To their credit, many political parties in Canada have built up into very multicultural coalitions. But when it reeks of tokenism, that coalition falls apart.
All the parties reach out to the various communities in their ridings. In Burnaby when I was involved in the federal campaigns we ran two separate phone banks most the time. The largest one was in English and the other in Mandarin and Cantonese. A few times during the campaign we would also organize a Punjabi and Urdu phone bank. The lists we phoned from however were not compiled from government lists but from a process where our main phone bank callers would identify voters whose first language was not English and they would get a call back in their own language. Also the staff of our sitting MP were hired partially based on their language skills so that people walking into the MP's office could be served in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Urdu and French.
IMO that is not pandering for votes that is just providing quality service to the residents of the riding. Frankly no party would deserve to win with out reach to all the voters. When around 50% of the population of the riding are immigrants from various parts of Asia a party that ignores them will lose and for good reason.
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