CONSERVATIVE CONSTITUENCY
Scheer is pursuing Chinese-Canadians, soccer moms and ‘non-elites.’
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was out cultivating a constituency this week that hasn’t been the easiest for him to charm — Chinese Canadians. Trudeau was in the GTA on Thursday to help kick off Chinese New Year celebrations with Chinese Canadians in Mississauga and Markham.
While the prime minister doesn’t usually have trouble attracting crowds, votes are not exactly the same thing. It’s this cultural community that has proved most elusive to Trudeau’s Liberals — even in the 2015 election that saw the party’s fortunes soaring among most other diverse demographic groups.
Chinese Canadians, by and large, have remained loyal to the Conservatives. Liberal strategists have freely acknowledged this privately and last weekend, the man who will be running the Conservatives’ 2019 election campaign was talking publicly about that enduring electoral advantage.
Hamish Marshall, who helped Andrew Scheer win the Conservative leadership last spring, was part of a panel discussion at the annual gathering of the Manning Institute in Ottawa, describing who the party needs to woo in the next couple of years to have a shot at returning to power.
It’s fascinating to see how large the GTA and its demographics loom in those calculations — likely because of how devastatingly the Conservatives were defeated there in 2015, losing all but a few seats across the entire area. Just as the GTA helped hand Conservatives their majority in 2011, it also sealed their defeat.
New Canadians were an important part of the Conservatives’ 2011 election victory, Marshall said — though maybe not as crucial as some boasted back in those days. But Conservatives lost a lot of them in 2015.
“In 2015, we actually had big drops, with the exception being the Chinese Canadian community,” Marshall said. “That vote is being maintained,” he added, citing the December byelection in ScarboroughAgincourt.
Though Jean Yip retained Scarborough-Agincourt for the Liberals (her late husband, Arnold Chan, was the previous MP), Marshall boasted that Conservatives had posted a strong second. “We got 41per cent of the vote in a seat that is more than half Chinese Canadian,” he said. “It’s very exciting.”
Marshall wasn’t divulging the entire blueprint of the Conservatives’ future election strategy, but he did throw out some important hints about where they would be concentrating their efforts. It’s worth keeping some type of record of these target communities — the next federal election is only 20 months away, after all.
So who do the Conservatives see as the key to success in the next election, besides those loyal Chinese Canadians?
We’ve already seen that Conservatives have been trying to position themselves as the voice of “nonelites” in Canada, casting Trudeau and the Liberals as the party of the wealthy and entitled. Scheer’s TV ads, odd as they may seem to some, are all about making him the soccer dad from the suburbs.
At last weekend’s panel discussion, Marshall got a little more specific about who is in the Conservatives’ non-elite group. In his words, these are “bluecollar workers, people who don’t have university educations . . . or perhaps more work in manual occupations, or some sort of physical work.” Traditionally, Marshall said, Conservatives do well with these voters and need to do better.
They particularly need to focus on women in this demographic group, sometimes called “pink collar” workers, he said, often in retail jobs.
The problem, Marshall warned, is that these citizens are historically not great at showing up at the polls on election day. “We need to get them to vote more,” he said. “It’s certainly an extremely important demographic and vital to win.”
No one knows yet how Doug Ford is going to do in the provincial Conservative leadership campaign, but clearly, his federal cousins are keeping an eye on “Ford Nation.” Marshall said that Ford had proved adept at gaining support of new Canadians in the Toronto mayoralty race he lost to John Tory in 2014. Ford’s support, said Marshall, was strongest in wards with large visible-minority communities.
“That shows that Conservative, anti-establishment messages can have great appeal with new Canadians, and low-income new Canadians,” he said. “But we’ve got a lot of work to do and I think there’s a huge amount of growth potential there.”
Voters in the GTA, if they do pay attention to politics, are probably more interested in what’s happening on the provincial scene — an exciting, unexpected Progressive Conservative leadership race and then the June 7 election.
But it seems that the federal political parties, of all stripes, are already hard at work in the GTA, too, doing the groundwork for the 2019 election already. It’s going to be a busy 20 months across the 905 and 416 area codes. sdelacourt@bell.net