Election day in Canada

Posted by Matra on January 23, 2006, 09:20 PM | #

That should be “scrap our infamous national gun registry”

Posted by Matra on January 24, 2006, 12:41 AM | #

The Conservative Party (CPC) seems set to form a minority government. Most experts and observers (like Mark Steyn) thought they would get between 135 and 140 seats out of 308. At present they look like they will only get about 123. The separatist Bloc Quebecois had a slighly disappointing night but they should end up holding the balance of power.

”(Even with all that pandering and immigrant minority anger over the Liberal Party’s support for gay marriage it would still not surprise me if the minority vote didn’t come through for the Tories).”

The CPC’s gains were in mostly rural ridings - ie., predominantly white areas. The CPC seem to have been shut out completely in ethnically diverse Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver - the country’s three largest cities and the destinations of vast majority of Canada’s new immigrants. No breakthrough in the ethnically diverse suburbs of Toronto either. So once again it seems their pandering to minorities did not pay off; though it’s possible it might have made them more palatable to ‘moderate’ whites.

Posted by Andrew on January 24, 2006, 01:22 AM | #

I guess that is the end of Canada Matra?
You just have to get up to speed on the Quran or get the nugget out and become Al Jolson junior.
And your Arabic Language skills. The wets have killed another Nation , it is only a short time now.

Posted by Guessedworker on January 24, 2006, 08:13 AM | #

Matra, for what will the BQ settle for supporting Harper?

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 24, 2006, 01:07 PM | #

what will the BQ settle for supporting Harper?

Money and a further devolution of powers to the provinces which means more money. It’s unlikely much cooperation will exist considering the CPC encroached on BQ territory. (SSM, abortion, gun control [a Quebec affirmative action program] forgetdaboutit).

One small quibble Matra. CPC inroads in Ontariairio were in largely white Protestant areas. White Catholics (and their vismin buds) appeared to remain solidly Liberal.

Posted by James Bowery on January 24, 2006, 02:39 PM | #

For those of us not very well informed about Canadian politics is there a brief run-down of the Conservative party’s stands concerning immigration and the right of freedom of association violating current dogma opposing whites who prefer to associate with whites?

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 24, 2006, 03:39 PM | #

James, regarding immigration this might be enlightening. However, ‘the right of freedom of association violating current dogma’ for whites has been long outlawed.

Posted by Matra on January 24, 2006, 03:58 PM | #

Matra:

The CPC’s gains were in mostly rural ridings - ie., predominantly white areas.

Desmond Jones:

One small quibble Matra. CPC inroads in Ontariairio were in largely white Protestant areas. White Catholics (and their vismin buds) appeared to remain solidly Liberal.

Given that rural areas are more Protestant (with numerous long settled Irish Catholics) than cities and suburbs I take it your quibble is that I didn’t emphasise that old stock Anglo-Canadians made the difference. Most of their gains were in southwestern Ontario, an area I’m not that familiar with but I assume to be mostly WASP. Listening to election returns it was indeed noticeable how many of the urban Liberal candidates had Slavic or Italian surnames. Hopefully as the number of non-white residents increases and fewer Europeans move to Canada to shore up those ‘white ethnic’ communities Poles, Italians and others will see the need to throw in their lot with WASP Canada. Clearly there’s a long way to go.

Posted by Matra on January 24, 2006, 04:21 PM | #

for what will the BQ settle for supporting Harper?

It’s unlikely much cooperation will exist considering the CPC encroached on BQ territory

Yes, the old prognosis that the BQ would be happy to work with the Tories might have gone out the window with the latter’s unexpected successes in Quebec. Harper’s call for more flexibility in federal-provincial relations including more autonomy (for all provinces, not just Quebec) will be popular with the Bloc’s supporters. Without those ‘soft’ Quebec nationalists who’ve been voting BQ in recent elections the separatists cannot win a referendum on Quebec ‘sovereignty’. 

However, the Bloc went from about 49% of the total vote to only 42%. They would have lost a lot more seats had the federalist vote not been split between the Liberals and Conservatives. The Bloc won’t want another election any time soon - no one does.

Meanwhile, the BQ is claiming to have made progress with ethnic minorities in Quebec. However I’m yet to see any evidence to back that that up.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on January 24, 2006, 05:08 PM | #

BQ’s the best hope going forward.  If Quebec breaks off, it will be heavily Francophone-nationalist, so will let in very few immigrants other than from the small number of Francophone countries. However Quebec breaking off would produce an almost permanent Conservative majority in the rest of Canada, and shift the whole spectrum to the right. If Harper has any sense (which he probably hasn’t) he’ll do a “support me for a full term and I’ll let you break away” deal.

