The next provincial election is still two years away, but a bitter Ontario rivalry is already underway — on Indian soil.

The high stakes contest pits Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne versus Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown, both crisscrossing India this month on competing trips. But India’s stunning vistas are merely a Bollywood-style backdrop for a more ambitious gambit — not just winning over Indians on the subcontinent, but winning the votes of Indo-Canadians back home in Ontario.

Wynne pushes off later this month with a 73-person delegation that would typically generate politically useful photo-ops with Indian dignitaries. That’s still the plan, but the premier has been pre-empted by Brown’s juggernaut.

The opposition upstart has upstaged her with his wild ride across India, starting with a picture-perfect elephant ride, and culminating with the father of all photo-ops — a meeting with India’s wildly popular prime minister, Narendra Modi.

That image was the payoff for years of personal ties cultivated by Brown, back when he was a little-known Ottawa MP and Modi was a political pariah as chief minister of Gujarat — blamed for riots that killed more than 1,000 Muslims on his watch in 2002, and banned from visiting the U.S. Modi has since been cleared and politically rehabilitated, allowing Brown to make the most of their relationship. (The PC leader covered all his political bases by making a quick trip to Muslim-majority Pakistan before the crossing the border.)

Greeted like a visiting head of state by Modi, Brown has since been feted by local chief ministers. Calling in chits and pulling out all the stops on an eight-stop itinerary, Brown has made headlines and headway — a welcome tonic for a political unknown languishing in provincial opposition obscurity at Queen’s Park.

Unsurprisingly, Brown’s Tories have tried to milk the Modi link, unabashedly tweeting photos (check out #PBinIndia — what’s a Twitter trip without a hashtag?) and posting breathless updates of encounters with local chief ministers. Four other Tory MPPs joining Brown on the trip are also pushing updates to local media in their home ridings — and gushing privately about their leader’s Indian status (sure to shore up his support in a restive caucus).

The Tories pared their costs by piggybacking on a trip by the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce, and are quick to point out that no public or party funds are being spent on their trip. Brown is paying his way out of his own pocket.

The same cannot be said for Wynne’s upcoming trip, which is deemed official business despite its undeniable political subtext. Like Brown, she is checking off the main destinations of New Delhi, Mumbai, Agra (the Taj Mahal) and Amritsar (site of the Golden Temple, revered by Sikhs).

Wynne will be accompanied by a coterie of her cabinet ministers, plus six Liberal MPPs (the backbenchers are all of South Asian descent or have large Indo-Canadian contingents in their ridings). No opposition MPPs were invited to accompany Wynne on the Jan. 27 trip, which perhaps explains why the Tories decided to steal a march on their parade.

(The NDP is not competing in the South Asian travel sweepstakes, and wouldn’t get very far: Its sole MPP of Indian descent, the high profile Jagmeet Singh, has been unable to obtain a visa, barred by New Delhi for criticizing its human rights record. There’s no word whether Brown had a word with Modi about the ban on a fellow Ontario parliamentarian.)

Will Brown’s peripatetic tactics in India pay dividends in Ontario’s multicultural landscape? He boasts about his 16 trips to India (nine to Punjab), and his leadership campaign team highlighted its close ties to Indo-Canadians. But converting that core support into a province-wide trend is another matter.

In India, banking on ethnic voter support merits its own traditional terminology: the vote bank, which refers to voting blocs that swing en masse behind a like-minded politician of like caste or shared faith. Canadian politicians tend to be more publicly circumspect about mining demographic groups, but Brown wants his provincial PCs to pick up where the federal Tories left off in cultivating closer links.

The gambit remains a gamble. Just as Brown no longer name-drops the now unpopular Stephen Harper, he may need to downplay his Modi connection should the Indian PM’s popularity one day wane. And like any demographic, Indo-Canadians aren’t a monolithic “vote bank” — they are divided in their views of Modi’s legacy. Moreover, many voters of South Asian descent may view the appeals of a provincial politician to Indian pride as pure pandering.

But as an inveterate jogger, Brown is not about to give up the juggernaut that has taken him this far, this fast. He plans to run in the Mumbai marathon this Sunday pre-departure — well before Wynne takes her first step in India.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Advantage Brown?

Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

Read more about: