Election Watch: Beyond the “Ethnic Vote” – New Canadian Media – NCM

2015/03/14 Leave a comment

Start of an interesting series in New Canadian Media in the lead-up to the October election by political science profs Inder S. Marwah, Stephen E. White and Phil Triadafilopoulos:

  • What exactly is the “ethnic vote”?  How is it understood and/or defined by different parties, media and researchers? Is there such a thing as an ethnic vote, or are there many different (perhaps conflicting) ethnic votes? Do assumptions about the “ethnic vote” portray widely diverse communities as sharing in a single set of values or interests?
  • What are the key ridings to watch in the lead-up to the 2015 election? How will demographic factors affect local, regional and national voting patterns?
  • What are the issues of greatest concern to new Canadians and/or longstanding ethnic communities? How are the different parties addressing them?
  • Are religious practices being politicized for electoral purposes, as has been the case in many European states? How are new Canadians likely to respond to such efforts?

We will explore how immigration and new Canadian communities are helping to shape the country’s political landscape. Broadly speaking, Canada is an immigrant-receiving success story. In the last few decades, the country has opened itself to a high volume of immigration, provided immigrant populations with relatively easy access to naturalization and citizenship, and maintained its social cohesion, political stability and economic wellbeing along the way. While new Canadians undoubtedly face barriers in accessing social, political and economic opportunities, they fare better in these respects than do immigrant communities in many other countries. New Canadians are, then, poised to profoundly influence the 2015 federal election, and more broadly, Canada’s political life. We look forward to analyzing their influence in the months ahead.

Election Watch: Beyond the “Ethnic Vote” – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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Trudeau stood up by controversial guest at Chinese New Year event

2015/02/23 Leave a comment

The challenges of foreign diplomats navigating the diaspora communities and deciding which events to attend and which not, to avoid being seen to favour one side or the other:

While this kind of activity does not constitute any breach of electoral rules, it lives at the complicated intersection of diplomatic protocol and multicultural politics. “That kind of thing is going over the edge,” said Fen Hampson, distinguished fellow and director at CIGI’s Global Security & Politics Program, before Thursday’s no-show. “You’d be seen as courting the opposition, or worse, playing to their electoral song sheet. You can be badly burned if that party doesn’t form a new government and find yourself on the list where calls won’t get answered by a minister if you were seen as dabbling in domestic politics.”

… When asked about how to navigate this zone of pre-election politics, a senior G7 diplomat said that visiting the campaign headquarters wouldn’t be a problem, provided that respects were also paid to the rivals. Going to a fundraiser, on the other hand, crossed the line. Why go if you wouldn’t be contributing financially? “There’s a risk of being seen as being involved with internal politics,” the diplomat said.

Trudeau stood up by controversial guest at Chinese New Year event – The Globe and Mail.

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Politics is the only free market that matters to Harper: McLaughlin

2014/10/15 Leave a comment

Cutting piece by David McLaughlin on the “shopping for votes” phenomenon and the Government’s approach to maximizing its electoral advantages:

Voters are consumers, not citizens. We are ‘shopped for votes’ by parties as our attachment to the political process waxes and wanes. Market segmentation slices and dices the electorate into micro-chunks of likely and accessible voters resulting in targeted voters being bombarded with direct appeals for support or money. Once captured in a party’s database, the virtuous cycle is repeated as retaining a committed supporter is ‘job one’ of any party.

The Conservative Party’s goal to get their hands on news video clips of their opponents for political advertising through new copyright rules fits with this dynamic. As the country is splintered into hundreds of mini-campaigns targeting specific voter demographics, using this material to craft electoral and fundraising messaging is simply the new normal.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been resolute in using incumbency to advance the political dominance of the party he leads and turn the Conservative Party of Canada into the default governing party. He has double-downed year-after-year on a strategy founded first on a core base vote glued by values and, then second, on a relentless string of election rule changes to give his party advantage over his opponents.

Free market capitalism is sold as beneficial for consumers. Healthy competition leads to more choice, lower prices, better service, and innovation.

But free market democracy is no guarantor of equivalent benefits for voters. After all, the end game of ideas and values in a democracy versus products and services in a marketplace are radically different from each other.

Conservatives instinctively favor free markets. It is striking that for all its populist interventionism and regulation as part of its consumer agenda, the most visible manifestation of free market philosophy in action is taking place in the political marketplace.

Politics is the only free market that matters to Harper – The Globe and Mail.

