Indian-origin politicos in Canada hop onto hogwash bandwagon
TORONTO: Bozo eruption is a term that is often used in North American politics to denote a candidate making a controversial, if not completely absurd, statement. While each election is touted as a coming-of-age tale for the Indo-Canadian community, the Parliamentary election this year, scheduled for Monday, seems to suggest that IndoCanadian candidates most certainly have made strides in this electoral cycle to catch up with their mainstream counterparts when it comes to going Bozo.
Exhibit A of this phenomenon is Jerry Bance, who was a candidate for the ruling Conservative Party. Bance, who runs an appliance repair outfit, was dropped by the party when a video emerged of him urinating into the coffee cup of a client while making a house call. Peegate, as it was called in Canada, caused a Twitter storm.
His party colleague Jagdish Grewal was also summarily dismissed as a Conservative candidate when a piece he wrote in a Punjabi journal came to light. In that, he had asked, “Is it wrong for a homosexual to become a normal person?” Grewal, though, remains on the ticket and continues to campaign since that revelation came after Elections Canada had already printed his constituency ballots.
Grewal isn’t alone is taking a position on homosexuality that is at variance with the prevailing norm in the country, where same sex marriage is legal.
While Grewal was on the right, Harbaljit Singh Kahlon, a candidate for the leftist New Democratic Party, once said in a TV interview, “I think there’s no research that says gays are born gay; it’s a choice they make upon lust.” Kahlon apologised profusely for his views, which he claimed had evolved, and remains an official candidate.
As does Joe Daniel, the only Canadian MP of Malayali origin. Also a Conservative, he recently spoke of the Syrian refugee crisis thusly, “I think there is a different agenda going on in terms of these refugees. Whereas at the same time Saudi Arabia is putting up money for 200 mosques in Germany. I think the agenda is to try and move as many Muslims into some of these European countries to change these countries in a major way. That’s something that I certainly don’t want to see happening in Canada.”
According to Rana Sarkar, an advisor to the Liberal Party’s Prime Ministerial candidate Justin Trudeau, two factors are playing into such remarks surfacing. “It’s an indication of the quality of politicians being recruited into the process,” he said, which combined with social media scrutiny, make for a combustible mix.
Sarkar, who ran unsuccessfully during the Federal elections in 2011, said a “lot of stuff would not have been caught” but for new media vigil.
Part of that army of new media ventures is The True North Times (truenorthtimes.ca), which was launched last year with an eye on this election by 19-year-old Montreal-based university student Simren Sandhu. While those like Daniel and Bance featured prominently on his site, the campaign it ran, Nine Days of Scandal, claimed a couple of scalps of its own.
While part of a larger coverage of the elections, Indecision 2015, the site’s founders didn’t know what sort of impact the Nine Days dirt-digging would have. “We thought it would be interesting to delve into social media and see what they’ve (the candidates) have said,” Sandhu, a student of political science at McGill University, said.
The effect that Sandhu’s venture has already had is ironic given that this British Columbia-born teenager has never even voted in an election. “This is the first time I’ll have the privilege,” he said.
That his site managed to find so much about candidates on social media surprised even Sandhu. “It says a lot about the candidates and the parties and their vetting process, or the lack thereof. They will definitely have to focus on that more,” Sandhu said.
Some of that focus will also be on some Indo-Canadian candidates, who have strayed from the staid and narrow path of prior polls, to becoming objects of ridicule.