It was more than arrogance, says Jason Kenney, the immigration minister who pounded the pavement for years and deserves a lion’s share of credit for big Conservative gains in the GTA.
“I don’t want to sound unkind, but frankly it was laziness,” Kenney told the Star. “There were 32 Liberal MPs from the GTA, and of the hundreds of ethnocultural events I attended in the past five years going from Scarborough to Mississauga, typically there were no Liberals there ... They treated the ethnic communities like passive vote banks owed to them through the supposed myth of Pierre Trudeau. They mailed it in.”
Kenney represents another myth of this campaign: that the Conservatives lost faith in the last week and were convinced they couldn’t get enough seats in Ontario to help form a majority.
Hokum, says Kenney.
“I was always very confident we were going to see a significant breakthrough in the GTA. I felt it on the ground. In the first week I was campaigning in Eglinton-Lawrence (lost by Joe Volpe) in 80 per cent Liberal territory and people were complaining about the arrogance of the Liberal party.”
He got the same reaction everywhere across the GTA. “It was phenomenally positive.”
In the end, the Conservatives went from 14 seats to 31 in the GTA, while Liberals plunged from 32 to 7. In the 416 area code, the Conservatives picked up 8 seats and the Liberals lost 14.
Throughout, the Conservatives were running a stealth campaign in plain sight.
Harper’s treatment of the media made headlines particularly the five-question limit. Meanwhile, on April 24, Easter Sunday and the Sikh holiday of Khalsa, the PM was at the Coptic Centre in Mississauga announcing a new international centre for religious freedom.
In the front row, Kenney was beaming because he knew the new centre would be a big vote getter. He knew insider national polls were showing, for example, a 70 per cent support rate nationally among the ethnic Chinese population.
At the Coptic Centre that Sunday, Kenney had his “rainbow coalition” of multicultural Canadians. These were natural Conservatives, he said, and “their vote for you has that potential of being a long-term realignment.”
Of Harper’s announcement, Kenney said: “You are speaking to their values ... I’ll be honest with you about the extent to which the mentality of today’s Liberal party is characterized by the kind of flippant secularism of the Annex.”
“If you go inside most places of worship around the GTA today,” Kenney said, “the large majority are new Canadians who have a higher degree of appreciation of religious freedom than your average university professor at the University of Toronto.”