An independent Quebec is perfectly economically viable (albeit probably socialist) and undoubtedly less viscerally anti-US than Mexico. Win-win all round, I call it.

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 24, 2006, 05:25 PM | #

Demographics is destiny Matra, even in Quebec. Montreal went Liberal because of allophones (vismins, Italians Greeks, Hatians etc) and will never, like Toronto and the 905 area, vote CPC. It’s difficult to find the numbers however it’s doubtful there is a large Irish Catholic constituentcy in Ontario. In addition, the Irish are highly integrated, with only 14% of ethnic origin census responses being a single response. Compare that to Italians or Greeks who gave 62% and 68% single responses respectively. French, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Portugese, Filipino Spanish and Hungarian origin account for ~3.46 m in Ontario with there being ~3.9 m Catholics in total. Gains came in Central, Eastern, Midwestern, and Southwestern Ontario (with the exception of the autoworker dominated Windsor region, across the border from Detroit, which is highly ethnic as well). Northern Ontario did not show much success for the CPC because it is heavily French.

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 24, 2006, 05:34 PM | #

It still doesn’t work Martin. It reduces the CPC number of 124 by 10 and the Lib number 103 by 13. And if he’s getting support he doesn’t want to break them away. The furtherance of the CPC fortunes lies in Quebec by enhancing asymmetrical federalism. The CPC will never break thru in TO or Vancouver for obvious reasons. The only place for growth is by further pandering to Quebec.

Posted by Matra on January 24, 2006, 06:22 PM | #

Martin:

Quebec breaking off would produce an almost permanent Conservative majority in the rest of Canada, and shift the whole spectrum to the right.

I’ve always hoped Quebec would leave as there can never be a right wing government with them still in Confederation. But even if they did leave there would not be a permanent Conservative majority. If the Conservatives moved right after Quebec’s separation then the Liberal Party would probably pick up a much greater percentage of the ‘progressive’ vote that currently goes to the NDP. Many of the seats the Conservatives picked up in Ontario last night were close races. If even a small proportion of the NDP and Green Party vote had been transferred to the Liberals the latter would’ve retained their seats.

Desmond - Are the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians in Alberta less likely than other Albertans to vote Tory?

Posted by Matra on January 24, 2006, 06:40 PM | #

Elections Canada, the agency responsible for conducting federal elections, is trying to get more immigrants ot vote.

Link from a Ukrainian-Canadian at Hogtown Front

Posted by Geoff Beck (aka Leslie) on January 24, 2006, 08:14 PM | #

For those following the BNP issue…

Free Speech Activists to Appear on Talk Radio Program
http://www.nationalvanguard.org/printer.php?id=7642

I’m sure many laws will be broken in many different countries, especially Canada. So, don’t tell anyone you say it here.

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 24, 2006, 09:10 PM | #

Matra, Yes. Why? Michael at HTF explains.

Punjabi power is flourishing across burgeoning Brampton, where the South Asian population has grown to about 85,000 people — about 21 per cent of the city’s residents. By deploying political strategies that appeal to recent immigrants, Punjabi Canadians have emerged to form an almost impenetrable political monopoly across a ring of ridings north of Mississauga.

Drafting friends and family to win nominations, launching platforms that highlight immigrant concerns and utilizing a huge volunteer network to pull the vote gives Punjabi Canadian candidates distinct advantages.

“In these ridings it’s impossible for a non-ethnic candidate to win a nomination now, much less a campaign,” says Brampton’s Sam Basra, a Fijian of Punjabi descent who arrived in Toronto 20 years ago and ran federally for the Conservatives during the ‘90s in Etobicoke North.

Basra says that in such a tight-knit community, the nomination process works in favour of Punjabi-Canadians with political aspirations. “They sign up as many friends and family as they need to take out memberships, pay the fee so they can vote, and then they win the nominations.”

Note this:

Some, Basra claims, don’t even care which party they’re nominated for.

The article goes on to challenge this claim, but I believe it, because I’ve seen the same phenomenon among Ukrainian-Canadian voters who’ll vote for any party as long as the candidate is one of “ours”. The Ukrainian word for ours is Nash and if a candidate is Nash, he’s good whatever his politics.

The reason it’s not decisive is because the number of Uktainians in Alberta are less than 10%. And for a group of people who have been in Canada’s West for over a century their integration numbers are still pretty low. According to Census 2001 31% of Albertan Ukrainians provide single source responses. This compares to 19% for the English (which is a skewed number because of those identifying as Canucks) 26% for Germans, 12% for the Scots, 9% for the Irish and 13% for the French.

