Poll sees ‘unprecedented’ rise in Muslim vote
Grassroots advocacy group found 79-per-cent turnout in recent federal election
Mohammed Hashim could tell this election was different.
In past years, the community activist said it was difficult to find members of the Muslim community interested in volunteering, helping on election campaigns and opening their wallets to support candidates. Even harder, was to get people out to vote.
“I have worked every campaign, municipal, provincial and federal since 2001,” said Mississauga-based Hashim, an organizer with Toronto and York Region Labour Council. “I have never seen this level of engagement from Muslims across the GTA,” he said.
“I think Muslims felt, this election, they had a lot more to lose if they stayed on the sidelines,” he said.
A new poll looking at voter turnout in the Muslim community, being made public Thursday, backs up what many activists felt was an “unprecedented increase” in civic engagement in the community.
Seventy-nine per cent of nationwide respondents to the poll, commissioned by the grassroots group The Canadian-Muslim Vote (TCMV), said they voted on Oct. 19. In nine GTA ridings where TCMV was on the ground, present at events and went door to door, the voter turnout was 88 per cent. (The overall national voter turnout this year was 68.5 per cent.)
“We worked really hard over the past seven months to really undertake an intensive election-awareness campaign, so for us, these results are amazing,” said Muneeza Sheikh, a spokeswoman for TCMV.
“There were a number of issues that really affected the Muslim community, and so people were really receptive,” she said.
The non-partisan group, which was founded to increase civic engagement in the Muslim community, commissioned the poll because “people were contacting us to find out about the result of our efforts,” said Sheikh. (TCMV’s efforts were focused on nine ridings: Don Valley East, Mississauga Centre, Mississauga—Erin Mills, Scarborough—Guildwood, Etobicoke North, Don Valley West, Mississauga—Malton, Scarborough Southwest and Scarborough Centre.)
The poll, conducted by Mainstreet Research, surveyed 802 Muslim Canadians from Nov. 3 to 5 across five municipalities: London, Ottawa, Greater Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver. Muslim Canadians are not thought to be habitually faithful in their voting habits; Mainstreet cites research from years past suggesting their turnout roughly a decade ago was less than 50 per cent.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Laura Anthony, a research manager with Samara Canada, a non-profit advocacy group for citizen engagement and participation, says the findings of any poll have to be taken with “a grain of salt.”
“The first thing that jumps out is that this is self-reported data, which can bump the numbers up significantly,” said Anthony.
In 2011, 74 per cent of youth between 18 and 34 self-reported they voted, when Elections Canada’s estimates found that 42.5 per cent of 18-34-year-olds cast a ballot, she said.
She said that polls like this are good for groups to set benchmarks for themselves that they can measure against in the future — especially because such data is not available elsewhere. Elections Canada doesn’t collect data based on religious affiliation. And polls aside, the outcome of the federal election result itself speaks for Muslim engagement.
“Beyond this report, we know that 11Muslims were elected to the House of Commons, and predominately from around the GTA,” she said. “We can see even there, there was definitely a movement.”
Newly elected MP for Mississauga Centre Omar Alghabra, said the poll’s high numbers are not surprising, and he sees it as a positive sign for the future.
“It was clear that the Muslim community had an impact on the outcome of the election,” he said. “And it’s a reassuring message to every citizen that their participation through voting and maybe even more, has an impact on the outcome.”