New ethnic communities, so-called “bread and butter” Canadians, and high-earning Green Party voters are the next groups that could prove future fertile ground for the majority-governing Conservative Party, say strategists.Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (Calgary Southeast, Alta.), who is his party’s key player on courting the ethnic vote, told an audience at the Manning Networking Conference on March 9, which attracted hundreds of influential Tories in the nation’s capital, that the success of the Conservative strategy to attract new voters from ethnic communities rests on identifying available groups who share the Conservatives’ values.
“Our strategy has been based on a very central, and I think honest, premise: that people should align their votes with their values,” said Mr. Kenney, who has been dubbed the minister for “curry in a hurry” due to his reputation for jam-packing his time with cultural community events.
“People who, frankly, always should have been supporting us, but for some peculiar reason were not,” he explained.
The strategy provided the federal Conservatives breakthroughs in the 2011 election in key multicultural ridings in the Greater Toronto Area and Vancouver. Prior to election 2011, there were 41 ridings in Canada with populations made up of at least 40 per cent immigrants, based on the 2006 census. Of those, 30 were held by the Liberals. After the election, the Liberals held 10. The Conservatives went into the 2011 election with four immigrant ridings and came out with 19 of those seats. The NDP also picked up votes in immigrant communities, going from three to six ridings with heavy populations of immigrants.
And according to Statistics Canada, the latest census data show immigration is driving two-thirds of Canada’s population growth and that new Canadians account for 80 per cent of population growth. Meanwhile, the next federal election in 2015 will include 30 new seats as the House of Commons will be increased from 308 to 338 seats. There will be six new seats in British Columbia, six in Alberta, 15 in Ontario and three in Quebec.
While new immigrants are still a part of any expansion plans, strategists also addressing the audience that day, in a panel called “Reaching Near-Customers,” identified a number of new voter groups that also share some conservative values and could be made into Conservatives.
Mitch Wexler, a Toronto-based demographic data expert who managed the voter identification database for the campaign to elect Toronto mayor Rob Ford, identified two new groups the Tories could reach out to: urban Greens and what he called “bread and butter” Canadians.
Mr. Wexler said the urban Greens that are most likely to become Conservatives, are high-income professionals who are single or married and childless, and when they get older or start families, they tend to become Conservatives.
“When we did the demographic profiles in a number of cases, particularly in urban areas such as Toronto, we saw a lot of the same demographics, the same characteristics in people voting for the Green Party as voting for the Conservative Party,” Mr. Wexler told the audience.
“If there was a way to appeal to people who have an interest in environmental issues, but still maintain those conservative values, there’s a potential market share for us,” he explained.
So-called “bread and butter” Canadians are people who don’t really follow or care about politics until it affects their daily lives, said Mr. Wexler, who also managed the 2011 campaign of rookie Conservative MP Kyle Seeback (Brampton West, Ont.) who beat then-incumbent Liberal MP Andrew Kania.
“They don’t identify with any particular party. They work hard, they want to enjoy their family, they want to put food on the table for them, but they don’t want to have to be bothered, or have things get in the way, that have to do with government,” he said, adding that Mr. Ford had particular success with this group of voters in the Toronto mayoral race.
Mr. Wexler said that these people usually work in hands-on jobs, including construction, retail, mining and agriculture. They also tend to have moderate incomes and are college educated.
This so-called “bread and butter” support now falls to both the NDP and the Conservatives, said Mr. Wexler. This support can be found in ridings or polls like Port Coquitlam or Maple Ridge, in the greater Vancouver area, according to Mr. Wexler’s research.
By tapping into these voters, the Conservatives can “break into the NDP area,” Mr. Wexler told the audience.
Andrew Dawson, a Conservative, a trade union lawyer and director of government relations with the New Brunswick Building and Construction Trades Council, who was also on the Manning Centre’s panel, singled out members of private unions as an only partially-tapped source of potential Conservative voters.
“On the subject of near and new customers, there is a tremendous opportunity in the blue-collar private-sector trade union movement for Conservative values,” Mr. Dawson said.
Mr. Dawson explained that unions, like the Building and Construction Trades Council, support many of the major infrastructure projects proposed by the Conservatives.
“In the building construction trades, we want the major projects that fuel Canada’s economy: the oilsands, Gateway, Keystone,” he said.
Mr. Dawson added that while union members are stereotyped as ardent socialists or NDP supporters, most people are in the unions simply for the job. He stated that private-sector unions, in particular, are more attuned to business and labour market constraints than public-sector ones. He also said that his union teamed up with federal Conservative candidates to help them get elected in New Brunswick in the last election.
Panel chair Rick Anderson, a veteran Conservative commentator and political strategist, noted that this group, as described by Mr. Dawson, was similar to Mr. Wexler’s “bread and butter” voters.
