Generally speaking, visible minority and immigrant populations are heavily concentrated in Canada’s urban and suburban areas, the same areas that are likely to see new seats in the coming years, and likely to gain increased importance by the time the next federal election rolls around.
An examination of the top 41 ridings that have 40 per cent or more of immigrant populations shows that prior to the 2011 election, the Liberal Party represented 30 of the 41 ridings, but after the election they were left with only 10. The Liberals still hold three of the top five ridings with the highest percentage of immigrants.
In contrast, the NDP managed to gain a number of Canada’s heavily immigrant ridings; prior to the election the NDP held six ridings with immigrant populations over 40 per cent, after the election they had 12 such seats.
Incumbent NDP MPs in these ridings consistently experienced higher results than in the election previous. For example, NDP MP and deputy leader Thomas Mulcair (Outremont, Que.) garnered 39.5 per cent in the 2008 election, but in 2011 he increased his numbers to 56.4 per cent. In fact, when looking at these 41, even in ridings where the NDP did not gain a seat, their candidates generally attracted a higher percentage of votes.
When legislation about adding seats to the country’s fastest-growing areas was initially proposed, ahead of the May election, Ontario was expected to receive 18 seats, Alberta five and British Columbia seven. The additional seats will be based on the 2011 census, which won’t be finalized until 2012.
“Probably a whole bunch of the new ridings will be in urban centres. And urban centres tend to be where newcomers come when they immigrate to Canada. But if anything, I would characterize it as the greater empowerment of new Canadians by providing the same kind of representation by population that they deserve based on where they live,” said Yaroslav Baran, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and former Conservative staffer.
Winning the support of cultural communities has increasingly become a focus of Canadian political parties. Historically a pillar of Liberal support, ethnic voters are increasingly leaving the party in favour of the Conservatives or NDP.
But what is an “ethnic vote”? Increasingly, said Barry Kay, a political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, people associate visible minority with ethnic. But that isn’t always accurate, as Sean Simpson, associate vice-president of Ipsos-Reid, pointed out “you can be ethnic without necessarily being a visible minority.”
Similarly, “immigrant” is a label largely associated with ethnic, but in 2010, according to the Citizenship and Immigration Canada website, the U.S. was the fourth largest source of permanent residents in Canada, closely followed by the U.K.
It should be noted that China, the Philippines and India, which ranked first, second and third, respectively, had permanent resident numbers in the 30,000s, whereas the U.S. and U.K. brought in under 10,000 permanent residents each last year.
Darrel Bricker, CEO of Ipsos-Reid Public Affairs, suggested that The Hill Times examine the ridings that had an immigrant population higher than the national score, which currently hovers in the 20 per cent range.
But Prof. Kay said the threshold should be much higher than that: “What you’re going to end up getting if the figure is that low, you’re going to basically be getting an urban-rural split, more than an immigrant, non-immigrant split…frankly I think you should move upward.”
The Hill Times decided to examine ridings with immigrant populations at or exceeding 40 per cent, double the national average, to see how Canada’s most diverse ridings voted.
There are 41 ridings in Canada with an immigrant population of 40 per cent or higher as of the 2006 census. Five of the ridings are in southern, urban Quebec, eight of them are in British Columbia, and the remaining 28 ridings are all in the Greater Toronto Area ridings of Ontario.
Included in the immigrant population figures are people from the U.S., Central America, Northern Europe, and Oceania—but none of those categories represented the largest segment for any of the ridings. Consistently, China, India, Southern Asia, Europe, and the Middle East represented the largest immigrant segments.
The Conservatives made clear gains in these heavily immigrant ridings. After the 2008 election, the Tories held only four of the 41 ridings, but after the 2011 election the party held 19 of the seats. The four Conservative incumbents all experienced better election results. The Conservatives only hold one of the top five immigrant ridings: Don Valley East, Ont., where the party displaced Liberal incumbent Yasmin Ratansi by a close near-two per cent margin.
While the Conservatives didn’t emerge as a clear winner in heavily immigrant ridings, they clearly made a lot of head-way and the considerable number of seats that their ethnic outreach efforts gained them played an undeniable factor in achieving a Conservative majority.
Tom Flanagan, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a former Conservative campaign manager, in an interview with The Hill Times, said that in 2008 the Conservative Party shifted their focus from winning Quebec to winning the ethnic vote, in order to gain majority status in the House. Immigration, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney (Calgary Southeast, Alta.) took over the party’s outreach efforts in that year, and as Prof. Flanagan said, he brought the party’s efforts to a new level of enthusiasm and organization.
“We take cultural outreach as seriously as we do everything else that we do. The party doesn’t take guesses as to how to win ridings, we do fairly statistical work, and because the government does ethnic outreach fairly broadly, when the party goes during an election campaign for votes, we have a fair bit of credibility,” a senior Conservative staffer told The Hill Times.
But while the Conservatives began to ramp up their efforts in 2008, the Liberals continued to largely ignore ethnic or immigrant Canadians, their traditional pillars of support.
“We sort of ignored the ethnic communities. For the last decade we might have taken them for granted,” said Liberal multiculturalism critic MP Jim Karygiannis (Scarborough-Agincourt, Ont.).
Mr. Karygiannis said in the future, his party is going to be sending more attention and affection to ethnic voters: “We sort of noticed what was happening with Mr. Kenney and we need to make sure that one, we’re a player within the ethnic communities, two, that they respect us, three, most importantly, that we respect them, [and] four, that their voices are heard around the decision making table of the Liberal Party.”
Mr. Karygiannis said he was disappointed by the Party’s lack of outreach efforts in recent years, and now that he’s been put at the head of Liberals efforts, he has a chance to take the approach he’s been using for the past 20 years in his work with ethnic communities, and formalize it as the party’s approach.
Conservatives sources agreed that it is the party’s message that was able to resonate with so many ethnic and immigrant Canadians. The Conservative staffer said the Conservatives’ value-based message was one that highlighted the shared values between the party and cultural Canadians.
“It’s our message that’s actually selling,” said the Conservative source. “The Minister [Kenney] said a couple of times, the reason he feels comfortable being tough on crime and being out in front of [the] human smuggling issue is because when we go to cultural communities, they want us to be way tougher than we’re actually being. So with the Liberals on the other side of the issue, they have a really hard time. You can go there [visit cultural communities] as often as you want, but if your values are still the same latte-drinking downtown values, it’s not going to help.”
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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