Post election

Editorial

In the entrails of last week's federal election, a few trends are evident – or, rather, absent. The tectonic shift that some predicted was occurring in the Jewish community's political allegiances does not seem to be as powerful as Conservatives would have hoped.

Perhaps most surprising to local voters was the not-so-close race in Vancouver Quadra. Just last March, a hard-fought by-election to replace former Liberal MP Stephen Owen saw Liberal candidate Joyce Murray, a former provincial cabinet minister, squeak past Conservative Deborah Meredith, a University of British Columbia business school lecturer, by 151 votes – a massive decline from Owen's 2006 plurality of more than 11,000.

In the rematch Oct. 14, incumbent Murray won by almost 5,000 votes, a surprisingly comfortable cushion. Between the by-election and the general election seven months later, Green and New Democratic party support each dropped about five percentage points (into the single digits), with those voters evidently going almost uniformly for the Liberal.

The Quadra result had to come as a bit of a shock to a number of prominent Jewish community leaders who publicly urged Jews to support the Conservatives, based primarily on support for the Conservative government's foreign policy position toward Israel.

While the "vote Conservative" approach does not seem to have shifted the results in Quadra, it may have had an effect, though limited, elsewhere. In the Toronto-area riding of Thornhill, Liberal Susan Kadis, an outspoken friend of the Jewish community, was defeated by Conservative "star" candidate Peter Kent, a former journalist. In another Toronto riding, Eglinton-Lawrence, Liberal Joe Volpe saw his plurality collapse from 11,000 in 2006 to about 2,000 this month.

This may send the message some Jewish voters hoped to send – that our issues matter and we vote. But a byproduct that could hinder both the Liberals and the Jewish community is that the swing that did happen took out at least one of that party's most vocal friends of the Jewish community and could off several more if it continues and grows.

If Jewish voters continue to abandon the Liberals to the extent that those MPs in the Liberal party who most vocally support Israel (predominantly those with comparatively large Jewish populations in their ridings) are defeated, an unhealthy trajectory could develop. If one party becomes the recognized home for Jewish – or, at least, Zionist – voters, it could make things much more challenging for this community to get its voices heard and issues addressed if the other party regains power.

This line of thought was condemned, when raised on this page some time ago, as being symptomatic of a Walt-Mearsheimer-style of Jewish power-mongering conspiracy. But it is simply sound politics to recognize that putting all of one's eggs in one basket – as the labor movement and other groups have typically done – could result in a permanent or semi-permanent outsider status in national politics.

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