Tamil-Canadians shut out of Liberal nomination vote in Toronto-area railing
Justin Trudeau makes phone calls in Calgary on Wednesday to raise support for local Liberals in next months by-elections.
Jeff McIntosh/THE CANADIAN PRESS
One of the candidates contesting against a senior Justin Trudeau staffer to win the Liberal nomination in a Toronto-area railing says Tamil-Canadians make up the vast majority of the 1,600 party members she’d signed up during her campaign and who have been proclaimed ineligible to vote in this controversial contest.
Juanita Nathan, a school board trustee who is Tamil-Canadian herself, says this ethnic community is present in large numbers in the railing of Markham-Thornhill. The electoral district is in need of a fresh Member of Parliament after incumbent John McCallum was named Canada’s next ambassador to China and by-elections for a number of ridings across the country are set for April Three.
The Liberal Party triggered accusations of favouritism in the Markham race by announcing Feb. Twenty that the period to register fresh members for the nomination vote would be retroactively cut off as of Feb. 14.
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“It’s pretty sketchy,” Ms. Nathan said of the stir. She has accused the Liberals of favouring Mary Ng, director of appointments to Prime Minister Trudeau, and said the far-reaching retroactive cutoff benefited the Ottawa staffer. Ms. Ng’s campaign rejects this charge and said the membership cutoff hurt them too.
Ms. Nathan said that by Feb. Twenty she had registered almost 1,600 fresh members on party rolls – all of whom are now disenfranchised from participating in the nomination vote set for March Four. She also had several hundred more memberships she had yet signed up but not registered on Liberal Party rolls.
She said Liberal Party officials would have been able to detect a pattern among members she was registering before they backdated the cutoff for voting. “Our names stand out. You can tell,” she said of Tamil-Canadian names.
By comparison, Prime Minister’s Office staffer Mary Ng, whom rivals alleged is the Liberal Party’s “preferred” candidate, is targeting her message to Chinese-Canadians in Markham-Thornhill, an even more significant ethnic group in this electoral district.
Ms. Ng’s campaign launched with English-language and Chinese-language news releases and the candidate bills herself as the “the highest ranking Chinese-Canadian to have ever served in the Prime Minister’s Office.”
Markham-Thornhill’s ethnic makeup is more than thirty five per cent Chinese and more than thirty per cent South Asian, according to census data. However Ms. Nathan says a significant portion of that South Asian category – she estimates twelve percentage points – are Tamils.
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The Markham-Thornhill nomination contest is one of two Liberal races where the governing party faces accusations of manipulating the results.
In Montreal this week, the Liberal Party rejected the candidacy of long-time municipal politician Alan DeSousa for reasons it would not divulge, providing a boost to Yolande James, the former provincial cabinet minister whom rivals have also alleged is the preferred candidate.
In Markham-Thornhill, Ms. Nathan said from the information she’s subsequently been given by the party that it shows up there are only about three hundred members in the entire railing association eligible to vote in the March four nomination race.
The Liberal Party has said it was within its rights to back-date the cutoff point for members, pointing to rules governing nominations that provide for this. One former senior Liberal official has said this helps prevent hoarding of memberships until the last minute. Liberal Party spokesman Braeden Caley declined to say how many Markham-Thornhill Liberal members are eligible to vote on Saturday and he also declined comment on the hundreds of disenfranchised Tamil-Canadian voters.
He noted candidates were free to sign up members for five weeks following the announcement that Mr. McCallum would be leaving elected politics. “The party strongly encourages candidates to not withhold large numbers of registrations.”
Ms. Nathan said it’s distressing there could have been thousands of voters eligible to determine the Markham-Thornhill nomination Saturday but now it emerges “the race will be determined by about three hundred people.”
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Mr. Trudeau, speaking ahead of a campaign rally for by-election candidates in Calgary, brushed off the controversy plaguing the Toronto-area railing. He said the grassroots will determine the outcome, not party brass.
“In the contested nominations, there’s always an excitement about who’s going to be the next candidate for the Liberal party. And I’m certain that, again, permitting the individuals who are members of the Liberal party to determine who gets to be their representative is the best way forward . . This is an significant part of being an open, translucent political party.”
With a report from Carrie Tait in Calgary