick route to the dreaded leftwing moniker.

Politicians have not come up with this strategy out of nowhere. It is an unfortunate reality that Jewish Israeli society prioritizes the Jewish aspect over the Israeli aspect in this regard, and politicians understandably believe that their voters will respond to using Arabs as an electoral foil. It is certainly the case that there are Arab parties, such as Balad, that are anti-Zionist in a genocidal way, and there have been Arab MKs who are not only anti-Zionist but have actively committed treason against their country. Much as Kahane violated Israel’s Basic Law on racist incitement and was banned from serving in the Knesset and his party outlawed, I have no problem with that standard being used on Balad – which yesterday was banned from running by Israel’s Central Elections Committee – or on MKs like Hanin Zuabi (who is not running for the next Knesset but has been the subject of disqualification petitions in the past). But portraying Israeli Arab participation in governing Israel as something that shocks the conscience in its extremity should itself shock the conscience in its extremity. That it does not is a poor statement about Israel’s commitment to its Arab citizens, who should not be delegitimized as a category of people.

One of the most familiar pro-Israel talking points is that Israel is the country in the Middle East where it is best to be an Arab, since they are full citizens who not only vote but serve in the Knesset and on Israel’s High Court. There is a popular formulation of this idea that the strength of Israel’s democracy can be demonstrated by an Arab justice (Salim Joubran) sending a Jewish president of Israel (Moshe Katsav) to prison. But it is hollowly cynical to use Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life to tout Israel’s greatness, and in the next instance portray Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life as something that must be negated and combated. The entire spectacle of using Israeli Arabs as props, raising them up for geopolitical benefit and keeping them low for domestic political benefit, is ugly and should stop. The best thing that Israel’s current election campaign could accomplish would be to demonstrate that this tactic does not work.

Source: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

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Tolley: Racialized and women politicians still get different news treatment

2019/03/08 Leave a comment

I am a great fan of Erin Tolley’s work. Some good words of advice to journalists covering politics and other spheres:

In the days after Jody Wilson-Raybould’s resignation from federal cabinet, reportssuggested she was difficult, not a team player, and even “mean.” Supportersdenounced this framing and pointed to its gendered and racialized undertones, a criticism with which the prime minister eventually agreed. Even so, media coverage came complete with editorial cartoons depicting Wilson-Raybould bound, gagged and beaten. Although the cartoons were largely condemned, some commentators derided the critics as overly sensitive, while of one of the cartoonists blamed faux-outrage and virtue-signalling.

As the days wore on, a caucus colleague suggested that Wilson-Raybould couldn’t handle the pressure of her cabinet position. Others argued that the evident cabinet discord is a predictable outcome of the government’s focus on “identity politics,” with one columnistsaying the prime minister had “been hoisted by his own petard.”

The media and political institutions have both edged toward more inclusivity, but women and racialized minorities remain, as former journalist Vivian Smith has put it, “outsiders still.” This outsider status partly reflects basic demographics: Parliament, newsroomsand the parliamentary press gallery are still mostly made up of white men. But it is also indicative of the ways that race and gender structure politics.

I have researched news coverage and found systemic differences in the ways white and racialized politicians are covered by journalists. Similar patterns exist in media coverage of women in politics. As I point out in my 2016 book, Framed: Media and the Coverage of Race in Canadian Politics, these patterns are longstanding, so as the 2019 federal election campaign kicks into high gear, we are likely to see more of the same.

Racialized candidates’ coverage is as plentiful but more negative than that of white candidates. Their coverage focuses less on politically salient issues and is more likely to mention aspects of the candidate’s background like their race, immigration status or religion than is the case for white candidates. Racialized candidates are less likely to be quoted and more likely to be featured in stories that are buried on the inside pages of print editions. These patterns give racialized candidates less visibility and credibility.

Race influences how journalists decide to frame and portray their subjects. This type of coverage cues voters to apply racial considerations to their evaluations of politicians. It is grounded in assumptions about the meaning, importance and consequences of race. One aspect of this process is to assume that race is only relevant to subjects with minority racial backgrounds. Because of this, stories will often advance racial explanations in the coverage of racialized subjects but not in those about white subjects.

