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Maclean's reviews The Strange Demise of British Canada and highlights the long history of courting the ethnic vote.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, Champion writes, the party with the greatest success among new Canadians was the Conservatives, and it was the Liberals who needed to catch up.
Champion goes on to recount, in fascinating detail, the story of a young Liberal organizer in the 1960s, Andrew Thompson. In 1961 he was 37 and an Ontario MPP for Dovercourt. He “packed his suitcase and moved in for a month with a family of Toronto immigrants,” Champion writes, ‘to discover ‘how the Italians live.’” It was not, Champion says, Thompson’s first foray into courting the non-British vote in English Canada.
“Three weeks before the 1953 [federal] election… Thompson raised the alarm that the ‘ethnic vote’ was shifting toward the Progressive Conservatives under George Drew. The Tories, Thompson warned, had seized control of the ethnic press.” When the Liberals lost 22 seats that year, “Thompson believed that ethnic voting had influenced the outcome.”
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Having travelled a little, I’m trying to find out why the world’s first scientific navigator/explorer, Captain James Cook, is not taught in Ontario grade schools. Australian schools teach far more about Canadian history, than we do ourselves in Canada. Why? Has it become politically correct in Canada, to not teach British – Canadian history? Are school children not allowed to learn that the British were successful colonists, and the French were not?
Harvey Alexander Pearson
188 McCaffrey Road
Newmarket, Ontario, Canada L3X 1J9