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Conservative support grows among Chinese-Canadians, despite Liberal push to regain ethnic voters

2014/08/02 Leave a comment

Good read and analysis on the political efforts of the major parties with Chinese Canadians:

The data appear to indicate the Tories’ continuing ethnic outreach, spearheaded by cabinet minister Jason Kenney, is connecting with the fast-growing numbers of Canadians who trace their roots to China and Taiwan.

The party’s more conservative approach to social issues and softened stance toward China may also be helping it reach Chinese-Canadians who were once seen as more likely to support the Liberal party.

For both parties, the money raised from Chinese-Canadians accounts for only a small share of total fundraising, but could be a leading indicator of ballot-box support in the coming election.

Although the parties do not report the ethnicity of donors to Elections Canada, contributions from Chinese-Canadians can be roughly tracked because of the limited number of Chinese surnames.

Most Chinese have one of about 100 common family names or their Romanized variants, such as Wong or Wang. So common are the Chinese names, the expression “Old One Hundred Names” is used in China to refer to the average person.

In 2007, seven of every 1,000 contributors to the Conservatives had one of these common Chinese surnames, according to the analysis of donors who gave more than $200 annually. But the 2013 numbers, reported this month, show that share has nearly doubled, with 13 of every 1,000 with a Chinese name.

Over the same period, the number of contributors who gave to the Tories rose by 34%, but the share with Chinese names outpaced that, rising by 173%.

The share of Liberal support from the Chinese community has remained largely static since 2007, when 10 in 1,000 donors to the party had Chinese names. That figure was unchanged in the 2013 filings, despite a surge in support for the party and its new leader, who was elected in April 2013.

The New Democrats appear to have the weakest level of support from Chinese-Canadians, the data show, with only three contributors in 1,000 with Chinese names.

Conservative support grows among Chinese-Canadians, despite Liberal push to regain ethnic voters

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Why far-right nativist political parties stand no chance in Canada

2014/07/12 Leave a comment

Bit of a flawed and limited analysis by James Yan.

Canada is more welcoming, accepting, tolerant than other immigration-based countries like the US and Australia. Europe is not a comparator region.

Our history influences who we are, and as Kymlicka and Ibbitson’s popularization (Why is Canada the most tolerant country in the world? Luck), there are unique factors to our history, particularly the (imperfect) accommodation to aboriginal Canadians and more significantly French-English accommodation that provide the backdrop and culture for a more accommodating political culture.

And we recognized, belatedly, many of the unfortunate incidents of our past.

So while demographics now make it impossible, how we got here, and the contrast with other immigrant-based societies, are equally important factors:

In the case of Canada, however, the proportion of Canadian citizens who are foreign-born and the proportion who are members of a visible minority, at 20.6 per cent and 19.1 per cent respectively as of 2011, is simply too high for a nativist party to even be politically viable. Political parties in Canada win elections only by winning the support of a broad coalition of voters, especially immigrants and second-generation immigrants who belong to visible minorities, since they form such a sizable chunk of the electorate. In Canada, any far-right nativist political party will inevitably self-destruct since it alienates the very voting bloc from whom it inescapably needs votes.

In Europe, on the other hand, nativist parties are doing well because the proportion of foreign-born people in most countries is nowhere near as high as that in Canada. According to the United Nations Population Division’s 2013 International Migration Report, the percentage of the population that is foreign-born in most European countries mentioned at the beginning of this article is between five and eight per cent. European countries are also more ethnically homogeneous. This is why nativist political parties in Europe can afford to lose the immigrant and visible minority vote yet still perform so well in elections.

So it seems that hostility towards “outsiders” resembles a bell-shaped curve. These perceived outsiders can be scapegoated up to a certain point, but once they have attained a critical mass in any given country, nativist political parties cease to be politically viable. Luckily, Canada today is positioned on the right side of this bell curve.

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Why far-right nativist political parties stand no chance in Canada | Embassy – Canadas Foreign Policy Newspaper.

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Scholarship and Politics – The Case of Noam Chomsky

2013/12/11 Leave a comment

A reminder of the scholar that Chomsky is, and a good overview of his recent lectures where he discussed: What is Language?, What can We Understand?,  What is the Common Good?

