Liberal Burnaby South candidate Karen Wang is stepping aside and has issued an apology after We Chat message referencing Jagmeet Singh as "of Indian origin.
Which leaves Jagmeet Singh a clear path to victory.
BREAKING - Liberals Withdraw Burnaby-South Candidate
Wed, 2019-01-16 12:48
#1
BREAKING - Liberals Withdraw Burnaby-South Candidate
Wed, 2019-01-16 13:03
#2
With the polls looking like they do this is good for the Liberals.
Wed, 2019-01-16 13:04
#3
When is the deadline to register as a candidate? There were other people interested in the Liberal nomination before Wang won it.
Wed, 2019-01-16 13:25
#4
The deadline for nomination as a candidate in the Burnaby South byelection is 21 days before election day, so Feb. 4. The Liberals have some time to make up their mind about whether they want to replace Karen Wang. Party's constitution allows the leader to appoint someone.
https://twitter.com/EricGrenierCBC/status/1085603311925874688
Wed, 2019-01-16 13:36
#5
So this woman who immigrated to Canada 20 years has the audacity to point out a Canadian born leader's ethnicity. Singh grew up in NFLD and Ontario not China like Wang. Wang ran for Clark's BC Liberals in the last election which is how she won the nomination.
ETA
One has to wonder how she would like working with Harjit Singh Sajjan who was actually born in the Punjab.
Wed, 2019-01-16 19:11
#6
It would be in their interest to find a new candidate. If there's no Liberal nominee, a Singh victory is a near-certainty, and that would mean the NDP would be free to put additional resources into the Outremont campaign and in so doing possibly prevent a Liberal gain there. Add that to the possibility that the Cons could take York-Simcoe, and there's suddenly the possibility of a Liberal wipeout on Feb 25th.The deadline for nomination as a candidate in the Burnaby South byelection is 21 days before election day, so Feb. 4. The Liberals have some time to make up their mind about whether they want to replace Karen Wang. Party's constitution allows the leader to appoint someone.
https://twitter.com/EricGrenierCBC/status/1085603311925874688
Wed, 2019-01-16 19:16
#7
You're probably right that the Liberals would be wise to find a replacement candidate for Burnaby South, but the NDP may be too far behind in Outremont to catch up:
But while Burnaby South is expected to be close, Maggi said he believes the Liberals will easily win back the Montreal riding of Outremont in next month’s vote, after more than a decade of NDP representation.
“Outremont is a slam dunk for the Liberals,” he said.
The riding was seen as a Liberal bastion for decades before Thomas Mulcair pulled it into the NDP fold in a 2007 byelection. Mulcair won re-election three times before resigning this summer to accept a teaching position.
Mulcair, the NDP’s leader from 2012 to 2017, grabbed 44 per cent of the vote in the last election.
Rachel Bendayan is once again running for the Liberals in Outremont, after coming within 10 points of Mulcair in the 2015 race. After the election, she served as chief of staff to Bardish Chagger when the latter was minister of Small Business and Tourism.
Maggi said polling by Mainstreet three to four months ago suggested a “runaway win” for the Liberals.
Thu, 2019-01-17 01:20
#8
on some cbc radio show last evening, a gary something, national affairs something for the globe in b.c. was being interviewed. he was saying how ironically, the libs _wanted singh to win, as a burden to the ndp going into the general election. "but i don't think she was a kamikaze candidate or anything". yikes.
he, like she, should know better than to say what they said, but it kinda points out how easy it is to let one's, oh, latent racism, or even just one's unconsious association function, slip out. but hey, that's why they're paid the big bucks, to understand/manage/stifle those thoughts. yes, i understand that chinese folks and japanese folks are not the same, that's a good chunk of my point, thank you.
regarding her remark, i also wonder about the role translation may have played in this. communicating to a chinese audience, the thrust may have been more of "vote for me, i understand your issues because i am of your community" than "buddy is other". i don't know, and i'm not defending, well, anything. again, they should know better that's their job.
Thu, 2019-01-17 11:23
#9
Quite a bit of speculation in the press that the Liberals deliberately blew up Wang's campaign in order to ensure Singh wins the riding and continues to lead the NDP into the 2019 election. Here are two such speculative pieces:
B.C. byelection bedlam!
Wang bailed after her campaign posted an appalling message on the Chinese-language WeChat app pointing out that Singh is “of Indian descent” and urging voters to support “the only Chinese candidate” in the byelection.
Wang originally blamed the post on poor “phrasing,” but then quit the contest outright, leaving the Liberals scrambling to find a replacement candidate.
Now here’s the crazy thing: you can bet there are more than a few powerful Liberals who aren’t exactly heartbroken by this development.
Why? Because they secretly want Singh to win, that’s why.
Under Singh’s wobbly leadership, the federal NDP is nosediving in national opinion polls and struggling to raise money, all with a federal election looming in the fall.
And that’s exactly how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals like it, as any “orange wave” of NDP support could cost the Liberals critical votes in closely contested seats.
If Singh were to lose this byelection, he would likely lose the NDP leadership as well. A fresh new NDP leader might turn the struggling party’s fortunes around.
So the Liberals like Singh right where he is, thank you very much. You’d almost think they were tempted to sabotage their own byelection campaign to help him, but I would never dare to suggest such a thing.
https://theprovince.com/news/bc-politics/mike-smyth-b-c-byelection-bedla...
