Singh’s Punjabi Q&A highlights election influence of South Asian community

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This article was published 11/09/2019 (1936 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA – Question-and-answer sessions with reporters are nothing new on the campaign trail, but Jagmeet Singh’s exchange in Punjabi Thursday makes clear the growing influence of Canada’s South Asian community in key battleground ridings.

On the first full day of campaigning, the NDP leader was in Brampton making an announcement about his party’s focus on health care, promising to partially fund the construction of a new hospital in the area in an attempt to cut wait times and eliminate “hallway medicine.”

He answered in kind when a journalist asked him in Punjabi why voters in the city should mark their ballots for the NDP over the Liberals, who won all five Brampton ridings in the last election. When he was done responding, he translated his answer into English for the rest of the assembled media.

Singh’s ability to speak directly with Punjabi-language journalists and voters will be useful in several important battlegrounds throughout the election campaign.

Data from the 2016 census shows that, other than English, Punjabi is the most commonly spoken language at home in all five of Brampton’s ridings.

Singh represented a Brampton riding when he was deputy leader of the provincial NDP in Ontario, and part of Singh’s promise in his bid for the NDP leadership was that he could turn crucial Toronto-area ridings — like those in Brampton — orange.

Punjabi is also the primary non-official language spoken at home in several ridings in greater Vancouver, which is anticipated to be a battleground in the lead-up to election day on Oct. 21. Those seats include Surrey Centre, Surrey-Newton, and Delta, a riding currently held by Liberal minister Carla Qualtrough.

The ability to communicate with ethnic media is particularly important at the individual riding level, since most ethnic media are focused on specific communities, according to Silke Reichrath, the editor-in-chief at MIREMS, a group that monitors and tracks ethnic media.

And like English- and French-language media, Punjabi and other ethnic media also make decisions to focus more or less on candidates, said Reichrath, who is also part of Diversity Votes, a project examining the impact of ethnic media and diverse communities on the election.

“Sometimes you get two or three Punjabi candidates from different parties, and these may be from different factions within the community” and receive varying levels of attention from outlets, Reichrath said.

She said the Portuguese community in the Toronto riding of Davenport constitutes a meaningful voting bloc. So do the Chinese communities in several Markham, Ont., ridings and Edmonton Mill Woods (won in a very tight race in 2015 by Liberal Amarjeet Sohi).

Reichrath also said the fact that this year’s election debates (including Thursday’s Maclean’s debate) will be translated live for Punjabi speakers will be “very significant to get them involved” in the democratic process.

The Maclean’s debate will also be translated into Mandarin and Cantonese, while the October debates organized by a broad partnership of media outlets will also be offered in several other languages, including Arabic and Italian.

And on top of those national debates, ethnic media often organize all-candidates debates and town halls at the local level, Reichrath said.

Singh, a turbaned Sikh, is the first non-Caucasian to lead a federal party in Canada — a central issue in Quebec, where that province’s recently-passed secularism law would make it impossible for him to work as a public servant. The law, which is being challenged in court, has already featured prominently in the federal campaign.

Singh has criticized that law, Bill 21, noting that his presence on the campaign trail in Quebec was an “act of defiance” against the policy.