So, for example, when the news media do shine a light on racialized politicians, that coverage often frames them as a product of their demography. After the US midterm elections in 2018, which saw a record number of women candidates and several “historic firsts,” much of the coverage focused on the candidates who “broke race and gender barriers” and would be heading to Congress. There’s nothing wrong with covering these trailblazers, but the focus on their socio-demographic backgrounds conceals the other qualifications that they bring with them, including their professional credentials, community organizing and political acumen. The focus on socio-demographics has the effect of suggesting electoral success was a function of these candidates’ race or gender and that the backgrounds of white or male politicians did not factor into their victories.

Racialized women break the political mould in two ways: once on account of their gender and again on account of their race. Their media coverage bears the marker of their intersecting identities.

In my work, I have documented the portrayal of racialized women serving as members of Parliament in Canadian print news coverage since 1993. In addition to highlighting the novelty of racialized women politicians, there is a tendency to exoticize them.

In a 2008 Toronto Star news story, then-Bloc Québécois MP Vivian Barbot was described as having a “captivating smoky voice.” In a 2009 column in the Globe and Mail, Ruby Dhalla was referred to as “a young drop-dead gorgeous, Indo-Canadian woman,” while a list of “10 things you should know about Ruby Dhalla” that appeared in the same paper said the Liberal MP is “like something out of a Bollywood movie.”

Some argue that media framing is simply a reflection of a candidate’s self-presentation. For example, in speeches and interviews, Olivia Chow, a longtime Toronto city councilor, MP and one-time mayoral candidate often referenced her background as an immigrant and woman of colour. Her background helps to explain her political activism, but Chow herself suggests it is also a response to the racism and sexism she endured on the campaign trail. Her treatment included an editorial cartoon that depicted her with exaggerated slanted eyes, dressed as a Maoist communist, and riding on her late husband’s coattails. The race and gender of white male politicians is rarely mentioned: they are portrayed as the neutral standard. Chow tried to counteract this tendency by framing her own narrative rather than leaving it up to the media.

The ways in which the media cover political candidates partly comes down to what news outlets think will interest their viewers and readers. Journalists consider timeliness, relevance and novelty when deciding what stories to cover, what angle to adopt and who to quote.

The Canadian Press Stylebook, a reference for print journalists, provides some guidelines. In its section on race and ethnicity, journalists are counseled to “identify a person by race, colour, national origin or immigration status only when it is truly pertinent.” However, it goes on to say that “race is pertinent in reporting an accomplishment unusual in a particular race: for example, if a Canadian of Chinese origin is named to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.”

The standard of a racially unusual accomplishment is not echoed in the section on sexism, which instead instructs journalists to “Treat the sexes equally and without stereotyping. . . . The test always is: Would this information be used if the subject were a man?” By contrast, there is no mention of this kind of reverse test in the section on race and ethnicity. There, journalists are not counseled to ask, “Would this information be used if the subject were white?” In other words, when determining what is relevant, the standard that journalists are advised to apply is different for race than it is for gender.

Although those in the media and those in politics might each be loath to admit it, these institutions share a common lineage, resting on foundations that are both racialized and gendered. In the political realm, for example, racist restrictions barred some Canadians from voting, sometimes until well into the 20th century. In other words, politicians and the news media are navigating institutions marked by racialized assumptions, not to mention prejudice, patriarchy and classism.

In this context, racialized women candidates stand out, and their atypicality provides journalists with what seems like a novel hook for a story.

The way for journalists to improve the fairness of their coverage is not to ignore race and gender altogether, but instead to use the same standard when deciding on the hook for stories, the way they will be framed, and which details they will focus on when they are covering white men and racialized women. Race and gender are as much factors in the political trajectories of successful white men as they are in the stories of racialized women who have triumphed. News coverage should reflect this.

Source: Racialized and women politicians still get different news treatment

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Andrew Coyne: Ex-Liberal candidate’s only crime was engaging in ethnic politics — out loud

2019/01/21 Leave a comment

More piling on with respect to former Liberal candidate Wang (the replacement candidate, Richard Lee, also a Chinese Canadian, has provincial political experience).

