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Petti Fong

It was billed as one of the tightest races in Canada, and both the Conservatives and Liberals saw the seat of Richmond - home to the largest number of ethnic Chinese in the country - as an important battleground.
But in the end, there was no battle at all between its two high-profile Chinese candidates, with Conservative Alice Wong handily beating incumbent and long-time Liberal Raymond Chan.
Ms Wong is one of the four new Conservatives elected in British  Columbia, giving the minority  government 143 seats - known as  ridings - across the country, but  falling short of the 155 seats needed to form a majority.
However, that was enough - in light of the Liberal Party's stunning downfall, particularly in British Columbia - to give the Conservatives a stronger minority government than it had before Tuesday's election.
In her victory speech, Ms Wong said the residents of Richmond voted for her because they believed that Prime Minister Stephen Harper  was the best leader to handle Canada's growing economic problems.
'Voters have seen how our government has led our country in a difficult time, and they trust I will be their voice in Ottawa,' she said. 'In the final weeks, people saw how the government performed.'
Ms Wong, 60, said having Mr Harper pay special attention to her seat was an important reason for her victory. The prime minister visited Richmond three times during the five-week campaign.
The defeat of Mr Chan, a former junior cabinet minister under the last Liberal government, has vaulted Ms Wong, a businesswoman who emigrated from Hong Kong 27 years ago, into contention for a cabinet post.
She will undoubtedly be given a prominent role in a Conservative government that has wooed the ethnic Chinese vote since winning its last minority government in 2006.
After her victory was confirmed, The Globe & Mail quoted her telling cheering supporters outside her constituency office that: 'It has been very hard work to get to this point. It will be even harder work to properly represent Richmond. I hope to make a better Richmond, a better British Columbia and a better Canada.'
Wooing the ethnic vote paid off for the Conservatives, with insiders saying Richmond was vital because it represented three major issues that the party needed to overcome.
The first was that the Conservatives, while holding seats across the country, had failed in 2006 to gain any in the major urban seats of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Another issue for the Conservatives was its inability to penetrate into the ethnic vote. A third problem that the Conservatives hoped could be vanquished by winning the Richmond seat was the perception that female voters were antipathetic towards Mr Harper.
Those factors all came into play in Richmond, where four out of every 10 residents list Chinese as their mother tongue and where nearly 60 per cent of residents are immigrants.
Mr Chan, who has held the seat in four previous campaigns, said all of the polls indicated the race in Richmond was going to be tight. But Ms Wong took the lead early, eventually taking nearly 50 per cent of the vote.
Richmond was the last campaign stop for Liberal leader Stephane Dion on Monday night.
But the leader's presence failed to win enough votes the next day for a party that lost popular support across the country.
But a Liberal surge did not materialise to rescue Mr Chan, who won with 42 per cent of the vote in 2006 and had hoped to eke out a narrow win. In the last race, Mr Chan beat Ms Wong by about 4,700 votes; this time, she won by 8,000.
In 2004, Mr Chan beat Ms Wong in the federal election, a victory that was based on raising issues about his opponent's social conservative views. That strategy did not work this time, either. Asked about her views on same-sex marriage, for example, Ms Wong - who had previously opposed this - said it was a non-issue because the government had legalised such unions.
Ethnic bloc
Nearly 60 per cent of Richmond's residents  are immigrants
The proportion of residents who list Chinese as their first language: 40%



HK expatriate eyes cabinet post after key win in Canada