PARLIAMENT HILL—Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has shifted his Conservative Party ethnic-vote outreach to Montreal, following the party's electoral gains in the Toronto region last May.But opposition MPs said Mr. Kenney’s (Calgary Southeast, Alta.) own public announcements and voting results from the May election show there is likely only one target Mr. Kenney has in his sights for now—the Mount Royal Liberal bastion now held by former justice minister Irwin Cotler.
Mr. Cotler and Montreal NDP MP Tyrone Benskin (Jeanne-Le Ber, Que.) said the dynamics and political views of recent and past immigrant communities are entirely different in Montreal, likely most of Quebec, compared to the greater Toronto area and, despite the recent attacks against Mr. Cotler, are likely to flop.
“The various communities of new arrivals in Montreal are very aware of what’s happening here in Ottawa as far as the Conservatives are concerned. They’ve expressed to me a lot of concern about that, about how things are being done and how they seem to be targeted as election props as opposed to actually caring about their issues, and these are things that are coming to me from my constituents,” Mr. Benskin told The Hill Times.
In the midst of a Commons uproar over Conservative Party attempts to mislead Mr. Cotler’s constituents that he is set to retire and a byelection is imminent, a government official confirmed Mr. Kenney, responsible for voter outreach into ‘cultural’ communities through the past two elections, is now applying his skills to a rainbow of visible minority voters in Montreal’s 18 federal electoral districts.
Mr. Kenney has been to Montreal at least four times since mid-November, including appearances in local communities which do not appear in the daily run of news releases from his departments. The official said Mr. Kenney now has more time to focus on Montreal, because the flood of new MPs the party gained in the GTA last week are able to take up outreach duties he had in the region over the past three years.
But a look at voting results in Montreal’s 18 ridings last May 2 shows that chances of catching up to the Toronto region results, even in the four years to the next election, may be slim.
Conservative candidates placed in distant third or even fourth places in the election, with 10 of the city’s ridings captured by the NDP as the party swept through Quebec. Liberal incumbents held on to seven ridings, and the Bloc Québécois retained one of its seats.
The lone riding where a Conservative candidate placed second was Mount Royal, the seat Mr. Cotler’s held since he won a byelection in 1999. Mr. Cotler blames the CPC gains on a barrage of dirty-trick tactics that preceded the vote, including Commons flyers sponsored by Conservative MPs that suggested Mr. Cotler, a member of Mount Royal’s exceptionally large Jewish community, was anti-semitic.
Conservative candidates in Montreal won more than 20 per cent of the vote in only two other ridings—the district of Pierrefonds-Dallaire, which former Liberal MP Bernard Patry lost to New Democrat Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, and the West Montreal district of Lac-Saint-Louis, retained by Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia.
Conservative candidates scraped through with under 10 per cent of the vote in eight of the Montreal ridings.
And Mr. Kenney's public announcements recently have focused on policies that might not be popular with certain elements of immigrant and new-Canadian communities, including measures to compel Muslim women to lift religious veils when taking an oath of citizenship and a watch-list for several thousand immigrants with permanent resident status the government said have been "implicated" in fraudulent applications.
Mr. Cotler told The Hill Times he has no way of knowing whether Mr. Kenney ordered the Conservative dirty-tricks campaign against him over the past two years, up to a Conservative-party organized telephone campaign, spreading the false retirement and byelection rumours. House Speaker Andrew Scheer (Regina-Qu’Appelle, Sask.) described the actions this week as “reprehensible.”
“I don’t know. He and I are friendly. We work together on a number of causes together. Our relationship personally is very good,” Mr. Cotler said. “But you know, I think they go about their business sometimes at the directions and behest of the party leadership and sometimes on their own.”
Mr. Cotler said, however, that although he understands why the Conservatives have attempted to defeat him by dividing the riding’s Jewish community, he has support from a range of cultural communities on Mount Royal and, though other Montreal ridings also have significant visible minority communities, he believes the real aim is to take him down and win his district as a symbolic victory.
“My riding is a very multi-ethnic riding. I enjoyed strong support amongst the cultural communities in all elections,” Mr. Cotler said.
He pointed out also that Mount Royal was the only Quebec riding on an inadvertently released Conservative list of 10 ethnic communities the party was targeting for the past election, and the list was generated in Mr. Kenney’s ministerial office in Ottawa.
“In the last two elections, the support in the Jewish community decreased. That demographic is 38 per cent of my riding. If you target the Jewish community, as polls seem to show, it ends up being 45 per cent of the overall vote, so if you can diminish my Jewish vote it gives you a better chance to win the riding,” he said.
“The only thing I can say is I think my riding is seen as a special case. It’s an anomaly in Quebec. No other riding has that kind of rainbow configuration with the 38 per cent Jewish community,” Mr. Cotler said.
“I think the breakthrough they’re hoping for doesn’t have the implications for the rest of the city of Montreal, but they look at it is an important symbolic victory,” Mr. Cotler said.
“Can they get the Trudeau riding? That has always been the coveted riding.”
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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