Coyne ends this column with the quasi-ideological twist that favouring greater representation of under-represented groups is somehow more undermining of social cohesion than not doing so, and that bias is not a factor in hiring and other practices:

You have to feel for the Liberal Party of Canada, who are surely the real victims in the Karen Wang affair.

The party had innocently selected the B.C. daycare operator to run in next month’s byelection in Burnaby South based solely on her obvious merits as a failed former candidate for the provincial Liberals in 2017, and without the slightest regard to her Chinese ethnicity, in a riding in which, according to the 2016 census, nearly 40 per cent of residents identify as ethnically Chinese.

Imagine their shock when they discovered that she was engaging in ethnic politics.

In a now-infamous post on WeChat, a Chinese-language social media site, Wang boasted of being “the only Chinese candidate” in the byelection, whereas her main opponent — NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — is “of Indian descent.”

The party was instantly and publicly aghast. Pausing only to dictate an apology to be put out under her name (“I believe in the progress that Justin Trudeau and the Liberal team are making for British Columbians and all Canadians, and I do not wish for any of my comments to be a distraction,” etc etc), party officials issued a statement in which they “accepted her resignation.” Her online comments, the statement noted, “are not aligned with the values of the Liberal Party of Canada.”

Certainly not! How she got the idea that the Liberal Party of Canada was in any way a home for ethnic power-brokers prized for their ability to recruit members and raise funds from certain ethnic groups, or that it would even think of campaigning in ridings with heavy concentrations of voters from a given ethnic group by crude appeals to their ethnic identity — for example by nominating a candidate of the same ethnicity — must remain forever a mystery.

Unless, of course, her real crime was to have said out loud what everybody in politics knows to be the practice, not just of the Liberals but of every party, but prefers not to mention. But the thing having been said, the party had no alternative but to pretend to be appalled, just as the other parties had no alternative but to pretend to be outraged.

There is, after all, a script for these things. Usually it is performed at the expense of the Conservatives, as in the controversy a few years back over a leaked party memo proposing an advertising strategy for “very ethnic” ridings, or another that urged a candidate’s photo include voters of different ethnic backgrounds — as if every party did not do this, every day. Again, the crime was to have said what must be left unsaid, or rather to have been caught doing so.

The only difference in this case is that it involves the Liberals, usually the first to feign such outrage, now forced to yield the stage to the NDP. Thus the NDP’s Nathan Cullen was quoted saying Wang’s post was “the worst kind of politics there is,” while Singh himself observed how “politics that divide along racial lines hurt our communities… I want to focus in on politics that bring people together.”

It takes some effort, hearing such admirable sentiments, to recall NDP officials’ open speculation, after Singh was elected party leader, that this would improve their chances in cities such as Brampton, Ont., or Surrey, B.C., with large numbers of Sikh voters. It doesn’t necessarily follow, of course: voters of all ethnicities display a stubborn tendency to think and vote as individuals, frustrating parties’ efforts to sort them into little boxes. But that doesn’t mean the parties don’t think that way, or act accordingly.

For her part, the lesson Wang drew from the controversy was that she should have limited herself to stressing her own ethnicity, without mentioning Singh’s. “As a Canadian with a Chinese background, normally, obviously, you are trying to gain people’s support from the same cultural background,” she told her post-resignation news conference.

Which at least has the virtue of honesty. The hypocrisy of the universal outrage over Wang’s appeal to tribalism is not just that all the parties do it, as a matter of practical politics, but that much respectable opinion believes it to be right and proper as a matter of principle. Thus, for example, electoral boundaries are supposed to be drawn in conformity with what is delicately called “community of interest,” on the precise understanding to which Wang sought to appeal: that membership in an ethnic or other identity group trumps. At the limit, it emerges in calls for special dedicated ridings — even a separate Parliament — for Indigenous voters.

This is hardly confined to politics: across society, progressive ideology has lately taught us, not to emphasize our common humanity, but the opposite: that people of one group may not — cannot — be represented by those of another; that they are to be judged, not as individuals, but on the basis of their race, gender and so on. The current generation of federal Liberals, in particular, has made hiring quotas the defining principle of their government, to be institutionalized from top to bottom.

