Anti-Incumbent & Anti-Immigrant Sentiment On The March
Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 10:37 am
Canadians vote today for their new House of Commons and Prime Minister. Prediction markets say there's a 94% probability that the third place progressive Liberal Party will throw the ruling Conservative Party out. It appears to be largely due to immigrants and refugees.
[quote=http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/o ... as-mulcair]Ayesha Vahidy moved to Canada with her parents from Pakistan when she was six, and now lives in Ajax with her son. She described how the campaign has provoked fierce controversy within the Muslim community, with arguments spilling into mosques.
Some older Muslims, she said, were natural conservative voters; instinctively resistant to Liberal policies such as those promoting sex education in schools. Conservative ads have played to this, suggesting the Liberals would make pot accessible to children and open supervised drug injection sites in communities - a hyperbolic re-imagining of Liberal support for legalized marijuana and drug harm-reduction strategies.
But in June, the Conservatives passed bill C-24; a statute giving the government to strip citizenship from anyone born outside Canada for terrorism-related charges. During the campaign, Harper also chose to focus on the marginal issue of the niqab – specifically whether a Muslim woman can wear the full face covering during her citizenship ceremony – which became a defining issue in the campaign.
He doubled down on that wedge issue by promising to implement a police tip line for “barbaric cultural practices” - child or forced marriages, gender-based family violence - if elected. Immigrant communities felt attacked.
Vahidy said that this “fearmongering” united devout and lay Muslims against the Conservatives. “That was it for me and a lot of other people in the same boat as me, who’ve been here since we were little,” she said. “It was like: this is my country. My son was born here. How dare you.”
Harper turned to anti-immigrant campaigning because his usual message of sound economic stewardship would no longer fly. Canada returned to recession in 2015’s first quarter, the only G7 economy to do so. Karen McCrimmon, a retired air force lieutenant-colonel and former Liberal leadership candidate who is running for the Kanata-Carleton riding outside Ottawa, told the Guardian that the economic narrative became “weak” for her Conservative opponent.
“I drive down the main street here where my campaign office is; maybe it’s a kilometre,” McCrimmon told the Guardian. “On that one strip, there’s 25 vacant commercial properties. People don’t have to look very far to see the evidence that their economic plan isn’t working.” The Conservatives won by nearly 28 percentage points here in 2011, but the latest polls give McCrimmon a lead of 50-39 – indicating a truly stupendous vote swing in the order of 41 points, though this may in part be linked to the fact that the Conservative incumbent is not standing again.
A draconian counter-terrorism bill, C-51, also inspired opposition to Harper. But Trudeau’s Liberals, who also voted for the bill - though with amendments - were also caught in the controversy. Vahidy, a life-long Liberal supporter and energetic party activist, actually switched and became a card-carrying member of the left-wing New Democrat Party. “I was so angry,” she said. [/quote]
[quote=http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/o ... as-mulcair]Ayesha Vahidy moved to Canada with her parents from Pakistan when she was six, and now lives in Ajax with her son. She described how the campaign has provoked fierce controversy within the Muslim community, with arguments spilling into mosques.
Some older Muslims, she said, were natural conservative voters; instinctively resistant to Liberal policies such as those promoting sex education in schools. Conservative ads have played to this, suggesting the Liberals would make pot accessible to children and open supervised drug injection sites in communities - a hyperbolic re-imagining of Liberal support for legalized marijuana and drug harm-reduction strategies.
But in June, the Conservatives passed bill C-24; a statute giving the government to strip citizenship from anyone born outside Canada for terrorism-related charges. During the campaign, Harper also chose to focus on the marginal issue of the niqab – specifically whether a Muslim woman can wear the full face covering during her citizenship ceremony – which became a defining issue in the campaign.
He doubled down on that wedge issue by promising to implement a police tip line for “barbaric cultural practices” - child or forced marriages, gender-based family violence - if elected. Immigrant communities felt attacked.
Vahidy said that this “fearmongering” united devout and lay Muslims against the Conservatives. “That was it for me and a lot of other people in the same boat as me, who’ve been here since we were little,” she said. “It was like: this is my country. My son was born here. How dare you.”
Harper turned to anti-immigrant campaigning because his usual message of sound economic stewardship would no longer fly. Canada returned to recession in 2015’s first quarter, the only G7 economy to do so. Karen McCrimmon, a retired air force lieutenant-colonel and former Liberal leadership candidate who is running for the Kanata-Carleton riding outside Ottawa, told the Guardian that the economic narrative became “weak” for her Conservative opponent.
“I drive down the main street here where my campaign office is; maybe it’s a kilometre,” McCrimmon told the Guardian. “On that one strip, there’s 25 vacant commercial properties. People don’t have to look very far to see the evidence that their economic plan isn’t working.” The Conservatives won by nearly 28 percentage points here in 2011, but the latest polls give McCrimmon a lead of 50-39 – indicating a truly stupendous vote swing in the order of 41 points, though this may in part be linked to the fact that the Conservative incumbent is not standing again.
A draconian counter-terrorism bill, C-51, also inspired opposition to Harper. But Trudeau’s Liberals, who also voted for the bill - though with amendments - were also caught in the controversy. Vahidy, a life-long Liberal supporter and energetic party activist, actually switched and became a card-carrying member of the left-wing New Democrat Party. “I was so angry,” she said. [/quote]