The significance of Richmond
The main story on the Canadian federal election on the CBC yesterday featured a large picture of Conservative leader Stephen Harper visiting a family’s home in Richmond. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Already, British Columbia looks to be a major battleground for all three federalist parties—Harper and NDP leader Jack Layton both spent yesterday in the Vancouver area—and Richmond is a shining example.
Home to the largest population of visible minorities in the country—more than half of the general population is of Asian descent—Richmond is the kind of city that Conservative strategists believe holds the key to an October majority. Since the last federal election, the Tories have been aggressively courting the immigrant vote—a bloc that they feel the Liberals have been taking for granted for far too long—and making no secret of it either.
And Richmond is where the Conservatives feel the Liberals are vulnerable. The incumbent Liberal, Raymond Chan, was elected in the 1993 Liberal sweep to power, becoming only the third Chinese-Canadian to sit in the House of Commons and the first Chinese-Canadian Cabinet minister. Yet by the time the 2006 election rolled around, Chan was being derided in Vancouver Chinese circles as massively ineffective. The criticism was especially sharp on Chinese talk radio.
It was Chinese talk radio that sparked the incident that perhaps summed up Chan’s situation the best. The Tories were off to a running start in the 2006 election campaign, the Liberals flatfooted; the hot topic was an official apology for the head tax imposed by the Canadian government around the turn of the 20th century, which the Conservatives were promising and the Liberals were not.
Chan was charged with the unenviable task of defending the Liberal policy. Being in his shoes was a double whammy: not only was he a Chinese-Canadian selling his party’s position to a large Chinese community, but he was also at the time Paul Martin’s Minister of State for Multiculturalism. To say things were awkward would be a mild understatement.
Things would get much more awkward, however. Faced with declining Liberal fortunes in the polls, Martin took it upon himself to play a classic Liberal trump: an appeal to the immigrant base. Taking both observers and listeners—and, by some accounts, his own advisers—by surprise, he made an impromptu call to the largest Chinese talk radio station in Vancouver and issued a Politician’s Personal Apology™ for the head tax. Sensing a lack of commitment coming from Martin and the opportunity to land a major score, the talk show hosts pressed Martin to make that apology official—in Parliament. Cornered, Martin conceded that the Liberals would do so.
He had gambled out of desperation and lost big. The logical next step for the Chinese media was obvious—find Raymond Chan and start interrogating him on the policy flip-flop: “Mr. Chan, you’ve been defending the Liberal platform for weeks, the platform that says no official apology for the head tax. Now your leader has gone on the air in front of thousands of voters and promised an official apology for the head tax. How do you react to that?”
It was the kind of disconnect that symbolized the entire Liberal campaign and spelled the end of Martin’s run as prime minister. But Raymond Chan, however, won re-election in Richmond, defeating Conservative nominee Darrel Reid (the former president of Focus on the Family Canada) by just under 4%. Pundits speculated that Reid’s evangelical background lost for the Tories what had been a perfectly winnable riding, something the Conservatives are determined not to let happen again.
Enter Alice Wong, Chan’s opponent in the 2004 election and an unsuccessful challenger to Sophia Leung in Vancouver—Kingsway in the 2000 election. In 2004, Wong lost to Chan by over 9%; the Tories believe they can close that gap completely in October.
The riding has been theirs before: Progressive Conservative Tom Siddon was the riding’s first MP in 1988, and more recently, Joe Peschisolido defeated Chan under the banner of the Canadian Alliance, before he crossed the floor to join the Liberal party (which still nominated Chan to run in the next election again).
Anybody wondering exactly how focused the Tories are on Richmond need only watch Jason Kenney, the Conservative point man on ethnic groups who now has Chan’s former Multiculturalism portfolio. Kenney has probably spent more time in Richmond than anywhere else in Canada, save for his home riding in Calgary and his Parliamentary office in Ottawa.
Underscoring the race in Richmond, in fact, is a sometimes-public Parliamentary feud between Chan and Kenney. From Chan’s accusations of Kenney feeding questions to the local Chinese media to Kenney unearthing a quote from Chan that was construed as racist, it’s now commonly believed that Kenney has not only a professional interest in seeing Alice Wong colour Richmond conservative blue, but a personal stake as well.
But in the end, the significance of Richmond boils down to this: if the Tories succeed in capturing Richmond, it is likely that they will come out of the October polls with a majority. Not because Richmond is any sort of bellwether riding—it’s not—but because Conservative victory there would likely indicate success for their strategy of capturing the ethnic vote. And if anything will gain them a majority in October, Tory strategists will be counting on that.