It is lovely to hear Liberal ministers proclaim, in response to the Wang affair, that “the value we stand for is representing all Canadians,” just as it is heartening to read an NDP commentator denounce the idea of reducing voters to “a passive, two-dimensional identity to be exploited for someone else’s elevation to the political class.” If only they meant it.

Source: Andrew Coyne: Ex-Liberal candidate’s only crime was engaging in ethnic politics — out loud

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USA demographic changes and political shifts: Asians, Latinos and Orange County

2019/01/08 Leave a comment

Good question regarding whether or not Asian Americans will be influenced by the Trump administration’s anti-immigration rhetoric and actions:

The same sort of panic that hit California’s Latinos after the 1994 passage of the anti-illegal immigrant Proposition 187 is now hitting many of this state’s almost 6 million ethnic-Asian residents.

Latino fears in the wake of Prop. 187, which sought to keep the undocumented immigrant out of public schools, hospital emergency rooms and seemingly any place its authors could imagine, led to citizenship applications and then voter registration by more than 2.5 million Hispanics over the next three years.

They caused a political revolution in California, which morphed from a swing state equally likely to elect Republicans or Democrats into one of the most staunchly Democratic states in the Union. Only one Republican has been elected to statewide office in the last 20 years, the almost non-partisan former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won out in the 2003 recall of ex-Gov. Gray Davis.

Now Asian immigrants are feeling fearful because of President Trump’s ban on entry to this country by residents of several Muslim-majority countries and his attempts to restrict the number of political and humanitarian refugees allowed in, plus a drive to deport Vietnamese refugees with any kind of crime on their record, no matter how old or minor.

Asians also remember the Japanese internment during World War II, in which 120,000 Japanese-Americans were held in remote camps for several years.

“You hope things like that can’t happen again, but they really can,” said one green card holder from Thailand. “So I will become a citizen.”

Like her, thousands of Asians in California, from countries as diverse as China, the Philippines and India, see citizenship as the best protection from a potential future expulsion.

If they become citizens in anything like the proportions of Latinos who felt similarly in California after passage of Prop. 187, they could spur vast political changes well beyond this state’s borders. In fact, if both they and citizenship-eligible Latino immigrants ever register in large numbers, they could turn several once-solid Republican states into battlegrounds or cause them to lean Democratic.

And Asians here are applying, although there are impediments Latinos did not face in the late 1990s. Example: Of the 220,000 immigrants in Orange County now eligible for naturalization, nearly 30 percent are Asian. Of them, about 4,500 applied for naturalization through the first three quarters of 2017. If that trend continues statewide for the remainder of Trump’s current term, more than 150,000 Asians will be added to California’s voting rolls.

Because they’re registering largely for the same reasons as Latinos once did, they probably won’t change this state’s political composition. But what about other states? Taking Texas as an example, more than 680,000 Asians are now eligible for citizenship but have not applied. That could make for big change in a state that in November almost gave a Democrats their first statewide victory in more than 20 years.

Yes, the $725 naturalization application fee is a roadblock for many. So is the required blizzard of paperwork. But Texas saw more than 20,000 citizenship applications from Asians last year. If Latinos, many even more apprehensive about Trump’s policies than Asians, register in Texas in similar percentages – and they have not yet – they could combine with Asians to turn Texas Democratic. For that state contains more than 3 million Hispanics who have not sought naturalization despite being eligible.

For sure, the numbers indicate fear among both Latinos and Asians has not reached the same levels it did among California Hispanics after Prop. 187.

But what happens when and if Trump begins serious work on his long-advertised border wall? And what if he attempts mass deportations of illegal immigrants, as former Attorney General Jeff Sessions advocated during his days in the Senate?

For sure, hate crimes against immigrants of all kinds increased during Trump’s presidential campaign and his first year in office. If that trend accelerates, it may spur the kind of fears that pushed Latinos to get naturalized here.

Isaac Newton’s third law of motion tells us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Just as former President Obama’s policies produced the backlash that elected Trump, so Trump’s policies may already have begun producing an even stronger national backlash against him and his party.

Source: Thomas D. Elias: Will Asians spur big new political changes?

And this analysis of the shift from solidly Republican to leaning Democratic in Orange Country is revealing:

To appreciate the vast cultural and political upheaval across Orange County over the last 40 years, look no further than Bolsa Avenue. The auto body shop, the tax preparer, a church, a food market, countless restaurants — all are marked by signs written in Vietnamese.

