One shouldn’t be too quick to suggest that racism is primarily at play for the dearth of certain ethnicities amongst council. There is some lingering racism… some people will never vote for a _______ (fill in the blank with various ethnic groups), but is that a major factor?

People do vote for a slate, but they also vote for individuals. Kashmir Dhaliwal is a leader within his community, but not very well known outside it. Don’t get me wrong… he has done great things as president of the Khalsa Diwan Society and the Ross Street Temple, and I love and appreciate the Vaiskhi parade he and others present to the community.

Years ago as part of TEAM Setty Pendakur was elected to council. He had been involved in many activities at UBC and had fought the Strathcona freeway. He had made a name not only within his ethnic group but also in the general community. He did get elected and contributed a great deal to the city during his term.

Michael Geller is a leader in the Jewish Community, a past president of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. Are we going to say he wasn’t elected (and other NPAers were) because of anti-Semitism? I don’t think so.

Frances,

I thought you were spot on on the not-soGiant98 last night when you discussed this….unfortunately, the numbers for a citywide win are just not there.

Personally, I do think that some kind of Ward/Citywide mix will be required to remedy this ridiculous lack of representation of a vital Vancouver community.

Thing is, Southsiders just might have the remaining RedRump Westsiders on their side in such an effort soon, especially if the Big Tent does an even halfway decent job over the next couple of years or so….

.

I dunno Wendy – in my neighbourhood his signs were very often paired with Ms. Reimer’s – and there were lots of ’em.

One thing that I didn’t mention above is that Mr. Dhaliwhal and Mr. Singh also appeared to have split the vote in those last vital polls…..in fact as it came down to the wire (south central polls were some of the last to report) I thought Mr. D might actually overtake Ms. Woodsworth (see 10:05pm timestamp here if interested) but then he faded a little, which I assume was due to Mr. Singh peeling off a bunch of votes from him….

.

i fully agree with A G Tsakumis’comments. i would also like to say Dhaliwal was not fit for this job. vision was looking for indo canadian candidate but they choose wrong person. very little education, poor english, no talent, fails to get support from 50% of his own sikh community because he only approached so called moderate group. a person who does not even have support within sikh community. look at the results around south van where most indo canadian live.you will see all red NPA victory around ross street temple, rest of the east side all green VISION/COPE. where was his support?go to this link to see graph.

http://vancouver.ca/electionresults2008/#20

“That being said, once again, Vancouver voters have shut out the South Asian council candidate”

not agree with these comments. look at raj hundal an indo canadian who got elected in park board

http://vancouver.ca/electionresults2008/#20

This map shows which candidate received the most votes in each voting division. (This does not include results from Advance and Special Opportunity voting as they are not tied to a specific voting division.)

I think there may have been a few factors in Dhaliwal’s defeat. Inasmuch as his race / ethnicity was a factor, part of that might have been the impression of him (or lack thereof) outside the Sikh community. I mean, I know that being a temple president means being a central community leader, and involves skills that would be useful at the council table. But a lot of people might not have seen this as significant – “okay, so he’s involved in the church, what else has he done?”

Another factor could be his experience as a federal Liberal organizer. Again, that was one reason Vision recruited him to run – they wanted to broaden the organization so it wasn’t just a civic version of the NDP. But in general Vision voters rejected the people with Liberal connections who wanted to be on the slate, like Catherine Evans, Demitri Douzenis, and DeGenova. On election day, maybe a lot of Vision supporters didn’t vote for Dhaliwal because they were leery of his Liberal ties.

Related to that, I’d be curious to hear whether supporters of David Eby voted for Dhaliwal. I did, both in the Vision nomination and in the election. I chalked up Eby’s narrow loss to Dhaliwal as a matter of being out-organized and missing out on Vision’s internal slate politics. But I gather that a few of Eby’s supporters became disillusioned with the process, and maybe some perceived Dhaliwal as being the beneficiary of a machine-style politics that they found odious, as well as being on the right wing of Vision.

I voted for the Vision slate minus Dhaliwal, but it had nothing to do with race. I had heard good things about Michael Geller and wanted to throw one vote his way.

The tough part was choosing who from the Vision-COPE slate to drop. Dhalliwal seemed like the weakest candidate on the list. He was the Vision’s last choice (barely beating out Eby) and he wasn’t endorsed by the Firefighter’s Union. It wasn’t easy to decide who to drop, but he seemed like the weakest candidate. I’m sure many voters felt th same way.

In the end, I’m glad COPE’s Woodsworth got elected instead. I’m hoping two strong COPE councillors will keep Vision to their promises on cycling and homelessness.

