Scarborough Liberals struggle to make sense of losses in safe ridings.

Tamil voters turned on party in Scarborough, says former MP Cannis

Retiring Scarborough-Rouge River MP Derek Lee talks with Liberal candidate Rana Sarkar at the Shoeless Joes Monday. Though Lee had been the area's MP since 1988, Sarkar saw Liberal support in the riding fade away as it was won by the NDP's Rathika Sitsabaiesan. Three Liberal incumbents, Dan McTeague, John Cannis and Michelle Simson, also lost their seats on election night. Scarborough Liberals, after a generation as the area's status-quo federal party, struggled this week to explain how their support suddenly came apart.

"I'm in the same shock as anyone else. None of us saw it coming," Scarborough-Guildwood MP John McKay said Tuesday, the day after Scarborough's six Liberal members were reduced to two, both of whom, McKay said, "won by the skin of the teeth."

The best explanation McKay, who kept his seat, and Scarborough Centre's John Cannis, who didn't, could offer is negative advertising works, and the "job" Conservatives did on Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff was completely effective.

McKay said he thought New Democratic Leader Jack Layton "was just a happy beneficiary of Harper's carpet bombing of Ignatieff," adding he faced constituents repeating what anti-Ignatieff ads said, "as if it were gospel truth."

McKay said that and what he called "irrational exuberance" drove progressive voters in his riding to his NDP opponent, Danielle Ouellette, who, he complained, "had no ground game at all, had no office, no nothing."

Cannis, who had beat opponents in six elections before this, also heard "the buzzwords" from Tory attacks on Ignatieff continuously at doughnut shops and front doors. "We are now living in the new era of politics," where smears are used on opponents, he said.

But while saying "Jack Layton and his lefties will be unmasked very quickly," allowing Liberals to come back, Cannis also suggested Scarborough's Tamil community had chosen this campaign to desert the Liberals.

"That community turned against us completely and some of us paid the price," said Cannis, insisting that after the surprise resignation of Scarborough-Rouge River MP Derek Lee on the eve of the election, Tamils were looking to have a candidate carry the Liberal colours there.

That opportunity was missed, said Cannis, arguing if a Tamil-Canadian candidate had run for the party Liberals would have won Lee's riding and the "signals" it sent may have given him enough votes to win his own three-way race in Scarborough Centre.

"The NDP was smart" to have chosen Rathika Sitsabaiesan, now headed to Ottawa as Canada's first Tamil-Canadian MP, said Cannis.

Sitsabaiesan, however, said she won chiefly because her party was saying the same things residents were saying about wanting more investment in health care, child care and education, and about wanting jobs created locally and not overseas.

She didn't deny many voters from the Tamil community had swung behind her but said that in the last days of Sri Lanka's civil war in May 2009, Liberal politicians had not appeared to support protestors on Toronto's University Avenue or on Parliament Hill in Ottawa where, she said, only Layton came to address the crowd. (Liberal MPs at the time said they didn't want to appear because protestors were displaying flags of the banned Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.)

The NDP is there to "give that voice for struggling people throughout the world," Sitsabaiesan, appointed in January as an advisor to Layton on Tamil issues, said she concluded.

The Conservatives nominated popular Tamil-Canadian broadcaster Gavan Paranchothy in Scarborough Southwest but he couldn't carry the riding against New Democrat Dan Harris.

A factor may have been a widely-shown Conservative ad, which showed footage of the MV Sun Sea landing last August with 491 Tamil asylum-seekers on board and said the re-elected Tories would crack down on people smugglers who "take advantage of our generosity." The Scarborough-based National Council of Canadian Tamils called on the Conservatives to apologize to the community and remove the ad, which the group said "insinuates that Tamil refugees who are forced to arrive (in Canada) through unconventional means are 'criminals.'"

Pauline Browes, a former Conservative MP, said she believes Conservatives who got elected in Scarborough were dedicated politicians promising action on the economy and jobs. New Canadians were looking at policies and the Liberals "were not the ones they were willing to stick with," she said.

"Many people really believed we need a majority government to get things done."

Scarborough East Councillor Paul Ainslie said many people in his area felt Conservatives were simply "a government they could work with" and their proposal for allowing income-splitting between couples seemed to resonate, at least in his riding.

Meanwhile, McKay said the Liberal party "has to have an existential moment" to figure out "who it is and where it's going," adding he doesn't know how that will sort itself out.

Scarborough East Councillor Ron Moeser suggested another reason why Liberal support fell away. It was disappointing, he said, when Liberals under Jean Chretien "painted the town red" but didn't give Toronto the money needed for infrastructure.

"They weren't helping us out; we were always after them," said Moeser, adding "maybe some people remembered that" and switched their support to another party Monday.