Description
How can we articulate Sikh-Canadian political success and to what factor can it be attributed? Several factors that relate to minority political participation explore the Sikh community’s electoral success in Ontario and British Columbia since 1981. The paper asks why Sikhs in Canada are more politically motivated than other minorities. The seven independent variables derived from previous theories of minority political participation and are applied to the case study of the Sikh diaspora in Canada. It was expected to find that Sikhs are able to exploit all of these factors, while other minorities only have access to some. Instead, the results show that the Sikh community does not, in fact, benefit from all seven of the variables that are presented in this paper. This paper is a starting point for continued research on the complexities of the South Asian diaspora and the need to include Sikhs as a separate category in disaggregated analyses. In the future, more data should be collected on the current socio-economic status of Sikh-Canadians and an analysis of all possible factors that could contribute to Sikh-Canadian electoral success must be developed.
