No need to crack open a points calculator - just go on certain subreddits and you can see everyone trying to game it openly. And the piece about t
he doctor from the US is enough to tell the other piece.
And yep, the overt racism against South Asians (or anyone brown in general) is getting to be an issue.
AoD
It always has been an issue. It's part of why I — a caucasian man descended from both east and west of the caucasus — left my medium-small hometown years ago in my early 20s. I saw so much racism there that I didn't see elsewhere (edit; outside of other small towns). When I was in high school (of ~1250 students), the number of visible minorities in my entire grade could be barely counted on two hands. I heard ethnic slurs on the school bus and school grounds regularly from kids of all age groups. If someone was going to insult someone else, it was almost always structured as "you aren't a [homophobic slur] [ethnic slur], are you?"
As immigrants really started moving into the town when I was a teen, the racism got less overt but darker in tone. The slurs began to get limited to more private company, but there were still overtones amongst the general population. There were places (ironically) you didn't want to be seen in by fellow townies; places to be avoided simply because a large number of a simple ethnic group lived there. Young kids knew Brampton was where the Indians and Pakistanis lived. Markham the Asians. North York the Jews. Even Vaughan would get you a side-eye because "that's where the Italians live". Comments about "why are we letting in so many immigrants?" were common things to be heard when parents got together.
This sounds like the 1950s, but I assure you it's far, far more recent than that..
The riding is one of the (both Federal and Provincial) conservative's GTA strongholds. It hasn't voted anything but Conservative provincially since the 80s, and federally since the early 90s (likely because the Reform party almost equally split the small-c-conservative vote there). I literally grew up with the son of one of the area's long-running incumbents.
One of the pivotal moments of my life was driving with a friend to Mississauga to go to Square One (aside; I miss Grey Region). For some reason he wanted to route through downtown Brampton along Queen Street to hit up the Taco Bell that was once at Queen & Kennedy. He saw some young Sikh men in turbans on the sidewalk, and quickly rolled down his window so he could ignorantly mimic a
Zaghrouta towards them. I sat there in the passenger seat, embarrassed, feeling trapped, suddenly and fully made aware of all the aggressive and microaggressive racisms I'd seen or been ignorantly party to over the years. Whether it was disdain for Sikh police officers wearing turbans, or blaming someone's race for why a coffee order got messed up.
The driver is no longer a friend. He flunked out of his first year of Police Foundations post-secondary, and he's currently a prison guard at Maplehurst; if that tells you anything about
the quality of human being he is.
Many of the people I grew up and am no longer friends with are now
overt racists on Twitter/Facebook, and every last one of those are Convoy idiots. All (if they voted at all) voted PPC or Conservative. Most of my current friends from town smartly moved out years ago. I'm only friends-on-socials with a small handful of people still in the area. Of those, most will generally tend to brush off or excuse the racism of the others.
So, I don't think it has never *not* been an issue. I think the problem is over the years that the GTA outside of the big cities has grown to have more power in political circles, and that in turn has emboldened them.