As a South Asian voter who lives in Mt. Pleasant I”m really tired of “our people” who jump up and down and cry foul, or worse, racism, when their plans do work out exactly as they hoped. Perhaps Dhaliwal should have realized that relying on the sheep-like block voting mentality of his community may work in federal politics but at the city level, you actually have to work. He should have realized that the Vancouver voters didn’t fail him, it was his party, who failed to get him and his signs, outside of Little India and South Vancouver.

This is a really revealing discussion on the issue of race in this seemingly incorporating society. I did vote for Mr. Dahliwal, but only because I read about him the day before the election. I followed this election quite closely and I never heard his name before I sought it out myself. We can put the blame wherever we want, but unless the candidate gets out of his own community and addresses the city at large, it is going to be tough to gain a lot of support.

It is easy to accept that there are biases displayed in the voting results, but race is not the only bias present.

There is an east-west bias. There are party biases. There are alphabetical biases.

There is even, apparently, a lotto-style random vote ‘bias’. For an obvious example of that one need only look at Haskell, an independent school board candidate, whose campaign profile couldn’t attract a vote and anyone who’d met him at a trustee candidate forum would have to conclude the man knows barely anything about the school system. Still, through the (apparent) magic of the random vote “bias”, Haskell managed to get thousands of votes.

And yes, there are racial biases or preferences. Clearly some communities are voting their tribe. How else can we explain the Haskells of this race, or that Sophia Woo – a complete unknown in all things related to education and our schools, who very clearly did not distinguish herself in public meetings, should pull substantially more votes than the sitting chairperson of the Vancouver School Board, Clarence Hansen?

There is a solution for all this. Shine a light on all the candidates, in all the races. Good ones will triumph.

How to achieve this remains a challenge. The media and their consumers the public unfortunately dwell on the big chair excessively to the exclusion of other contests in play.

Parties often have their own agenda in controlling access to candidates. We’ve seen that in federal politics; political parties even in the municipal campaign have been known to sequester their candidates from public scrutiny.

If candidates can’t stand up in public and speak for themselves, can voters really expect them to stand up for their concerns if called upon to do so?

Sadly there doesn’t appear to be a public appetite for more information about candidates in all the races. No one is marching down the street with banners clamouring for “More Debates!”, and the voter turn out is embarrassing.

Allow me to dwell on school board for a moment longer and comment that if Alvin Singh got more media and public exposure during this campaign, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’d be a sitting trustee at this time. He’s a truly impressive individual and there’s no doubt we’ll be hearing from him again in the future.

Yet despite having a half billion dollar budget and being responsible for functions that touch 55 thousand school kids, over 100 thousand Vancouverites in total (one in six), not even the local cable company channel covers school board candidate forums.

The only approach to combating racism in our city, our communities, our politics, is to shine a bright light on the proceedings. Maybe next time we can see more of the individual candidates and less of the mayoralty race.

I voted for Kashmir, and thought he would make a great councilor. But in my heavily COPE/Green/Vision neighbourhood, the only sign I saw with his name on it was on my lawn (not a prominent one). His name was not in the media or in the community around here, and I was feeling pretty queasy that he’d be dropped from more than a few people’s slates. There was certainly a racial component to that, but I think it was one that could have been overcome by enough door-knocking on the Drive, in Kits, the West End, Dunbar etc. If he did not do that (and I apologize if he did and I missed it), the blame should land squarely on the shoulders of his campaign staff. The history of South Asian candidates makes it clear that even one as personable and talented as Kashmir was going to have work harder than any other candidate to get elected in one of the last positions. It might not be just, but the campaign staff’s job isn’t to bitch about justice-it’s to get the candidate elected.

Those of us not up-to-speed on the political machinations in Vancouver’s Indo-Canadian communities, Kash Dahliwal’s candidacy raised a number of red flags. The table throwing incidents at the Ross Street Temple, financial irregularities with the Khalsa Credit Union, the shenanigans of the Grewals in Surrey, and even the Air India trial made it hard to know what to make of a candidate who’s power base is non-secular. At the end of the day, I supported Kash because he had the endorsements of many people I trusted to know whether or not he was an ethical person of high moral character. There is still work to do in the South Asian Community to gain the confidence of the citizenry at large. Efforts by the South Asian community in the South Fraser Region to support Surrey Memorial Hospital and efforts by other South Asian groups to help feed the need on the Downtown Eastside goes a long way to easing concerns. While I wouldn’t decide an individual candidate’s worthiness by the wayward actions of others, I have to be honest about my reservations. I reckon my discomfort may be viewed by others as prejudice, but my reality is that it’s based on ignorance. The former is evil and the latter is lazy. Good luck Kash.

