Geoff Russ: Lake Ontario's Global Village
There is no single 'ethnic vote.' Rather, there are many ethnic votes, and their influence on Toronto's elections continues to grow.
The metropolis vibrates and shudders from the veiled flashes of the world’s problems and passions, but few say anything about how it is altering the politics of Toronto. Elected politicians have turned a blind eye to it for years. They are content to talk of the housing market as it goes up and down, or of investment that rises or falls.
A section of the Metrolinx was recently completed, connecting Mount Dennis and Kennedy station. On February 8, the Eglinton Crosstown was officially opened to the public.
Hundreds of thousands of new and long-standing voters ride it daily. Meanwhile, the essential gate separating the affairs of Canada from the world slackens and cracks. The growing clamour of the Global Village marches closer with the ever-louder boom of the storm above Lake Ontario.
Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s defeat in the Ontario Liberal nomination contest for Scarborough Southwest is not, by itself, the end of Canada. It is far worse than that. It is a useful, thundering demonstration of how Toronto’s politics are now won and lost.
Erskine-Smith, the sitting federal MP for neighbouring Beaches—East York, adjacent to Scarborough, is a former cabinet minister and former leadership contender for the provincial Liberals. He lost by 19 votes to Ahsanul Hafiz, a businessman and vice-chair of the federal party.
After the votes were counted, Erskine-Smith said that scrutineers told him they had “never seen anything like it”, and raised concerns about identification fraud and other unethical practices. By contrast, the victorious Hafiz, a man who immigrated to Canada from Bangladesh many years ago, said the process was entirely free and fair. This comes despite the documented presence of instructional sample flyers written in Bengali, urging voters to choose the Bangladeshi candidates on the ballot over their rivals.
The public record may remain tidy when this nomination is fully analysed, but most people who pay attention can guess the political reality of Scarborough. The nomination was a competition between two men who had never represented the riding before. Erskine-Smith has been the MP for tony Beaches—East York in Ottawa since 2015, while Hafiz spent most of his career in London, Ontario, before reinventing himself as the quintessential local man for political gain.
The question of who was more local turned out to be an argument over who could win over Scarborough’s networks and turnout machines, where Hafiz had an unassailable advantage.
In-group preference has proven, again, that it can be far more powerful than policy and philosophy. Erskine-Smith was known as an ideas guy with supposedly bold proposals on housing and other files. None of it mattered to a local electorate and party machine that wanted its own man to represent it.
Just over a year ago in the federal election, Erskine-Smith retained his seat in Beaches—East York, smashing his Conservative challenger with almost 70 per cent of the vote, the largest margin in the riding’s history. Beaches—East York is also one of the whitest and least diverse parts of Toronto’s political map.
Erskine-Smith may have been invincible where traditional Canadian brokerage politics still exist, but he stood little chance in the nomination next door, where instant signup drives, diaspora networks, language-specific mobilisations, and loose rules on party membership are the gatekeepers of power.
The “ethnic vote” is not a myth, as some people would have us believe. In 2020, The Walrus ran an article declaring that people are divided by age, education, class, and experience, meaning that ethnic minorities cannot possibly be reduced to a single bloc. There is some truth to that, but it only goes so far.
In reality, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ethnic votes that can be activated in any election at any time, and by any power broker. These votes may be motivated by pocketbook issues, but also by grievances, fears, and ambitions that most Canadians will find strange and unfamiliar.