Or head seven miles west to Santa Ana, where Vietnamese makes way for Spanish along Calle Cuatro, a bustling enclave of stores and sidewalk stands serving an overwhelming Latino clientele.

The Democratic capture of four Republican-held congressional seats in Orange County in November — more than half the seven congressional seats Democrats won from Republicans in California — toppled what had long been a fortress of conservative Republicanism. The sweep stunned party leaders, among them Paul D. Ryan, the outgoing House speaker. Even Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor-elect of California, won the county where Richard M. Nixon was born.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/admin/100000006276845.embedded.html?

But the results reflected what has been a nearly 40-year rise in the number of immigrants, nonwhite residents and college graduates that has transformed this iconic American suburb into a Democratic outpost, highlighted in a Times analysis of demographic data going back to 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president.

The ideological shift signaled by the most recent election results, on the heels of Hillary Clinton beating Donald J. Trump here in 2016, is viewed by leaders in both parties as a warning sign for national Republicans, as suburban communities like this one loom as central battle grounds in the 2020 elections and beyond.

Those new swing suburban counties were one of the central factors behind the 40-seat Democratic gain in the House in November. Many of them have been changed by an increase in educated and affluent voters who have been pushed toward the Democratic column by some of Mr. Trump’s policies. That partly accounts for what is happening here in Orange County, but the political shifts can also be explained by the rapidly changing cultural, political and economic face of the region and are on display in places like Bolsa Avenue, which is known as Little Saigon.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/admin/100000006276842.embedded.html?

“There are so many of us here and that is what is contributing to these changes,” said Tracy La, 23, who is Vietnamese. Ms. La helped organize a rally in Westminster in mid-December to protest an attempt by the Trump administration to deport thousands of Vietnam War refugees. It drew hundreds of people to the Asian Garden Mall, one of the largest and oldest Vietnamese-operated malls in the nation.

“This is where the future is heading,” said Mark Baldassare, the president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “I don’t see anything that took place in these elections or the demographic trends that are ongoing, to make me think this is a one-time incident.”

That said, the critical question for Democrats — and for Republicans eager to get back in the game — is how much of the November outcome, and the large turnout of younger Latino and Asian-American voters, was because of Mr. Trump.

Kyle Layman, who ran the Southern California congressional campaigns for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said this election had apparently begun to cement long-term changes in voter behavior — an assessment that is not disputed by California Republican leaders.

“I think what we have done is built a foundation that is going to be sustainable,” he said. “These seats are going to be swing seats moving forward. They are going to be very, very tight. But this is part of a long-term trend.”

Indeed, even if the dramatic shift on display in 2018 was in reaction to Mr. Trump — and particularly the immigration policies he has embraced — analysts said that he had only accelerated political movements that were well underway.

“Because it’s becoming more diverse it’s becoming more Democratic, because the Democratic Party is more inclusive,” said Gil Cisneros, a Democrat from Yorba Linda who captured a House seat held by Representative Ed Royce, a Republican. “This is no fluke at all. It’s been this way for a long time and it’s going to continue to trend this way for a long time.”

There was a steady decrease in white voters in the seven congressional districts that are in and around Orange County between 1980 and 2017, according to census data. In 1980, whites made up 75 percent of the population in the district where Mr. Cisneros won. By 2017, that number dropped to 30 percent.

The county’s immigrant population grew five times as fast as the general population between 1980 and 2000, and while the pace of immigration has slowed, the Latino and Asian populations continues to increase, driven by the children of immigrant families born in the United States.

“The Republican Party in Orange County has been traditionally all white,” said Carlos Perea, 25, who moved to Santa Ana from Mexico to join his parents 11 years ago. “The party has pushed for policies that are very harmful to those communities: 2018 was a referendum on that old Orange County.”

Source: In Orange County, a Republican Fortress Turns Democratic

In contrast, Republican support among Latinos, although low at about one-third of voters, is holding steady:

The 55-year-old Colombian immigrant is a pastor at an evangelical church in suburban Denver. Initially repelled by Trump in 2016, he’s been heartened by the president’s steps to protect religious groups and appoint judges who oppose abortion rights. More important, Gonzalez sees Trump’s presidency as part of a divine plan.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Gonzalez said of the president. “He was put there.”

