DIVERSITY WAS ON DISPLAY ON SATURDAY NIGHT FOR SCHEER’S LARGEST AND MOST ENTHUSIASTIC CROWD BY FAR. BUT DIVERSITY ISN’T THE SAME AS UNITY, AND CANADIANS ARE AS SPLIT AS EVER.
Party’s rally in Toronto suburbs heartening
It’s a cliché, but it’s also true, that first-time visitors to Toronto are often astonished at the diversity they see. But even when you live in Toronto most of your life, its diversities — of ethnicity, of religion, of … taste — can amaze you. On Saturday night in Richmond Hill, just north of the city, reporters covering the Conservative campaign were ushered into the Premiere Ballroom through a massive kitchen. Not much was going on except for (at a guess) 100 pounds of tripe soaking in a giant sink. I was expecting a bog-standard Chinese-Canadian banquet hall.
I struggle to describe the esthetic we encountered instead. “Psychedelic Versailles on a budget,” maybe? It was dominated by enormous baroque paintings of women in 150-pound dresses and men in powdered wigs remonstrating with each other over harpsichords. Hanging incongruously above the gold-painted cash bar was an even more enormous Heywood Hardy knock-off painting of a British fox hunt. Faux-marble statues of shapely women had lamps bolted on to them; at the entrance, several guarded a gloriously maudlin illuminated waterfall. The chandeliers looked like they were bought second hand from a defunct airport hotel, 20 years ago. It was madly glorious. If you like Chinese food and need to host an event in the area, you would be a fool to go elsewhere.
Andrew Scheer’s rally, hosted by Senator Linda Frum, was the Conservative leader’s campaign farewell to Central Canada, and it’s fair to call it a major success. The party pegged the crowd at 2,000, and that didn’t sound silly. And the assembled partisans quite splendidly represented one of the great successes of the newly reformed conservative alliance, which is its diversity.
Richmond Hill is a classic example of Canadian multiculturalism, and a rejection of the “ethnic enclave” worries propagated by people like Maxime Bernier: 57 per cent of residents are immigrants, according to the 2016 census, and 62 per cent claimed a mother tongue other than English or French. Of those, 40 per cent first spoke Mandarin or Cantonese, but 17 per cent first spoke Farsi, 8 per cent Russian, 5 per cent Italian, 4 per cent Korean and 3 per cent Arabic.
Liberal Majid Jowhari is Canada’s first MP of Iranian descent. In Richmond Hill, he’s up against Costas Menegakis, who won the riding for the Conservatives in 2011. The NDP’s candidate is Adam DeVita, the Greens’ is Iccha Kohli, the People’s Party’s is Igor Tvorogov. All that diversity was on display both visually and aurally on Saturday night at Scheer’s largest and most enthusiastic crowd by far.
That sort of thing makes me a bit misty-eyed about my city. But most kinds of Canadian diversity make me misty-eyed about my country as well. It’s at least superficially heartening to know that the same leader, representing the same big tent, can successfully make the same basic pitch to a crowd in a rural Nova Scotia community centre one night, in a stronghold of Quebec nationalism the night after that, and in a place like Richmond Hill the night after that. (It’s also heartening to know he can fairly effectively knock down a “lock him up” chant, as Scheer did in Richmond Hill — encouraging “vote him out” instead.)
It becomes somewhat less heartening when you consider the extent to which some of these constituencies are being pandered to, of course. If Scheer doesn’t wake up Tuesday morning in Regina in a position to become prime minister, his party may view his “whatever you want short of independence” pitch to Quebecers as something of a liability. Scheer sounded downright silly in Vancouver on Sunday warning that “a vote for the Bloc is a vote for a referendum.” The Bloc couldn’t hold a referendum with every seat in Quebec at its command, and there is little reason to attribute its resurgence to a renewed appetite for separatism.
Even with the Bloc in remission, however, it was tough to say Canada was in any meaningful sense unified. Not being on the verge of falling apart isn’t an achievement in itself. This is a federation whose would-be Conservative prime minister promises a premiers’ meeting on Jan. 6 to start negotiating — negotiating! — free trade between provinces. This is a country designed such that things like pipelines can be built for the good of all, but where even government ownership is no guarantee of such a thing getting built.
If following a leader around on one of these absurdly mile-intensive campaign tours is occasionally heartening, far more so would be if far more ordinary Canadians could see that much of the country and its people. It’s no surprise that Canadians tend to travel abroad rather than within Canada: the distances alone explain it, even before you look at the state of competition in the airline industry. More familiarity between Canada’s endless diversities wouldn’t steel our national resolve on its own; but the lack of it means our national frustrations are no surprise.