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SURREY — “He was offering me tea,” explains Harjit Singh Gill after an unusually long stop at the doorstep of a potential supporter.

The NDP candidate is translating a conversation that happened entirely in Punjabi, the unofficial language in this riding of Surrey-Newton. In this particular stretch of suburb on the outer edges of B.C.’s Lower Mainland, most residents prefer Singh Gill’s Punjabi campaign material to the English version.

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More than 60 per cent of residents in Surrey-Newton are of South Asian descent, most of them Indian; a host of other Filipino, Latin American and Chinese make it among the most ethnically diverse ridings in the country.

That diverse patchwork of nationalities has fed into the local politics of a region that represents one of the key battlegrounds in the upcoming federal election. Vancouver and the Lower Mainland could be central in deciding whether Liberal leader Justin Trudeau can cling onto his majority government this October, a region that is third in significance only to Quebec and the Greater Toronto Area.