Profiling victims find friend in Singh
Much has already been written about the challenges awaiting Jagmeet Singh, the first member of a visible minority to lead a federal party.
But, surely, the challenge rests with Canadian voters who will be asked to show sufficient maturity and tolerance in 2019 that the NDP leader will be judged on his policies, his team and his message, and the turban (no matter how brightly coloured), the beard and the kirpan will have been rendered invisible.
Invisible as an impediment to a vote, but for Singh, his religious symbols are powerful.
The country was overdue for a victory for diversity when Singh steamrolled past three other challengers for a first-ballot victory in the NDP race.
Now it’s up to Canadians to accept that victory for diversity whether it is win, lose or draw for Singh’s NDP in two years.
The beard, turban and kirpan will have to be part of his message because, for the first time, Canadians have a political leader who knows what so many Canadians know — the bitter pain of being targeted because they look different.
Voters will have before them a man who grew up with “brown skin, long hair and a funny name.”
He knows about being pulled over by police for no reason except his colour, and he can relate to the practice of police carding in a way that no leader before him can. He says he has been pulled over 11 times, beginning at age 17, because of the way he looks.
He has told the story of a couple of bicycle cops carding him when Singh, then a law student, pulled his car into Casa Loma for a break.
He knew his rights, walked away, got back in his car but couldn’t leave because the bicycles had boxed him in. The officers then called for backup, and a Sikh officer explained it wasn’t carding, just a routine stop.
Singh knew differently.
With that background, Singh can credibly paint Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — a man who referred to his “family fortune” during the tax reform controversy — as elitist.
His is a tall promise to eradicate all racial profiling across the country, first by outlawing it in federally regulated police and border agencies, then have provincial and municipal police provide receipts after stops to build a database to show its prevalence.
He championed the cause at Queen’s Park to no avail. It has been an ongoing battle in Toronto for many years with powerful police interests putting up roadblocks at every point.
But it is an issue that will now be raised at the federal level where governments too often shrug off concerns about police behaviour as something outside their jurisdiction.
Canada now has a racialized leader who can speak directly to racialized communities as one of them.
The party has also again turned to an outsider as it so often does, and there were inevitable comparisons Sunday to Jack Layton’s 2003 victory.
Layton was a Toronto city councillor who blitzed five challengers with 53.5 per cent of the weighted vote on the first ballot.
Singh won 53.8 per cent first-ballot support.
The 2015 election results hurt fundraising and morale, and the party, under Tom Mulcair, was reeling into obscurity. But Singh still won a better prize than Layton.
Layton inherited a party that won just 8.5 per cent of the vote in the previous election, had only 13 seats, only one in Ontario and none in Quebec.
Singh inherits a caucus of 44, a party that won almost 20 per cent of the popular vote in 2015, has eight seats in Ontario and 16 in Quebec.
Yes, a glass-half-full assessment after what Layton was able to build in 2011, but hardly the depths the party had fallen to in the barren post-Ed Broadbent years.
Like Layton, Singh has no federal seat. That provides some logistics problems, but is something he can play to his advantage.
He has the energy to travel the country and grow what he was able to build over barely four months in the leadership race.
He can take a page from the Trudeau playbook.
Trudeau’s advisers calculated his talents were better used travelling the country instead of, as leader of the third party, waiting for a couple of questions in the corner of the Commons.
Singh will have to be seen in Ottawa — not as much as Layton who often wore out his welcome waiting at microphones in his early leadership days — but he will be more effective outside the bubble. That’s where the 2019 votes reside. Tim Harper writes on national affairs. tjharper77@gmail.com, Twitter: @nutgraf1