— Musings —03.30.2011 05:08 PM
— Musings —03.30.2011 05:08 PM
Give me a break. This is more like stating a trend about changing parties when you don?t get a riding given to you.
My goodness, that really is off the charts stupid!
Disappointing. Imagine if I said that about a certain other ethnic group. All hell would break out.
Here’s a fact for Steve. We Italo Canadians were disgusted with Roccos mob ads. Full stop.
That we were. I mean its not like Rossi’s Italian immigrant parents ever had to face those stereotypes or anything right?
Italian-Canadians may lean Liberal due to the geographic distribution of them, but I suspect like Canadians of all ethnicities you will find your fair share who support every party. This idea that certain ethnic groups blindly vote for one party is nonsense. Never mind Italy is hardly a bastion of progressivism, but rather pretty evenly split as they have elected both right wing (as now) and left wing (as recently as 2006). Also Italian-Americans split pretty evenly between the Republicans and Democrats. I would rather parties focused on policies and forget about targeting certain ethnic groups as no ethnic group is monolithic in their views.
I worked for a very smart Liberal Member of Parliament in the ’90s, who had a sizable Italian community in her riding.
One fine campaign day in 1997 she told me that Italians tended to vote Liberal because a Liberal government reversed a policy of the Diefenbaker government of barring Italians immigrants from entering the country during his time as PM.
Of course, that advantage would begin to wear off after that generation of Italian Canadians died off but it does sound plausible.
That would make some sense. Interestingly enough in the United States, Italian-Americans voted heavily Democrat from Roosevelt right through Kennedy, but during the 70s and 80s began to turn towards the Republicans and considering the large wave of Italian immigrants came about 40 years later in Canada it would make sense it would wear off. Also it wasn’t just the immigration issue, but also the Tories were very much a WASP party back in the day. As recently as a decade ago, the Liberals had a huge advantage amongst Catholic voters but much of this has shifted to the Tories although the declining religiosity of Canadians has helped the Liberals too. In fact much of the non-WASP population voted Liberal at one time, but today, politics seems to be more divided by ideology, geography, and education as opposed to religion, ethnicity, and income like it use to be.