Angry in the Great White North

The effort to win votes in ethnic communities continues, as reported in the Hill Times:

As part of a whirlwind week of meetings with cultural groups in the Toronto and Vancouver areas, Secretary of State for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney attended a ceremony in Markham on Aug. 8 with the local Conservative candidate, Duncan Fletcher, where he presented several dozen Chinese community members with government head-tax restitution payments of $20,000.

Mr. Kenney said the Markham, Ont. event was one of a number of stops in the Toronto area during what he called "a typical day." He said he also had meetings scheduled with the Korean, Filipino, Nigerian, and Afghan communities before day's end.

"It is Conservatives who have been willing to face up to historic injustices, like Japanese wartime internment, the Chinese head tax, et cetera. It's the Liberals who introduced a $1,000 landing fee for all new immigrants. Imagine the economic burden for them. It's our government that cut that in half," Mr. Kenney told The Hill Times by phone following the event. "We're responding to communities in ways the Liberals didn't."

The Liberals say the Conservatives are expending effort pointlessly:

Liberal MP Marlene Jennings (Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine, Que.) said Mr. Kenney's comments are wishful thinking.

"Jason Kenney is floating a mantra that the Conservatives are trying to drive home in the minds of ethno-cultural minorities. By repeating it over and over again, somehow it makes it so," she told The Hill Times. "I think to some extent it's capitalizing on very real tragedies. There were many of us in the Liberal Party that supported coming to a resolution on [the Chinese head tax]. The resolution that the Conservatives chose has not settled the problem, because you still have significant numbers of Chinese-Canadians who think that the current settlement didn't settle anything. They're still pressing their suit forward."

Victor Wong, the executive director of the Toronto-based Chinese Canadian National Council, agree that more work needs to be done (the formula used to assign funds left out 3,000 families that Wong thinks out to have been included), but he seems to think partial progress is better than Liberal stonewalling:

Mr. Wong criticized the former Liberal government for its inaction on the head-tax apology, however, and opposed a Liberal policy announced in November 2005 that sought redress without an apology. Ms. Jennings said that announcement was never meant to be the end of the road.

Ms. Jennings said there are a number of ethno-cultural groups that are seeking redress, and the head-tax apology has only served to ham [sic, "harm"?] relations between these communities.

Jennings is not quoted as providing actual examples of harmed relations created by those divisive Conservatives.

Still, I can't imagine what is being achieved on the measure of inclusiveness by insulting the memory of a great Chinese-Canadian in front of a room of Chinese-Canadians. The Hill Times reports on the Douglas Jung gaffe committed by Stephane Dion:

At the CCLA [Chinese-Canadian Liberal Association] banquet, Mr. Dion misnamed Canada's first member of Parliament of Chinese origin. He claimed that Arthur Lee, a Lethbridge, Alta.-born Liberal first elected under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1974, was the first Chinese Canadian MP. In fact, Douglas Jung, a Progressive Conservative MP under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker from 1957-62 and native of Victoria, B.C., was the first Chinese-Canadian MP.

Sing Tao, one of the largest Chinese-language daily newspapers in Canada, reported on the gaffe on July 27.

"Dion's press secretary [Jean-Francois Del Torchio] indicated that Dion misspoke when he said Arthur Lee was the first person of Chinese descent elected to Parliament. He meant to refer to Lee as the first Liberal Party Member of Parliament, in keeping with the theme of his speech," read an English translation of the article, in which Mr. Del Torchio said Mr. Dion regretted the error.

"This was certainly not intended as a slight against Mr. Jung or his family and Mr. Dion apologizes for any misunderstanding," it said.

Mr. Velshi, Mr. Kenney's director of communications, told The Hill Times via email that he felt Mr. Dion deliberately misled Chinese-Canadians.

"Dion has embraced the Liberal specialty of torquing history to suit a partisan agenda, thus depriving Douglas Jung, Canada's first MP of Chinese origin, of his place in our history books, solely because he believed that the Progressive Conservative Party was the party in which his talents would be most recognized," Mr. Velshi said.

Here's the video of that presentation:

There are bone-headed mistakes that could mitigated by a timely apology, and then there are Liberals (some of whom the Liberal Party emphatically insist do not speak for the party) inspired to perform some sort of weird ethnically-based calculation that would result in proving that Arthur Lee was more Chinese than Douglas Jung, and so prove there was no mistake at all.

Gosh, imagine the damage to the Liberal Party in trying to get the vote in the Chinese community if that sort of ethno-metrics was reported in a widely circulated Chinese-language paper.

Now that's divisive.

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