Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has long been leading a concerted effort by the Conservative Party to reach out to first-generation Canadians, a group of immigrants that have historically been more likely to vote Liberal than Conservative. Kenney has had some success but, as the Conservatives now recognize in an accidentally leaked presentation, “Data Proves Hunch: We Are Losing” though, “We Are Losing Less Badly Now.”
For example: According to the data in the presentation, the Conservatives were once winning just 17.9 per cent of the vote in those polls in the Toronto with a 416 area code where 40 per cent of voters are Chinese. By the 2008, general election, the Conservatives had nearly doubled their support in those same polls to 33.3 per cent — a strong improvement but not enough to steal seats.
The Conservatives want to do better in the next general election which — as you'll see in the presentation below — they believe will begin in late March. And so the Conservatives are/were all set with a radio and television advertising strategy that would have a “heavy deployment” beginning on March 15 and running for two weeks. That information comes on a page – page 17 below — that is titled “TV Buy Costs – Pre Writ”, an indication that the Conservatives, at least, believe the country will be into a general election campaign two weeks after this ad buy starts. Any ad spending between now and the writ period, of course, doesn't count against the spending limits imposed during a campaign.
A note on the provenance of the information below: The information was distributed to members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery by the NDP. The NDP came to be in possession of this information because it and a cover letter seeking some help for a $200,000 fundraising campaign to pay for these ads was accidentally addressed and hand-delivered to NDP MP Linda Duncan who happens to have the same last name as Conservative MP John Duncan. The original set of documents from the NDP contained 29 pages but many of the pages were duplicates. I have removed the duplicate pages and presented these documents as distributed by the NDP. So far, we have heard nothing from the Conservatives to suggest these documents have been altered or are fake. Indeed, in a talking point memo distributed by the Conservative Party yesterday to all of its MPs, the Conservatives appear to make no apologies for this kind of approach to winning the support of “cultural communities”.
Jason Kenney presentation – Building the Conservative brand in cultural communities