And for the whipped cream on the strawberries, how about Senator Paul Yuzyk, the father of multiculturalism in Canada. Do we really have to guess his ethnicity?

The Ukrainian National Association, of which Sen. Yuzyk was supreme director for Canada, sent a nine-member delegation of UNA executives and Supreme Assembly members from the U.S. and Canada led by Supreme President John Flis.

Metropolitan Hermaniuk, a close friend of the senator, was visibly shaken at times during the service. In his eulogy, the church leader praised the late senator, calling him a “great man” who held deep convictions. He told the congregation that one of the happiest days in the senator’s life was in 1971, when the federal government unveiled its multiculturalism policy.

Game, set and match?

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 24, 2006, 09:49 PM | #

More on Ukrainians and the politics of exclusion, ya gotta love the whole Michael Ignatieff brouhaha.

Ms. Augustine said tension in the riding—stirred up by the arrival of the new Liberal candidate, academic Michael Ignatieff—is being caused not by senior Liberal officials, but rather by a rogue riding association executive that has long been a thorn in her side.

“This is a group of Ukrainians that have taken over the riding association and every single one is of Ukrainian origin,” said Ms. Augustine, 68. “It is a not an inclusive association, representative of all people living in the riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore and they were just sitting there waiting for me [to leave] going. All this mess that is going on—it has a little bit to do with their own ambitions.”

“They never supported me, they have never raised money for me, never had a meeting inviting others, never came to my Christmas Party, my Open House, Canada Day. They took over the riding, but they did nothing since then,” Ms. Augustine said.

Of course Ignatieff is Ukrainian, whose award-winning book, Blood and Belonging, explores the bigotry that has shattered world peace in the post-Cold War age. Ignatieff’s critique of “ethnic nationalism” addresses the most serious causes of war in the world today: intolerance, authoritarianism, and extremism.

He disses his own people.

The book is sympathetic toward Ukrainian nationalists, victims of Stalin’s terror who became the surprised victors of the Cold War. It stresses, however, that Ukraine’s choice of independence over a democratic federal system for the USSR has been a disaster, resulting in extreme economic privation such as hunger and the loss of heat in homes in winter.

Yet despite all the criticism, Michael after all is Nash and surprise, suprise he got elected.

Wow.

Where’s that Lynyrd Skynyrd album?

Posted by Mark Richardson on January 24, 2006, 10:19 PM | #

Desmond, there is a passage in Blood and Belonging, which I might write a post about if I get the chance, in which Ignatieff visists his ancestral home in the Ukraine and finally gains “some element of respect for the national tradition”.

The national tradition in the Ukraine touched him in a way which the Canadian one couldn’t.

Posted by Matra on January 24, 2006, 11:01 PM | #

Yet despite all the criticism, Michael after all is Nash and surprise, suprise he got elected.

Wow.

Ignatieff is Great Russian not Little Russian (Ukrainian). His ancestors were aristocrats one of whom served as a minister for a Tsar.  The White Russian exiles like the Ignatieffs were generally considered by Ukrainian nationalists to be Great Russian chauvinists. If by Nash Ukrainians mean one of their own then Ignatieff is not Nash even though his ancestors were from Ukraine. Here’s more.

The reason it’s not decisive is because the number of Uktainians in Alberta are less than 10%.

That’s more than in Ontario. I’d be curious to know if they are as Conservative as other Albertans.

Yes, Paul Yuzyk and other Ukrainians played a significant role in turning Canada into the multicultural paradise it is today. We’ve already established that. Now what? I doubt there are all that many still arriving in Canada. So as their numbers decline and their areas are threatened by non-Europeans will they remain Ukrainians first? I think Wayne Gretzky would consider himself Canadian.

Posted by Matra on January 25, 2006, 06:33 PM | #

A few last points on the Canadian election.

In wasn’t just the urban and suburban ethnic minorities who refused to vote Tory. In the 95% white (mostly British) Maritime provinces they continued to vote for Liberal. A lot of people there live on welfare and as our PM-elect said a few years ago have a “defeatist” attitude.

On the Quebec results, Jeffrey Simpson in today’s Globe and Mail:

Once again, as they have done throughout the history of Canada, Quebec francophones chose a party led by one of their own, Gilles Duceppe, over a party led by someone from outside the province.

Unless or until that pattern changes, it will be hard for any English-speaking party leader from outside Quebec to form a majority government.

Kevin Michael Grace has an interesting article at Vdare today:
Canada: This Union Can’t Be Saved