‘Our election signs are being torn down’

‘Our election signs are being torn down’

Mr Partap Dua has accused the Liberals and Conservatives of destroying his election signs in the Markham-Unionville riding. ‘We had placed the election signs with lot of effort and it involved many nights of hard labor on part of our volunteers’, he said. ‘We don’t have resources, as we are spending our own hard earned money. Also we don’t have as many volunteers as the main parties and that is precisely the reason that we had put up our signs very late in the election. No sooner had we set up our election signs and the Markham-Unionville people became aware of UPPC and its candidate, the main parties swung into ‘cheap’ behavior of uprooting our election signs. Suddenly all our signs were gone in one night. All Markham-Unionville residents who had seen so many of our signs spread across the riding are a witness to it. We ask the riding voters in Markham-Unionville to look across the streets for themselves. It is extremely difficult for our party to put up the signs again in sub-zero temperatures due to frozen grounds. Yet we will start re-erecting the signs again on Tuesday once the Markham residents have seen for themselves what happened to our signs. It should give them an informed opinion about the ‘third world’ gimmicks resorted to by the established parties.

It sends out a strong signal that the main parties have been shaken by the launch of United Peoples Party of Canada. Mr Dua’s performance in all-party candidate debates in Islamic Center (8 Jan), Seneca College(12 Jan), and Denison Mosque (15 Jan), not only exposed the main parties but also shook their candidates beyond belief. Mr Dua argued with details on many policy points of these parties and convinced the riding voters about the real position of these parties. Mr Dua also gave a powerful speech at a local ethnic temple in Scarborough to the immigrant community and asked them to support UPPC candidates in Markham-Unionville(Partap Dua) and Scarborough-Guildwood(Farooq Khan). Looking at the unexpected performance of Mr Dua (perhaps these parties don’t expect immigrant candidates to debate effectively in English), the parties scrambled to damage the signs of Mr Dua. Our volunteers saw at many places signs of Conservative candidate, Mr Joe Li, in place of our signs. At certain places some of Joe Li’s workers had written obscene/racist remarks on our signs and punctured the eyes in Mr Dua’s picture on the sign. Yet Mr Li said that his party workers had not done so. We cannot pinpoint the culprits (Liberals or Conservatives) and we don’t have any hopes from the police to help us, we are asking people to be vigilant. Surprisingly, none of the NDP or Green Party small signs have been damaged, and some of our signs on main Highway 7 were safe because of the continuous traffic flow. It shows us that Liberals and Conservatives perceive Mr Dua as a bigger challenge than the other party candidates. We have really achieved our goal in shaking these parties. Our party forced Liberals and Conservatives to announce scrapping of $975 landing fee and apologize to the Chinese head tax victims.
Our party also forced the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP to start speaking about minorities and immigrants, and we all have seen these parties making pleasing announcements these days. Where were these parties all these years? All of them were fully aware of the problems of immigrants and newcomers, yet they NEVER included immigration, newcomer assimilation or discrimination/racism in their election platforms. Our party will force them to not only compensate the Chinese head tax victims and their families, but also other victims of Canada’s racist exclusion policy including the Kamagatamaru and landing fee victims in the last few years. Our party has challenged ‘the status quo’ and they have started listening to us and our problems. If our party could do so much from outside the Parliament, imagine what we can do once we are inside the parliament. This is also a wake-up call to the ethnic/immigrant MPs to start speaking up for the rights of people they represent. They have failed to do so with impunity.

We appeal to all voters to assert themselves in this election. Some voters think that small party candidates cannot do anything. We have already achieved so much. We will also force these parties to undertake massive immigration reforms that include reducing landing/refugee decision time to 60 days, looking into plight of live-in caregivers and reduce their landing requirement to 1 year, as well as new comer absorption in work force and granting equality to all persons irrespective of color, religion or ethnicity. We want people to be heard and not left at mercy of circumstances. The bureaucracy and red tape, which mostly affect immigrants, has to be straightened up once for all and people should get straight answers from the government departments. We want to tell the voters that whichever party they vote for will not get them any true voice in the parliament, because the traditional party MPs don’t have the guts or the intention to speak for them, notwithstanding the fact that they make many individual promises outside the party platforms to the voters.

(PRESS RELEASE)