Though Latino voters are a key part of the Democratic coalition, there is a larger bloc of reliable Republican Latinos than many think. And the GOP’s position among Latinos has not weakened during the Trump administration, despite the president’s rhetoric against immigrants and the party’s shift to the right on immigration.

In November’s elections, 32 percent of Latinos voted for Republicans, according to AP VoteCast data. The survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters — including 7,738 Latino voters — was conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Other surveys also found roughly one-third of Latinos supporting the GOP. Data from the Pew Research Center and from exit polls suggests that a comparable share of about 3 in 10 Latino voters supported Trump in 2016. That tracks the share of Latinos supporting Republicans for the last decade.

The stability of Republicans’ share of the Latino vote frustrates Democrats, who say actions like Trump’s family separation policy and his demonization of an immigrant caravan should drive Latinos out of the GOP.

“The question is not are Democrats winning the Hispanic vote — it’s why aren’t Democrats winning the Hispanic vote 80-20 or 90-10 the way black voters are?” said Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster. He argues Democrats must invest more in winning Latino voters.

The VoteCast data shows that, like white voters, Latinos are split by gender — 61 percent of men voted Democratic in November, while 69 percent of women did. And while Republican-leaning Latinos can be found everywhere in the country, two groups stand out as especially likely to back the GOP — evangelicals and veterans.

Evangelicals comprised about one-quarter of Latino voters, and veterans were 13 percent. Both groups were about evenly split between the two parties. Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist in California, said those groups have reliably provided the GOP with many Latino votes for years.

“They stick and they do not go away,” Madrid said. Much as with Trump’s own core white voters, attacks on the president and other Republicans for being anti-immigrant “just make them dig in even more,” he added.

Sacramento-based Rev. Sam Rodriguez, one of Trump’s spiritual advisers, said evangelical Latinos have a clear reason to vote Republican. “Why do 30 percent of Latinos still support Trump? Because of the Democratic Party’s obsession with abortion,” Rodriguez said. “It’s life and religious liberty and everything else follows.”

Some conservative Latinos say their political leanings make them feel more like a minority than their ethnicity does. Irina Vilariño, 43, a Miami restauranteur and Cuban immigrant, said she had presidential bumper stickers for Sen. John McCain, Mitt Romney and Trump scratched off her car. She said she never suffered from discrimination growing up in a predominantly white south Florida community, “but I remember during the McCain campaign being discriminated against because I supported him.”

The 2018 election was good to Democrats, but Florida disappointed them. They couldn’t convince enough of the state’s often right-leaning Cuban-American voters to support Sen. Bill Nelson, who was ousted by the GOP’s Spanish-speaking Gov. Rick Scott, or rally behind Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, who lost to Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis.

Still, in the rest of the country, there were signs that pleased Democrats. Latinos voted at high rates in an election that saw record-setting turnout among all demographic groups. Latinos normally have among the worst midterm turnout rates, and while official data won’t be available for months, a number of formerly-Republican congressional districts in California and New Mexico flipped Democratic.

That’s why Republicans shouldn’t take solace from being able to consistently win about one-third of Latinos, said Madrid. They’re still losing two-thirds of an electorate that’s being goaded into the voting booth by Trump.

“That is contributing to the death spiral of the Republican Party — even if it holds at 30 percent,” Madrid said. “That’s a route to death, it’s just a slower one.”

Gonzalez, the pastor, sees the trend in Colorado. He distributed literature across Spanish-speaking congregations supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Walker Stapleton, who was crushed by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis as the GOP lost every race for statewide office.

Gonzalez understands the anger among some Latinos at the GOP and Trump for what he says is a false impression of a solely hardline immigration stance. “In the community that is not informed, that is following the rhetoric of the media, there’s a view that Donald Trump is a bad guy,” Gonzalez said. Evangelicals “understand that he’s there to defend values.”