It’s a two fold task.

South asian candidates must demonstrate that they represent more than one specific community and be involved in broader community events. President of a temple in secular Vancouver is not necessarily a selling point.

The voting population, caucasian – chinese etc, must be challenged on their preconception of South Asians. This is a dynamic community with many emerging leaders in various fields.

I also don’t think it was racism. There were just too many candidates for too many positions. Even after reading up and consulting others more knowledgeable than I, I knew I wouldn’t use up all my votes.

Mayor was easy, pick one. My council votes were a bit all over and for parksboard I think I voted for three people. I think the closest I came to using all my allotted votes was for the school board…

I certainly wasn’t avoiding South East Asians. I voted for people I’d met, or read about, and I thought deserved an opportunity. BC has had some noteable Indo-Canadian politicians and I’m sure there will be more. I was a bit surprised no Vietnamese of Filipinos were put forward, I hear those two languages a lot around Fraser and Broadway where I live.

Cheers,

Racism is certainly not dead, and it will never be completely gone. Personal biases will exist until the end of time.

There’s been a leap of logic here though. Jonathan Ross has invoked racism as the *primary* reason for Dhaliwal’s loss, without offering a shred of evidence. Doing so is very much in character with a man I’ve known well in the past. One comment at a door doesn’t make it true though.

On the flipside, I share an office with a guy from Langley who invokes race as the reason he wants his kids going to a “white school.” I would (and do) have legitimate concerns about sending children to a school where English isn’t the first language of most children: education tends to address the lowest common denominator, and such an environment effectively becomes an ESL school. That has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with communication skills (I have many friends of all races who speak English as well, or better, than I.)

Race plays both ways as well. Look at the election results for 2002. Kelly Wong ran for the then nascent VCA Team party and received 18925. No name recognition, she hardly campaigned (she was a part time student at the time) and barely had a lawn sign up. She received 7,000 more votes than her nearest VCA Team compatriot: pretending her last name had nothing to do with it is disingenuous at best. There is a block vote there.

Results are here:
http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/newsreleases2002/CoVunofficialresults.pdf

Race may well have played a role in Dhaliwal’s loss, but it was one of only many factors, and probably only a small one.

I am personally gratified to see the Indo-Canadian community becoming involved in a level of politics which they have not been in the past. It can only be good in the long term.

I note that Senator Larry Campbell received 80772 votes while Gregor Robertson’s million dollar smile received only 67598. I hope Gregor is only 83% as disappointing as Larry’s tenure.

This city does need wards, incidentally, but we didn’t need 14.

The fascinatingly strange part of this online discussion is that the speculation on biases (be they gender, ethnic, east/west or whatever) are based on “gut-based” speculation, rather than actual voter data. This article in the Vancouver Sun today (East Side
Immigrant Areas switch from NPA to Vision, http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=be7720be-edcd-4f89-8f04-8c0337e53106) tells a very different story, indeed – and it’s story based on data from the election.

Let’s be honest – politics is dominated by white men who are keen to hold onto their power and reluctant to hand it over to anyone else. The only way that is going to change is for women, persons of colour, First Nations , young people and others from marginalized groups to continue to stand up for nomination and election, and refuse to be ignored.

But before we slay the enemy, let us figure out who it is. Do the research, understand the reasons for the results, work with experts to analyze the data, surround yourselves with members of underrepresented groups to understand and engage those communities, and be brave enough to act on the what you learn.

First, Alex, I am very aware of your pedigree…a disgruntled former NPA partisan who is now a self-proclaimed “rebel with a cause.” How that cause is anything but screwing over your former mates, however, is still in question.

I agree with the assessment that my candidate did not get wide enough exposure throughout the city. And for reasons that are certainly not necessary for public consumption, I will, unlike yourself, keep my thoughts on internal party machinations within the family.

In terms of your chip on your shoulder regarding rugby, I find it humourous, considering that I stated that: “Alex and his Rugby buddies are great guys…I have enjoyed their parties more than once.” How in the world can that be interpreted as taking a shot or having a mental block?

For the record, I remain a cricket player since childhood, and so the rugby community is one that I naturally feel akin to (if for no other reason, our shared clubhouse and history at Brockton Oval).

Getting back to the issue at hand, your assertion that people who concentrate on one constituency cannot get elected is complete and utter hogwash. As I mentioned previously, there are those that have focussed on their strengths (the GLBT community, the Chinese community, the Arbutus/Kerrisdale/Dunbar corridor) and at the end, stood at the finish line a victor.

