Juno News - January 19, 2019Let’s stop kidding ourselves that the Karen Wang incident is anything new
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Summary
Karen Wang, the Chinese-Canadian candidate in the upcoming by-election between Jagmeet Singh and the Liberal candidate for Burnaby South, was caught on camera saying "Don't vote for me because I'm the only Chinese candidate."
Transcript
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Hey, guys, I want to talk to you today about Karen Wang, that Liberal candidate for Burnaby
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South facing off in the by-election against Jagmeet Singh.
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Now, I know you're kind of thinking, Liberal candidate, isn't she the former Liberal candidate?
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But I'm taking a bit of a pause here, a bit of a timeout on all of it, because even when
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the story first broke, I thought, I'm unclear what the big deal is here.
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I mean, I'm not getting a bee in my bonnet over this, not because one shouldn't be campaigning
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that way, but because I've thought for years that the massive ethnic pandering that we do
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in this country is too much, that it shouldn't be done, it has to stop, but no one seemed
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to agree with me, so I thought, all right, I guess this is the new normal.
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I guess because she didn't just say, vote for me because I'm the only Chinese candidate.
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She said, don't vote for this person, or imply don't vote for him because of his ethnicity.
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Is it also partially because this was a case of two different non-white candidates up against
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each other, and it's a little different when one of the candidates is seen to have a male
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I read some old stories from 2014 about when high-profile NDP or Olivia Chow ran to be mayor
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of Toronto, and I found a number of stories out there in major papers, National Post and other
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outlets talking about her campaign and how the Chinese community was rallying behind
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her, and they were saying, we are supporting her because we want to see the first Chinese
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woman be mayor of a major city, things like that.
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And they weren't even saying they agreed with her NDP values.
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Olivia Chow herself at one point, at one big campaign event, at one big debate during the
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election, she said, well, one reason I differentiate myself, I'm not male and I'm not white.
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And I think a few people criticized her for that, but it wasn't really the end of the
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She continued with the campaign, and she went through it relatively unscathed, placed a pretty
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This stuff, to a different degree, to varying degrees, is happening all the time in Canada.
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Candace Malcolm wrote that this is just the inevitable outcome of Trudeau's post-national
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This encouragement that there is no unifying core Canadian identity going on, encouraging people
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to think of themselves as, you know, ethnic ghettoization and so forth.
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I don't think it's healthy, what Karen Wang was saying and doing.
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I don't think that's the way we should think about each other in this society.
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All these things that unify us and rally us together.
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Well, we're going to have to have a conversation in this country, because it's been happening for
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a long time, all of the political parties in this country have been exploiting it, and