Gonzalez’s church is Iglesia Embajada del Reino, or Church of the Kingdom’s Embassy. On a recent Saturday night, an eight-piece band played Spanish-language Christian rock before Gonzalez walked to the podium. Wearing a blue corduroy blazer, blue shirt and grey slacks, Gonzalez, a onetime member of a Marxist group in Colombia, told his congregants that they were ambassadors of a higher power — the kingdom of God.

“It’s important that your political opinions, your social opinions,” not enter into it, Gonzalez said. “We need to represent the position of ‘The Kingdom.’ ”

Gonzalez did not mention Trump in his sermon, though he spoke about the Bible as a book of governance.

Afterward the congregation gathered for bowls of posole, a traditional Mexican soup. When politics came up, church-goers struggled to balance their enthusiasm for some of Trump’s judicial appointments with their distaste at his rhetoric and actions.

“I think the president has good, Christian principles,” said Jose Larios, a parks worker. “But we feel as Latinos that he doesn’t embrace our community, and our community is good and hard-working.”

Oscar Murillo, a 37-year-old horse trainer, is not a fan of Trump’s. But he tries to stay open-minded about Republicans. He voted for the GOP candidate for state attorney general, who visited the congregation before the election. “He’s in the same party as Trump, but he seems different,” Murillo said.

Source: Latino support for GOP steady despite Trump immigration talk

 

 

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Canada is a tinderbox for populism. The 2019 election could spark it.

2018/12/05 Leave a comment

Frank Graves and Michael Valpy focus on the shifting views of millennial men, visible minorities as well as not visible minority, towards populism and the right. The 2019 election will provide a test of their thesis but certainly the Conservatives seem to mining this resentment in much of their messaging:

As Canadians, we sit atop the continent, watching as our neighbours slide into cultural civil war. It has become easy to just be appalled as America becomes riven, with social media and antagonistic rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum erasing the middle ground. There are two Americas, incommensurably separated on the fundamental issues of the day: climate change, the economy, social issues like health and education, employment, the media, immigration in particular, and globalization and free trade.

We’ve learned more and more about the populism that has fuelled this complicated moment as the fracture in America races like wildfire throughout Western democracies. It is the biggest force reshaping democracy, our economies and public institutions. It is the product of economic despair, inequality, and yes, racism and xenophobia. It is an institutional blind spot, largely denied or ridiculed by the media, and by the more comfortable and educated portions of society.

It is very much alive in Canada. In fact, our populist explosion has already had its first bangs and is likely to have a major impact on next year’s federal election.

The shifts in the democratic world order over the last decade have increasingly prompted social scientists to discard the left-right political spectrum in favour of an “open-ordered axis,” or what The Economist calls drawbridge-down vs drawbridge-up thinking. The former are cosmopolitan-minded people, in favour of diversity, immigration, trade, and globalization, and who are optimistic about the future; they’re guided by reason and evidence-based policy, and believe that climate change is a dominant priority. Drawbridge-up people, with an “ordered” worldview, are largely parochial, and they have reservations about diversity, are deeply pessimistic about the economic future, believe more in moral certainty than reason and evidence, are disdainful of media, government and of scientific expertise, and are convinced that climate change is trumped by the economy and their own survival. It’s ordered thinking that is metastasizing in Western societies, including Canada’s, especially among the political right. EKOS research from 2017 suggests about 30 to 40 per cent of adult Canadians are drawn to it.

Meanwhile, research over the last 10 years has found that Canada, like the United States, is turning into a society fissured along fault lines of education, class and gender. These are social chasms defined by the concentration of wealth at the top of society and, for everyone else, by economic pessimism and stagnation; by a comfortable feeling on one end of the societal teeter-totter, and a fear on the other end that a subscription to the middle-class dream might no longer be available.

Although there has been a recent uptick for the first time in 15 years, the portion of Canadians who self-identify as middle class since the turn of the century has declined from 70 per cent to 45 per cent, a stark number that mirrors America’s—signalling that Canadians have a deeply pessimistic view of their personal economic outlook. Only one in eight Canadians thinks they’re better off than a year ago. Only one in eight thinks the next generation will enjoy a better life. And EKOS finds that, by a margin of two to one, Canadians believe that if present trends with inequality continue, the country — this country! — will see violent class conflicts.

Ordered populism has already become an illusive, misunderstood theme in provincial elections in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Ontario. Indeed, Doug Ford and his Ontario Progressive Conservatives won thanks to a preponderance of working-class, male electoral support—but a closer examination of the vote shows that male millennials, against expectation, supported Ford in significant numbers and had a high turnout. Millennial women, meanwhile, preferred the New Democratic Party by a margin of 25 points, and the millennial women who didn’t vote NDP largely stayed home. Millennial men split their votes between the NDP and Progressive Conservatives, and they led females millennials by 10 points in turning out to cast ballots.

Survey evidence strongly suggests that these are young men angered by the economic realities they face, and they are hit the hardest by what is happening in Ontario’s economy. A joint study by United Way Toronto and York Region and Hamilton’s McMaster University on poverty and employment precarity in southern Ontario reports that only 44 per cent of millennials in the region — the heartbeat of Canada’s economy — have full-time, permanent jobs, that the majority have not found work that provides extended health benefits, pension plans, or employer-funded training, and that formerly high-paying blue-collar jobs there are rapidly vanishing. The lack of good jobs, coupled with the social catastrophe of affordable housing and the resulting need to delay family formation, is resulting in anxiety and depression that disproportionately affects millennial men—making them ideal targets for the appeals of ordered populism.

What is happening challenges the conventional view that the youngest adults of Canadian society—the millennials, now Canada’s largest electoral demographic—operate with roughly similar, progressive views and values.

Another assumption in need of challenging is the idea that Canada’s ordered populism, like its American counterpart, is a besieged white citadel. In fact, our northern brand is as much the choice of multicultural new Canadians as of white native-born Canada. A significant chunk of new Canadians, many of them non-white, indicate they will vote Conservative in next year’s federal election — even though 65 per cent of Conservative supporters told EKOS this year that Canada admits too many non-white immigrants. And while a majority of Canadians are open to immigration, the intensity of the opposition is red-hot, including in other parties: 20 per cent of New Democratic Party supporters and 13 per cent of Liberal supporters also believe too many non-white immigrants are entering the country..

There are two possible explanations for this: First, new Canadians may bring with them into the country strains of social conservatism that make them hostile to issues like same-sex marriage and what they see as immoral, too-liberal sex education, an inflammatory issue in Ontario over the past couple of years. Thus, what they see as an assault on their values may be more important than a party trying to appeal to voters who want fewer of them in the country.

Second, where neighbourhoods are ethnically homogeneous as many are around the core of Canadian cities—white, brown or otherwise—populism holds appeal. Where there’s more diversity, it doesn’t. As social scientists have discovered, communities which have the least contact with with minority groups are the most hostile to them.

The looming federal election could be a spark for all the populist tinder largely being ignored in Canada. In the 2015 federal election, voting differences by gender for all age groups were flat. Now the federal Conservatives hold a 17-point advantage among men from all age groups other than seniors —a huge change in three years. Federal Conservatives also hold an advantage over Liberals and New Democrats with voters who self-identify as working class, and the party has overwhelming support from non-university-educated Canadians, the group most likely to feel left behind by the disappearance of blue-collar industries.

Former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper led a party supported by the economically comfortable. His successor, Andrew Scheer, leads a party of the economically unhappy, of the new economy’s losers, a base increasingly comfortable with raising the drawbridge even as the Liberal government announces Canada will admit an additional 40,000 immigrants by 2021, bringing the annual number of new, mostly non-white arrivals to 350,000. Any campaign rhetoric that confuses this new support with its old party will only exacerbate the anger—and for the angry to find comfort in populism’s temptations.

What we do know is that Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government, with its populist strains and its vague campaign promises, is what many angry young men voted for. Maybe they didn’t vote for its policies; maybe, in their anger, they just voted to burn the house down, even if the history of populist movements show they’ve rarely worked out.

We can try to understand why it’s happening. We can insist that governments tackle inequality and affordable housing. We can build a future that preserves progress for all of us but addresses the real injuries of those who have embraced populism, while also refusing to bend to their fear, anger and ignorance. But letting populism burn the house down benefits nobody—and we can’t just ignore the smell of gasoline in the air.

Source: Canada is a tinderbox for populism. The 2019 election could spark it.

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