Why Canada election candidates dodged Hong Kong protest ‘minefield’ ahead of Justin Trudeau’s win
- Only 2,742 out of the estimated 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong were on Canada’s International Register of Voters as of mid-October
- Candidates may have avoided the issue of the Hong Kong protests for fear of alienating one camp or the other, observers said
Hong Kong’s protest upheaval may have ignited intense activism among diaspora communities in Canada, but it was also a political minefield mostly dodged by contenders in the federal election that returned Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to power Monday, observers said.
And in Hong Kong, engagement in the election among the vast Canadian community there appears to have been extremely low compared to elsewhere, in another possible reflection of the few options available to Canadian politicians to influence events in the city one way or the other.
Only 2,742 of the estimated 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong had registered to vote as of October 13, a rate far exceeded by Canadian expatriate communities elsewhere.
Despite the debate over the protest movement in Hong Kong, “this was not a good electoral issue” for Canadian politicians, said Yves Tiberghien, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia and a distinguished fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation.
“The levers for Canada are very limited, so there was no serious ‘choice A’ or ‘choice B’” for candidates regarding the Hong Kong protest movement, Tiberghien said on Tuesday, the day after Trudeau’s centre-left Liberals were re-elected with the reduced mandate of a minority government.