A most convenient misstep for the Liberals in Burnaby South
Her resignation has left Singh alone on the left of the political spectrum in Burnaby South, facing Conservative Jay Shin and People’s Party candidate Laura Lynn Tyler Thompson. His victory would seem assured, if the Liberals don’t replace Wang. And yet they seem in no hurry to do so. When asked if there would be another Liberal candidate, Liberal communications director Braeden Caley said: “We’ll have more to discuss on that in due course.”
The most recent opinion poll in Burnaby South by Mainstreet Research suggested the byelection was turning into a two-horse race between Singh, with 39 per cent support, and Wang, with 26 per cent. The Conservatives will be more alarmed by the pollsters’ estimate of People’s Party support, at nine per cent, than the failure of their candidate to win the seat (Shin had the support of 22 per cent of the 740 people polled.)
Even with a margin of error of nearly four per cent, it’s clear that Burnaby South will stay orange if there is no Liberal in the race.
So back to Occam’s razor. Was this just a case of a reckless candidate gambling that if she played dog-whistle politics, it wouldn’t be heard beyond the Chinese community?
Or was the plan all along to throw the fight?
Nine times out of 10, it would be the former but the outcome of this electoral rumpus is extremely convenient for Trudeau. He has polished his own halo as the great unifier who will forge consensus and bridge divides.
And he has all but insured that an NDP leader yet to find his feet on the national stage staggers on to fight the general election.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-ivison-a-most-convenient-misstep-f...
Thu, 2019-01-17 13:03
#10
Or was the plan all along to throw the fight?
If it was, I doubt that the Liberals would do it by having the candidate make ethnocentric remarks under her own name on-line.
Personally, I think you'd have to be naive to think that politicians don't regularly benefit from chauvinistic voting patterns, or that polticians who do so benefit are crying themselves to sleep every night over the guilt of it all. I've probably mentioned this before, but when I did market research, one question on a political survey was "The Conservative candidiate in the riding of North Wherever is a native indian. Do you have any opinion about this?" Don't know which party commissioned that, but I have my theories.
Which kind of makes Wang's demagoguery somewhat bizarre, because any voter inclined to vote for a Chinese Canadian candidate and/or against an Indo-Canadian candidate can probably figure out which one is which, without the candidate having to tell them and run the risk of exposure. Guess maybe she was expecting a tight race, and figured she needed to pull out all the stops.
Thu, 2019-01-17 12:50
#11
The endless pundit class masturbation over how Trudeau's a Machiavellian mastermind who has the next decade planned out to the second is getting a little ridiculous. If Trudeau wanted to parachute Singh into the riding so he could wipe the floor with the NDP this fall, all he had to do was not run a candidate and call it "leader's courtesy". There was no need to run a candidate, have her "accidentally" post something racist, and then withdraw her.
People taking the pundit speculation about how Singh's Trudeau's ideal NDP leader seriously might want to recall that the very same pundits were saying Singh was the biggest potential threat to Trudeau long before he'd even entered the race. There's evidently a deep-seated psychological need among the population to think of the people in charge as omniscient. That's not to say nobody ever tries a move like helping your opposition pick an unelectable leader, but ask Hillary Clinton how well that worked out. Speculating about the future is not the same thing as willing it into being.
Thu, 2019-01-17 13:03
#12
regarding her remark, i also wonder about the role translation may have played in this. communicating to a chinese audience, the thrust may have been more of "vote for me, i understand your issues because i am of your community" than "buddy is other".
That is exactly why this is a racist remark. Wang is a Chinese Canadian immigrant from Mainland China. She is from the right wing community that immigrated here to get away from the People's Republic. In the last provincial election she lost to a Chinese Canadian immigrant from Taiwan. The immigrant community from Taiwan fled a brutal Western backed system seeking a more democratic country. They have been a major support of the BCA and NDP including its federal MP's. As well I believe that a large plurality or small majority of Burnaby voters who are of Chinese ancestry are in fact Canadian citizens by birth.
When anyone reduces party politics to ethnicity it is racism and that is what she did. It obviously slipped out and was not some Machiavellian plot from the PMO.
Thu, 2019-01-17 13:16
#13
Are we 100% sure the absence of a Liberal candidate would actually help Jagmeet? Surely Wang, as a former B.C. Liberal provincial candidate, would also have significant right--of-centre support that could move over to Shin or Thompson if she is not replaced.
ETA: Indeed as further evidence Wang is right wing, the Conservatives are now saying that she had sought to run for them before obtaining the Liberal nomination and was rejected.
Thu, 2019-01-17 15:20
#14
Yes, that's right, I think what Trudeau is really quite afraid of would be for Singh to be deposed as leader, the NDP to be in utter chaos internally fighting amongst ourselves from now until the election, and for federal council to crown one of the losing candidates, none of whom demonstrated any ability to grow the party or get even 1 out of 4 members to vote for him.
That's what keeps Trudeau up at night in fear. As long as he makes sure Jagmeet Singh keeps winning, he can relax.
Thu, 2019-01-17 19:25
#15
keeps winning? has singh won _anything since the leadership?
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speaking of breaking news, ms wang is apparently un-withrawing her withdrawal.
who said politics is booring?
the biggest downside to all this is that it's pushing indigenous issues off the news leads, which must make oil happy.
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Thu, 2019-01-17 19:45
#16
speaking of breaking news, ms wang is apparently un-withrawing her withdrawal.
Liberals said no, so now Ms. Wang is running as an independent
Thu, 2019-01-17 19:59
#17
Bernier's party wouldn't take her?
Thu, 2019-01-17 20:05
#18
Bernier's party wouldn't take her?
He already has the B.C. number one anti-Transgender activist running as the candidate.