Six of the eight Jewish candidates in Canada’s parliamentary elections Monday won seats in the new House of Commons.
Most of them bucked the popular tide that returned the Progressive Conservative Party of incumbent Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to office with a comfortable majority of 170 seats in the 295-member house.
Big winners in Quebec were 38-year-old David Berger and Sheila Finestone, who were reelected after serving four-year terms in Parliament.
Both are members of John Turner’s Liberal Party, which won 82 seats. Finestone defeated a Jewish Conservative candidate, Robert Presser.
In Montreal, Jewish Conservative Jerry Weiner, a member of the Mulroney Cabinet, handily won re-election. He has been minister for multiculturalism.
Two Jews who held Cabinet posts in the last Liberal government also won re-election. Robert Kaplan of Toronto, the former solicitor general, and Herb Gray of Windsor, Ontario, former minister of national revenue, retained their seats in Parliament.
In Winnipeg, Manitoba, David Orlikow, a veteran member of Ed Broadbent’s New Democratic Party, was defeated. But another Jewish member of the NDP, former British Columbia Premier David Barrett, was re-elected to Parliament.
Finally, in the Outremont district of Montreal, a massive turnout of Hasidic voters secured victory for a Conservative candidate, Jean-Pierre Hogue, in what traditionally has been a Liberal stronghold. Neither Hogue nor his opponent is Jewish.
Considering that Canada has a Jewish population of about 300,000, the number of Jews running in the national elections was minuscule.
Because of the Thanksgiving Day postal holiday, there will be no Daily News Bulletin dated Friday, Nov. 25.
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