If you are trying to suggest that a name like Tim Stevenson, or even Ken Clement (whose name might not necessarily indicate his mixed heritage, just as my anglosized name certainly doesn’t fully represent mine) isn’t more acceptable than a Kashmir Dhaliwal to certain sections of the city, then you are fooling yourself.

To Brent’s credit, he acknowledges his ignorance about South Asians and more specifically the Sikh community, and I commend him for being so open and honest.

His observations though:

“The table throwing incidents at the Ross Street Temple, financial irregularities with the Khalsa Credit Union, the shenanigans of the Grewals in Surrey, and even the Air India trial made it hard to know what to make of a candidate who’s power base is non-secular.”

are in my opinion, a far more widespread phenomenon than most on this thread would like to acknowledge.

How Air India, or the stupidities of Gurmant Grewal in Surrey, has any bearing on the fate of Kashmir Dhaliwal, is baffling to me. Should Tim Stevenson, for example, be forever branded because of the actions of Svend Robinson? Of course not.

The Chinese community does have not only the numbers, but also the benefit of greater knowledge and integration into this city’s identity. It hasn’t always been that way…Chinese people have had to face to the injustices of intolerance, and have slowly got to a place where it isn’t a prominent feature of people’s attitudes (go back east to Montreal, however, and the offensive classifications of “Hongcouver” still permeate).

The South Asian community has not reached that place as of yet. And yes, maybe there needs to be more opportunities for cultural exchange to create that level of comfort. But that is exactly what Kashmir Dhaliwal has done for many years now…from his involvement in growing the annual Vaisakhi parade, to his work in bringing community policing to South Vancouver, to his inter-cultural work with other ethnic communities.

The media in this city, however, stunts this kind of potential for growth and integration by their constant portrayal of Indo Canadians as gang members, or terrorists, or infighting savages who can’t get along with each other, or wife beaters. Rarely, if ever, do you hear about the amazing individuals of South Asian origin that have arisen to great accomplishment and status within this city.

Anyways, I will stop now and let other respond, because I truly am interested in other comments. I am proud of the work that I did for Kashmir, and have no desire to make excuses or offer up justifications as Alex seems to suggest.

I am just offering my opinion on the state of affairs in this city, which for a supposedly cosmopolitan metropolis, still has far more divisions residing below the surface than places like Montreal or Toronto.

Alex,

That $75 steak you mention – would that be the same kind that Sam used to buy for you when you used to be a supporter? :

http://www.publiceyeonline.com/archives/001682.html

Once again, I am proud of the campaign that we ran despte trying parameters and circumstances. Yes we lost, and as campaign manager, I am not trying to shy away from anything. I will take resonsibility without hesitation. But for the things that were completely out of my control? That once again is a discussion for myself and the party, not for a comments section on a well-read blog such as this.

For anyone who knows of my political involvement, I am not prone to drinking koolaid blindly. Believe it or not Alex, I have been just as outspoken as you against my own party (and I am not referring to Vision) in the past, and I have abundant proof in print that maybe I’ll show you one day over the beers that you have promised to purchase.

Manipulation of the Sikh community by political operatives? Absolutely…150%. But that is not the cause of the divisions that you refer to, demonstrating that it is you, not I, who has “a fundamental misunderstanding of how that community works. ” Marrying into it doesn’t permit me that kind of ignorance.

Despite what you attest, the mythical promised tax hikes that you and the NPA keep mentioning did not deter the South Asian community. In fact, one of the key strengths of Vision is in its reach into various ethnic communities, unlike your former party.

Ujjal and Herb were never pitted against each other, nor do they represent opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the Sikh community. Herb’s riding association takeover (for which I was around for because I happened to be one of his staff) was achieved long before Ujjal ever came into the Liberal fold.

Raj Hundal, like I said before, is a rising star, and as campaign manger for him as well, I am very happy that he is going to be around on Park Board for the next 3 years to show his considerable talents. That being said, knowledge depth of voters for Park and School tickets are never as pronounced, and thus voting along party lines is most definitely a reality for the typical voter that isn’t a political hack like you and I.

Enough of this pissing match. Any other points I will make will be done through email.

You’re right…there are some serious problems that Vancouver needs to fix, and it is certainly going to take a lot more than political rhetoric to get it done.

I’m dipping into this complex conversation to note for the record that I spent a lovely autumn afternoon door knocking on the westside —between Burrard and Arbutus — with Kashmir during the campaign and I saw him at several campaign events around the city as well.

While all of us at Vision worked incredibly hard to get elected, I don’t know that anyone worked harder than Kash.