The answer according to yesterday's vote in the house of commons? Scarborough. Here's the break down. In cow-town, 6/8 members of parliament voted in favour of reopening the same-sex marriage debate. In Toronto's largest borough, 6/6 members voted in favour. Here's the kicker. The comparison between Calgary and Scarborough is fairly appropriate. Calgary saw some of the largest Conservative pluralities and Scarberia saw some of the largest Liberal pluralities. Indeed, of the Scarborough six only Tom Wappel (Scarborough-Southwest) didn't garner 50% of the vote in the last election. There are a couple ways to rationalize this:
- The Parizeau explanation: Yep. It's the ethnic vote. Two things are true of many new Canadians (Can I get away with generalizing for one second?). They are more socially conservative and they vote Liberal. The latter is less true than it used to be. However, they still form a large part of the riding associations out in Scarborough. Thus, it shouldn't be a big surprise that they'd nominate a social conservative.
- The Pragmatic Explanation: The party is trying to crowd out the Conservatives on the right by taking away ammunition.
3 comments:
The reasons are far beyond it. This time around many candidates in Scarborough are worried that Tamil Canadians and Indo-Canadians might vote enmasse for Harper, which willelad toa rout of the Grits in Scarborough. Harper has reached out to these communities through Jason K and the response has been tremendous.
I know in the case of Tom Wappel, he already beats up on blind Canadian Veterans.
Even he is smart enough to know not to piss off whatever constituency may still support him. As incredible as it is to believe there are any.
In Scarborough people can run a monkey as a Liberal and it will win.
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