It's very corrosive for Conservatives to blame their poor performance among Chinese-Canadians on interference on a hostile foreign power
What seems more likely is what others have noted in this thread: East Asian groups are among those who have most complied with and support expanding when necessary pandemic restrictions. Perhaps it is something learned from SARS. Perhaps it is simply cultural and how before all this I often saw Japanese in Japantown go about their business with some form of face mask if they had a cold or flu. East Asians are however among the most vaccinated in the US. Pandemic politics puts these groups at odds with any party proposing or with the image of weakness on COVID. The points towards the Liberals in Canada and the Democrats in the US, which explains precinct data and increased relative demographic turnout from all three contests.
Just a guess. But it is becoming a observable trend with multiple datapoints.
Yeah, I agree. They were "masking before masking was cool", so to speak, so it all comes second nature to them--and of course, the SARS crisis had a particular immediacy when it came to Toronto's Chinese. So to them, CPC soft-pedalling would seem tin-eared, and PPC militancy outright unseemly. (And within a society and culture marked by resolute discipline, Bernierite freedom-mongering is totally off-orbit--though one can understand how they might have found Stephen Harper's stolidity admirable.)
This community took the virus very seriously, well before it was even named COVID-19. Anecdotally, the malls of Richmond, which are normally bustling with shoppers and diners, became virtually dead as early as February 2020 - a whole month before the rest of the western world took notice. The idea that COVID-19 could be handwaved away as "no big deal" is simply terrifying, especially since the governments in the Chinese-speaking world took a zero tolerance policy towards the virus. It was no surprise that the predominately Chinese-Canadian municipalities had a much lower case rate and a much higher vaccination rate. Hence, the CPC's pandering to anti-vaxxers, and calling Trudeau's proposal for vaccine mandates as "divisive", struck this politically heterogenous group as dangerous.
