What to call voters, besides Canadians?

When I posted this yesterday on Stephen Harper’s appeal to immigrants and their children (and grandchildren, I suppose), I hesitated slightly before typing the word “ethnic.” I wondered if I should think of another adjective to describe these voters.

Aren’t all voters, if you get down to it, ethnic voters? But then I thought I might be falling prey to a sort of overly self-conscious attention to a harmless word. The term is generally understood to mean immigrants and maybe the next generation or two of their families. No harm in using this shorthand. Or so I thought.

Then this morning I heard this from Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff at his Toronto news conference, when he was asked about his own bid for the ethnic vote:

“Let me just say, if I may say with the greatest respect, the word ‘ethnic vote’, spare us this. With the greatest respect, I don’t think it treats people with respect. These are Canadians. I’m going to everybody out there, I’m saying a Canadian is a Canadian Canadian. Come on into the big red tent.  I’m going out to Mississauga not to talk to the ethnic vote. I’m going out there to talk to Canadians. “

The notion of a campaign that doesn’t differentiate among Canadians based on when their families came to this country, or where they came from, struck me as bold in an era when electoral strategy leans so heavily on slicing up the voting population into demographic groups—age, sex, religion, urban or rural, suburban or downtown, and, of course, cultural background.

Yet how to square what Ignatieff said with this news release, which the Liberal Party of Canada released this morning around the time he was speaking:

Liberals launch advertisements for multicultural audiences

OTTAWA - The Liberal Party of Canada got the election campaign rolling with a series of TV ads that speak directly to Canadians from vibrant communities that will define our country’s economic and cultural future.The advertisements will feature ordinary Canadians speaking in a variety of languages – including Urdu, Hindi, Cantonese and Mandarin. Two ads were launched today, one in Punjabi and one in Portuguese.

Are “multicultural audiences” or “vibrant communities” okay but “ethnic voters” offends? I think it is always a delicate matter to identify people who must first be considered fellow citizens by some other aspect of their identify. But there’s no point pretending it isn’t done, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the exercise.