Minorities, too, abandoning Liberals
Jan. 12, 2006
HAROON SIDDIQUI
Editorial page editor emeritus
The Toronto Star
What is the "ethnic vote?" Ballots cast by minorities.But which ones? Immigrants? Non-whites? Even those who have been here 100 years?
Besides such imprecision, I have also taken issue with the long-held political wisdom that the "ethnics" tend to vote Liberal because Liberal governments let them into Canada.
Assigning that as the sole, even primary, motivation for minority voters presupposes that such citizens are incapable of judgment on the economy, environment and foreign, social or other policies.
That the hypothesis was false was proven when the Tories, who initiated the modern immigration rush into Canada under Brian Mulroney, failed to reap any automatic benefit from it.
If minorities are deserting the Liberals, it is principally for the same reasons as other Canadians are (sponsorship scandal, etc., perhaps more so, given that many came here from corrupt nations) and also because the Liberals seem to have developed a tin earfor minority grievances, while the other parties have fielded minority candidates and offered specific policy promises.
Start with Quebec. It was Lucien Bouchard who buried the Jacques Parizeau notion of the Québécois as pure laine but it is Gilles Duceppe who is articulating the Canadian idea of the equality of all citizens. "Everyone who lives in Quebec is a Quebecer," he tells newer Canadians in Montreal. "You are Quebecers."
On Ottawa's bungling of the probe into the 1985 Air India bombing, the Paul Martin Liberals have been busy doing damage control while Stephen Harper has promised the million-strong South Asian community what it wants: a judicial inquiry.
On an apology and compensation to Chinese Canadians for a head tax imposed a century ago, Harper, Duceppe and Jack Layton have agreed to both demands, while the Liberals are floundering.
On the $957 landing fee charged new immigrants, Martin and Harper have pledged to scrap it. Brought in 1995 as part of the deficit reduction drive by Martin as finance minister, the fee was abolished for refugees in 2000 but kept for others long after the federal books were balanced.
The announcement did not seem to help the Liberals. Nor did the election-eve immigration accord with Ontario, raising federal settlement dollars from $800 a head to $3,400.
"Paul Martin and his Liberals amaze me no end when it comes to their cunning to mesmerize new immigrants just before each election," wrote Asoka Weerasinghe of Gloucester in a letter to the Ottawa Citizen. "Having siphoned the cream of the professional intelligentsia from developing countries and then destroying their dignity once they land in Canada, not recognizing their qualifications and work experience, and forcing them to take up jobs in the taxi, security, fast-food and retail industries, now they are telling these immigrants they will abolish the landing fee."
Mark Persaud of Toronto placed the letter on his Multicultural News website, and added: "The traditional love affair between the Liberal party and many in the ethno-cultural communities has turned sour." Angelo Persichilli of the Italian daily Corriere Canadese told Reuters news agency: "The ethnic vote should not be taken for granted by the Liberals."
Arab Canadians, a significant percentage of whom are Christians, are dismayed by the sorry Liberal record on civil liberties post-9/11, according to Mohamed Boudjenane of the Canadian Arab Federation. Raja Khouri, former president of the federation, said Arabs are upset with what they see as the Liberal pro-Israeli policy tilt.
Both he and Boudjenane said the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois would be the main beneficiaries.
The same sentiment holds for Muslims, who with the Arabs, total more than 1 million.
The 1 million-plus Chinese community is angry and upset over the head tax.
About 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid $23 million between 1885 and 1923, when the levy was replaced by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which remained in effect until 1947.
Those were racist measures. Acknowledging so would be in the same spirit as the apology and compensation given by Mulroney to the Japanese Canadians interned during World War II.
The counter-argument is that you cannot keep apologizing for the past and doing so might open up the floodgates to compensation claims by other groups with grievances, such as the Ukrainian and Italian Canadians interned during World Wars I and II.
Martin opted for no apology and no compensation but a $25 million fund to acknowledge "the historical experiences of ethnocultural communities impacted by wartime measures and immigration experiences." He allocated $2.5 million for the Chinese dispute.
But he cut out the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC), which had long been in the forefront of the issue. Ottawa opted for an agreement with a newer, more malleable lead group, the National Congress of Chinese Canadians.
Sid Tan, Vancouver spokesman for the CCNC, said, "the money is going to Liberal friends. It's like a Chinese Canadian sponsorship scandal."
The mainstream media ignored the controversy as a turf war between two competing Chinese organizations. But the issue rankled enough Chinese Canadian voters that the Chinese media, in Vancouver and Toronto, kept hammering at it.
Last week Martin backed off, offering an individual apology. That didn't quite cut it.
Multiculturalism Minister Raymond Chan said an apology could be appended to the agreement but not offered from the floor of Parliament. That didn't fly either.
He was contradicted by Industry Minister David Emerson who came out for a formal apology.
With their bumbling, the Liberals managed to offend voters on both sides of the issue, as well as those watching from the sidelines.
Sue Eng of the Ontario Coalition of Head Tax Payers and Families says she is most gratified that "the Chinese voting population is totally engaged, and, secondly, that the issue has helped break the gatekeeper mentality."
Minority communities, at least some of them, are breaking free not only of ethnic brokers but also the Liberal party.