Mr. Dawson said that his private union members are good potential Conservative voters for the same reasons that Mr. Kenney said that new immigrants are good Conservatives.
“The values are the same, there’s opportunity there. Reach out to them,” said Mr. Dawson.
The Conservative strategy to reach out to ethnic voters involved identifying potential strategies for grabbing an ethnic community’s attention, showing up to cultural community events, listening to their issues and going about resolving them, according to Mr. Kenney, his government’s resident expert on reaching out to the ethnic vote.
The end goal was to build enough trust of the party in the cultural community to get them to listen to Conservative messages, explained Mr. Kenney.
“Part of that was to identify what were key symbolic emotive issues that mattered in each respective community that we hadn’t paid attention to, perhaps neither had the Liberals,” said Mr. Kenney.
For the Korean community, it was speaking out against the abuse of so-called Comfort Women in Japan and increasing air travel to Korea; for the Chinese community, it was an apology for Canada’s racist head tax, said Mr. Kenney.
The Conservatives followed the template set in 1988 by then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s apology for the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two, said Mr. Kenney.
As the party met with cultural leaders, it also recruited them to run for office, including now MP Wladyslaw Lizon (Mississauga East-Cooksville, Ont.) who immigrated to Canada from Poland in 1988 and new British Columbia Conservative Senator Yonah Martin, who immigrated to Canada with her family in 1972 and is the first Canadian of Korean descent to hold federal public office.
At first, Mr. Kenney said he often heard comments like, ‘Why are we meeting you? We’ve always heard you Conservatives are racist.’ Or, ‘You’re the first Conservative to show up to this event and we’ve been doing it for 25 years.’”
“That just shows you the extent to which our adversaries were brilliant at dominating the symbolic politics of immigration and diversity, even though not in substance,” Mr. Kenney said.
The panel also discussed blue ocean strategy, the business and political concept of moving into as-yet untapped markets where there is little competition.
Mr. Kenney noted that while “90 per cent of success is just showing up,” Conservatives’ visits to cultural community events were boosted by the fact that Liberals “stopped competing.”
“They stopped showing up, they got arrogant, they took it for granted, and people know when they are being taken for granted,” Mr. Kenney said.
Once the Conservatives began connecting with cultural community grassroots, the communities started “tuning in” to Conservative messaging, said Mr. Kenney.
“Delivering on symbolic and emotive issues that mattered allowed us to have people give us at least the benefit of the doubt, and tuning into our frequency and then realizing that their values are aligned with ours,” he explained.
It’s clear the efforts have paid dividends.
“According at least to one major poll that was done at the end of the election, we’ve gone from a 50 point deficit vis-à-vis the Liberals amongst the new Canadians in 2000 to about a 24-point lead in this last election,” said Mr. Kenney.
Mr. Kenney also noted that while the Conservatives won the votes of 37 per cent of voters born in Canada, they won 42 per cent of the votes of immigrants to Canada.
“If it was just new Canadians voting, our majority would be even bigger,” he said.
The Conservatives are also making gains with older immigrants, who are often less accessible than their children and who tend to vote based on who was in power when they first came to Canada.
“We’re finally breaking through on some of that,” said Mr. Kenney, citing the election of Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver in Eglinton-Lawrence, Ont., and Associate Defence Minister Julian Fantino in Vaughn, Ont., two areas dominated by older Italians who immigrated to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s.
A Vancouver-area map compiled by Mr. Wexler showed that concentrations of Chinese Canadians were virtually identical to a map showing areas of Conservative support. The Conservatives have run the largest slate of Chinese candidates ever, in the last two elections, said Mr. Kenney.
Mr. Wexler also brought up a map showing that while the party was doing well with the South Asian Canadian vote in the area, there was still progress that can be made.
“We would see that as an opportunity where we’re underperforming,” said Mr. Wexler.
The party’s next step in ethnic communities is to solidify their links to the Conservative Party by getting people involved in Conservative institutions, said Mr. Kenney.
“I think the challenge now is to go to those people who are attracted to the party, many of them through candidates that they know, and about certain issues, and to get them to become members of our association boards, to run as candidates, to run for the national executive of the party,” he said.
The minister is also bringing his “curry-in-a-hurry” style to Montreal, as he and other Conservatives spend time at cultural events in that city. The Conservatives now have only six seats in Quebec, and in the last election the party lost three Cabinet ministers from the province.
“I’ll tell you, the results are maybe not coming home in a clear electoral way yet, but they are in an organizational way,” said Mr. Kenney, adding that he sent a Manitoba MP to an event in Montreal’s Muslim community in February.
“There were 4,000 people and all of the organizers were praising our government and Stephen Harper for what they had done,” said Mr. Kenney. “They wouldn’t even acknowledge the presence of Justin Trudeau in the audience.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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