Immigrants become a key voting bloc in 2015
Parties’ political fortunes will rely on ridings where new Canadians head to polls
OTTAWA— Is Canada a more conservative country after nearly nine years of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s rule?
When the election rolls around in 2015, immigrants to Canada may well cast the deciding votes on that question — or at least according to Harper’s own measure of political success. In a rare, relaxed interview during a visit to New York last September, Harper revealed what he believed was the secret to Conservative victories in Canada.
“What’s most interesting politically about our coming to office and staying in office . . . the growth of Conservatism in Canada, our electoral support, has been largely, not exclusively, but largely by our penetration of immigrant voters . . . of so-called cultural communities,” Harper told Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker. “Fifteen years ago, like many Conservative parties in other parts of the world, we had a very small share of that vote. Today, we win most of those communities.”
The answer was disarmingly candid, from a prime minister who doesn’t tend to talk political strategy in public. It was also intriguingly generous to Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney, who has done the lion’s share of the work in building the Conservatives’ political base among cultural communities. Harper, known more for his one-man brand of leadership, was essentially saying that he owes Kenney a huge debt for a Conservative stamp now placed on Canada. “My colleague Jason Kenney phrased it this way — he said (we did it) by turning people who were small “c” conservatives into big “c” Conservatives,” Harper explained, when asked how his party had won over these groups.
“Most of these people have conservative views . . . They’re prepared to work hard and seize those economic opportunities. They have a very traditional hostility towards crime and criminal elements, towards the extremes of liberal social values — they’re family-oriented people.”
About one in every five citizens in Canada is an immigrant, so Harper’s claim to dominate that constituency is no small boast. But is it true? A study of data from the last election, presented to the Canadian Political Science Association convention in Edmonton in 2012, found that Conservatives had definitely grown their support among immigrant voters in 2011, but so had the NDP. As for the Liberals, they weren’t doing much growing the vote anywhere in 2011. Their hopes for 2015 are more ambi- tious. It is true that for most of the latter part of the 20th century, the immigrant vote was said to belong to the federal Liberals and to the legacy of Pierre Trudeau, father of the Liberal leader who will be facing off against Harper in the 2015 campaign. It was Pierre Trudeau who brought multiculturalism to Canada, after all, not to mention the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which made diversity a legal, guaranteed reality in this country.
Of course, the fight for the immigrant vote will be important for all parties, including the New Democrats, whose hopes of vaulting from opposition to government rest in making inroads into regions outside their base in Quebec, especially in those suburban areas where many immigrants have made their new lives in Canada. But the struggle between the Conservatives and the Liberals for that immigrant vote has a historic resonance too — because of the Trudeau factor.
For Justin Trudeau, the immigrant vote in the 2015 campaign represents a symbolic and strategic goal — to reclaim the loyalty of a demographic once inextricably tied to his late father and also to rob Conservatives of a constituency that they’ve openly acknowledged as crucial to their power and legacy.
And as odd as it was to hear Harper talking openly of strategy and Conservative legacy last fall, it was equally odd for Trudeau — reflecting on those remarks a few weeks later — to say he may agree with the prime minister to some extent about the conservatism of newcomers.
“There is a need for order that I think might well make new arrivals, on certain standards, slightly more socially conservative — when we think, perhaps, of objections to gay marriage or issues around religious rights,” Trudeau said in an interview with the Star, several weeks after Harper made his comments in New York. But Trudeau says that he remains confident that immigrant groups ultimately embrace the Charter and diversity more than they do their instincts toward conservatism.
“My experience is that those same groups understand very rapidly that what protects their rights and beliefs is the same Charter that allows for recognizing those individual rights and fundamental principles of a free and open society,” Trudeau said.
Immigrant voters, he said, “rapidly understand that that’s something worth protecting.”
Trudeau said he was discouraged to hear Harper talking about his stamp on Canada in terms of people’s political leanings.
“My father’s legacy was bilingualism, multiculturalism, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” he said.
“The prime minister is not just the prime minister for Conservatives. He should be the prime minister for all Canadians, and I think that blurring of the line between what is in the interest of government of Canada or Canadians and what is in the interest of the Conservative Party of Canada is part of the problem.”
Still, with his candid reply during that New York interview this fall, Harper has also given his rivals a definite target in any bid to shake the Conservatives out of Ottawa. If the prime minister believes his strength is built on immigrant voters, then it follows that losing them would weaken his electoral power.
And this is why the big battlegrounds in 2015 will be where the immigrants to Canada have made their new homes in this country.