October 2022 | Campaigns
In 2022, Decide Campaigns worked with Jinny Sims and Surrey Forward in the municipal election in Surrey, British Columbia.
Jinny was an experienced politician, former Member of Parliament, provincial cabinet minister and respected community leader. Surrey Forward brought together candidates from a variety of backgrounds with an ambitious vision for the city's future.
We lost.
Jinny received 12.6% of the vote in a crowded mayoral contest won by Brenda Locke.
But the experience challenged some important assumptions about how political campaigns understand ethnic communities.
Political campaigns have a long history of treating visible minority communities as homogeneous groups. We identify communities by ethnicity, language or country of origin. We identify prominent community leaders. We assume those leaders have influence over the political decisions of people who share their backgrounds.
And we often assume that shared ethnicity creates shared political interests.
The reality is considerably more complicated.
Ethnic communities are not single, unified social networks. They are collections of overlapping relationships shaped by family, friendship, religion, business, geography, generation, migration history and individual experience.
Two people who share a language, religion or country of origin may belong to entirely different social networks. They may have different priorities, trust different people and hold fundamentally different political views.
And someone described as a community leader may have considerable influence within one network and very little influence beyond it.
The lesson for us was that demographic information is not the same as understanding social relationships.
Knowing who people are doesn't necessarily tell us who they trust, who they listen to or how they make decisions.
This distinction matters because social network influence is one of the foundations of our approach at Decide Campaigns.
People don't make political decisions in isolation. Their relationships and conversations can influence how they interpret information and form opinions.
But those networks cannot simply be assumed from ethnicity or cultural background.
The Surrey campaign reinforced the importance of moving beyond stereotypes and developing a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships that exist within communities.
It also reminded us that political experience, name recognition and community connections don't automatically translate into electoral support.
We didn't achieve the result we wanted in Surrey.
But we came away with a better understanding of the limitations of conventional approaches to ethnic politics.
Communities are not demographics. They are people connected through relationships.