Angry in the Great White North

The question of ethnic communities and voting patterns is a touchy one. When someone goes into an ethnic community (and by that I mean a geographically cohesive population), there are often accusations of being patronizing, or racist, or worse.

So when the Globe & Mail got hold of a Conservative presentation on reaching out to ethnic minorities, the spin by many observers was negative:

"For them, the end justifies the means, and they want to win. They're using disappointing, crass tactics to achieve that goal," Liberal MP Susan Kadis said.

Ms. Kadis is concerned about Rosh Hashanah letters sent out last month by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to constituents in her largely Jewish riding of Thornhill, near Toronto. She said she wants to know how the names were obtained and compiled.

"I would say this is a sinister and disturbing type of activity and approach by the Conservatives," Ms. Kadis said.

Sinister and disturbing?

Show up for cultural events. Offer political literature in languages other than English and French. Arrange one-on-one meetings with community leaders. Gather business cards. Assign specific communities to specific MPs so the Conservative Party can build up a group of MPs with deep and detailed knowledge of the concerns and issues that span across each community.

The fact is, though, that with regression analysis, the impact of ethnic communities on voting patterns is obvious and significant. Regression analysis is the science of taking a result, such as the voting patterns in each riding, and then working backwards and comparing riding against riding. Common characteristics are lined up and then factored out, leaving those characteristics of interest behind, from which their impact or lack of impact can be judged.

Just such an analysis was done by Goliath, a business consultancy group:

Analysis of results among Canada's 308 electoral districts reveals that for the federal election of 2004, the visible minority, immigrant, and bilingual composition of ridings had substantial effects on levels of support for the Liberal, Conservative, and New Democratic Parties, as well as for the Bloc Quebecois. Regression analyses at national and regional levels reveal that riding characteristics--percent immigrant, percent visible minority, and percent bilingual--have impacts on party support that persist when social class composition, measured by average family income and percent with university degrees, is taken into account.

Now what did they find, exactly, when it came to party support? Interestingly, they tied Liberal focus on the ethnic vote with the long-term decline of Liberal fortunes in Quebec:

Over the past twenty years since their iron grip on Quebec was broken by Mulroney's Conservatives (1984) and the Bloc Quebecois (1993), the Liberals have become increasingly dependent for their electoral success on Ontario in general and the multicultural ridings of Canada's major metropolitan areas in particular. This pattern has long been recognized by newspaper columnists and academics alike: "Liberals depend on multicultural votes" (Simpson 2005); in her Hamilton riding, Sheila Copps "had strong ties to the large immigrant community, which traditionally supported the Liberal Party" (Campbell and Christian 1999, 103); recent immigrants tend to support the Liberals (Pelletier 1991, 145).

One of the things that the research discovered that I think is very relevant is that the successful approach is not to merely run a minority candidate in a riding with a heavy minority presence. The Liberals seemed to have understood that better than the NDP or the Conservatives:

Discussion of electoral success by minority candidates rarely makes the Liberal/minority link, since they are selected and elected in all of the major political parties (Dhillon 2005; Siemiatycki and Matheson 2005). Bird (2005, 82) notes that the Liberals won in each of the nineteen most diverse ridings of the Greater Toronto Area in 2004--despite the fact that they ran only four minority candidates there, "while the Conservatives and the New Democratic Party (NDP) each ran six." (2)

Clearly the Liberals succeeded on a deeper level than merely running candidates with familiar last names. The Liberals connected across large segments of the populations within these ethnic communities. The NDP and the Conservatives had problems replicating the same success, in part because past attempts have been shallow.

Indeed, just running a candidate drawn from the community is patronizing. The current Conservative effort instead is based on establishing meaningful connections on multiple levels (community activists, business leaders, religious authorities, and so forth), having prepped the people making the connections with the best information that could extracted from the CIMS database:

Create a voter profile of neighbourhoods and ridings expected to become electoral battlefields using psychographics and geodemographics. These techniques compile information on people's beliefs, values, opinions and lifestyles, and blend them into a composite sketch for their neighbourhood. Data are drawn from the census, public-opinion polls and information bought from ad agencies, private companies and organizations like Air Miles that compile consumer data.

Of course, there is a very practical reason to be doing this. The Conservatives want to win ridings. They were shut out of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver in the last election. They are determined to change that.

Not just for their own political goals, of course. If Canadian voting patterns polarize and solidify into this sort of urban-rural or ethnic-non-ethnic divide, civil peace is at risk. We've seen in the US a disturbing trend or Red versus Blue states turning into crude jokes (what some call "Real America" others deride as "Jesusland").

The Conservatives are trying to break out of this electoral straightjacket. It is good for the party and good for the country. And the Conservatives are doing it by applying the best qualitative judgment and quantitative analysis to the problem. Common sense and deep math agree -- no one likes to be talked at or taken for granted.

The Conservatives might have been guilty of the former in the past, but are working to change that. That is the point of the Conservative presentation that was the focus of the Globe & Mail story.

The Liberals need to worry about the latter. For a long time their success was bolstered by the support they enjoyed in various ethnic communities. Now their success is critically dependent on that support. The Conservatives have spotted that, and are working hard to kick out that leg out from under the Liberals. But people aren't stupid. The Conservatives know it is not enough to say the Liberals are bad. They have to give these people in these communities a reason to vote Conservative, the same way they have to give any Canadian a reason to vote for them. They think there are issues that work in their favour (socially conservative, family-oriented, tradition-based issues in particular, but not exclusively those sorts of issues), but whatever issues are deemd to be vote winners, the key is always communication.

The Conservatives are starting several steps back, or that has always been the situation in the past. With the work they've been doing, that gap has probably been bridged already, in no small part because of the hard work by Jason Kenney and his people. With the Conservatives running apace, is it no wonder that Liberal Susan Kadis would like people to think the Conservatives are up to something evil?