While much of the article refers to the separate academic and political roles, the more interesting part is a thoughtful discussion on our human limits and constraints, as captured in this quote:

In his second lecture (“What Can We Understand?”), Chomsky took up the question of what humans are capable of understanding and his answer, generally, was that we can understand what we can understand, and that means that we can’t understand what is beyond our innate mental capacities. This does not mean, he said, that what we can’t understand is not real: “What is mysterious to me is not an argument that it does not exist.” It’s just that while language is powerful and creative, its power and creativity have limits; and since language is thought rather than an addition to or clothing of thought, the limits of language are the limits of what we can fruitfully think about. Nor, Chomsky declared, are those limits capable of being enlarged or transcended in time. This is as good as it gets. There is “no evolution in our capacity for language.” These assertions are offered as a counter to what Chomsky sees as the over-optimistic Enlightenment belief — common to many empiricist philosophies — that ours is a “limitless explanatory power” and that “we can do anything.” Our limits, he concluded, should not be lamented, for the fact of limits enables perception and predication, “If there were no limits,” everything would be mush, and “there would be no scope” for definite action. (Here we might think of Wordsworth’s great sonnet, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.”)

Scholarship and Politics – The Case of Noam Chomsky – NYTimes.com.

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How Quebec’s charter turned the Tories into ethnic champions – The Globe and Mail

2013/11/29 Leave a comment

Another article, by Inder Marwah of University of Chicago, and Phil Triadafilopoulos, of UofT, on how the Conservative Party has learned to embrace the “fourth sister” of Canadian politics (ethnic communities) and how the proposed Quebec Charter has furthered that embrace. Not much new compared to commentary by Tom Flanagan, John Ibbitson or others, but it still is a remarkable change.

How Quebec’s charter turned the Tories into ethnic champions – The Globe and Mail.

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Julie Miville-Dechêne, Gérard Bouchard et moi – L’actualité

2013/09/25 Leave a comment

A lengthy but interesting discussion by Stéphane Gobeil in L’Actualité of laicité and Canadian multiculturalism. Again, too much in the past, too much caricature, too little understanding of the commonalities between interculturalisme and multiculturalism. And no acknowledgement of the recent emphasis in Canadian multiculturalism on integration, largely returning to multiculturalism’s roots. Nevertheless a good read to better understand some of the Quebec debates.

But borders in the absurd, with the assertion that Canadian multiculturalism is the most “perfidious and insidious” form of racism, ignoring the strong integrative and equity aspects:

C’est l’essence de l’idéologie du multiculturalisme canadien, qui comme le déclarait l’autre soir Micheline Lanctôt, chez Bazzo, représente la forme la plus perfide et insidieuse de racisme. Elle n’est pas la première à le dire et ceux qui sont déjà grimpés dans les rideaux feraient bien de retourner lire l’essai de Neil Bissoondath, Le marché aux illusions: la méprise multiculturelle. …..

Le multiculturalisme à la canadienne est insidieux en ce sens que sous couvert d’ouverture, il institue des catégories de citoyens et les pousse à entrer dans un moule culturel dont beaucoup ne veulent plus.

Julie Miville-Dechêne, Gérard Bouchard et moi – L’actualité.

Filed under Charte des valeurs québécoise, Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Québec écarte le Comité sur les affaires religieuses

2013/09/24 Leave a comment

More evidence on how governments can marginalize views or organizations that they do not agree with. Removal of some of the checks and balances helpful to a democratic society, even if they complicate things for government.

Québec écarte le Comité sur les affaires religieuses | TOMMY CHOUINARD | Politique québécoise.

Charte des valeurs québécoises – Le CSF a peut-être perdu toute crédibilité pour s’exprimer

And lastly, and surprisingly at least to me, a former Supreme Court Justice appears to be coming down in favour of the Charter:

Ex-Supreme Court judge expected to back Quebec values charter

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

No ‘mass phenomenon’ of homegrown radicalization in Canada, says Harper – Winnipeg Free Press

2013/09/24 Leave a comment

Correct assessment, although even isolated incidents can be deadly. Interestingly, no mention of the ongoing research towards better understanding of some of the possible factors involved that are part of the federally funded Kanishka Project:

…. invest in research on pressing questions for Canada on terrorism and counter-terrorism, such as preventing and countering violent extremism.

The Project is about better understanding what terrorism means in the Canadian context, how that is changing over time, and what we can do to support effective policies and programs to counter terrorism and violent extremism in Canada.

No ‘mass phenomenon’ of homegrown radicalization in Canada, says Harper – Winnipeg Free Press.

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