The Liberal Party of British Columbia is reeling over a leak of an internal strategic document. Titled the \u201cMulticultural Strategic Plan,\u201d it attempts to detail how the BC Liberal Government should reach out to ethnic minority voters, especially Chinese Canadians, who allegedly and reportedly feel \u201cignored by government between elections\u201d (p. 2).<\/p>\n
Since everyone has seen it, you should see it too<\/a>.<\/p>\n The plan details ways to win \u201cethnic communities\u201d\u2013which seems really to be code for \u201cChinese Canadian people\u201d (see p. 2, although there is stuff in there about Punjabi communities too)\u2013to the BC Liberal side, especially for the election on May 14, 2013. The Liberals are particularly aware that they are not doing well among Chinese populations because of the severe backlash they faced when they pushed a 12% Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) through the Legislative Assembly in 2010. The backlash from all sides got so bad that the premier at the time, Gordon Campbell, resigned. [Just to get everyone up to speed: the BC Liberals are a centrist<\/b> party that combines people from the right and the left. The party on the left is the New Democratic Party (the NDP). To give you a sense of how confusing things got, the NDP\u2013the party on the left\u2013opposed<\/b> this form of tax revenue pushed by the Liberals.]<\/i><\/p>\n The plan\u2019s approach is to re-engage ethnic media on the Liberals\u2019 terms and to look for \u201cquick wins.\u201d It argues that the Liberals need to find spokespeople who can speak \u201cethnic\u201d languages so as to directly target the \u201cethnic media\u201d with their message (like the NDP\u2019s Gabriel Yiu<\/a>), as well as to build an \u201cethnic database\u201d and to find \u201cvalidators\u201d from within ethnic communities to write letters to editors and defend the Liberals from attacks from within \u201cethnic media.\u201d It also calls for \u201cquick win\u201d solutions, particularly by identifying historic wrongs and then apologizing for them. The example in the document is the Komagatu Maru incident in 1914, in which a Japanese steamship carrying passengers from India was denied entry into Vancouver because of anti-Indian exclusion.<\/p>\n As you might imagine, there has been a good deal of Chinese Canadian backlash toward the leaked document. I\u2019m on the look-out for Punjabi pushback too. In recent Canadian news (the Province<\/a>, the CBC<\/a>, the Globe and Mail<\/a>, Global BC<\/a>, and the Georgia Straight<\/a>), there has been a great deal of outcry at tax dollars being spent on the Liberal election machinery, leading to a series of Liberal resignations, including Premier Christy Clark\u2019s deputy chief of staff. As far as Chinese Canadians are concerned, Bill Chu from the Canadians for Reconciliation Society has said that the document demonstrates the insincerity of the government in its apologies for historic wrongs. So too, Victor Wong at the Chinese Canadian National Council has voiced his disappointment over the instrumentalization of Chinese Canadians for the Liberal vote.<\/p>\n But for these uses of ethnicity to wire us like coffee, there are some further questions we should ask:<\/p>\n Allow me to suggest some of my own answers. There is a long history of anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese exclusion in British Columbia. As historian Patricia Roy documents it in her three-volume historical set (A White Man\u2019s Province<\/i><\/a>, The Oriental Question<\/i><\/a>, and The Triumph of Citizenship<\/i><\/a>), Chinese and Japanese people have been historic pawns for white politicians to score political <\/i>points. While some might argue that the era of exclusion has passed, this sort of \u201cethnic targeting\u201d rhetoric suggests that in fact little has changed, that British Columbia remains a \u201cwhite man\u2019s province\u201d in which ethnic communities remain pawns for power. That is precisely the point about multiculturalism that has been made by scholars in critical race studies: that it doesn\u2019t address legacies of white supremacy and makes sure you don\u2019t talk about it because why would you want to say something about that when we could all just be nice, equal, and living together in a constructed harmony? One might see the document, itself titled a \u201cmulticultural strategic plan,\u201d as the smoking gun.<\/p>\n This blog is about religion and <\/i>ethnicity. I can\u2019t think of a better post with which to begin the caffeinated conversation on ethnicity and its equally complicated cousin, race.<\/p>\n UPDATE (3 March):<\/b> here is an Indo-Canadian<\/a> statement. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Liberal Party of British Columbia is reeling over a leak of an internal strategic document. Titled the \u201cMulticultural Strategic Plan,\u201d it attempts to detail how the BC Liberal Government should reach out to ethnic minority voters, especially Chinese Canadians, who allegedly and reportedly feel \u201cignored by government between elections\u201d (p. 2). Since everyone has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2816,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[841,855,751],"tags":[801,802,808,804,799,803,810,805,800,809,807,806],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asian-canadian","category-civil-society","category-religion-ethnicity-wired","tag-bc-liberals","tag-bill-chu","tag-canadian-multiculturalism","tag-chinese-canadian","tag-christy-clark","tag-gordon-campbell","tag-hst","tag-indo-canadian","tag-multicultural-strategic-plan","tag-multiculturalism","tag-patricia-roy","tag-victor-wong"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
\nUPDATE (4 March): <\/b>Christy Clark\u2019s cabinet<\/a> backs her.<\/p>\n