With 45 Indo-Canadians in the fray for Canada's general elections, the Parliament is bound to see some representation from the community regardless of which party wins the January 23 vote.
Most Indo-Canadian and other South Asian candidates do not form an ideological bloc and belong to different parties.
Among the Indo-Canadians running for office, most are from the Conservative Party (13), followed by the ruling Liberal Party (11) and the New Democratic party (8). The Liberal Party's fortunes are clearly on the slide.
Two each are contesting from the communist party and the Progressive Canadian Party and four from the Green Party.
Some 35 MPs in the House currently are foreign-born and this includes countries like Britain, Italy and the US, not just India.
Indo-Canadians are concentrated in just a few of the 13 provinces, reflecting their immigrant settler pattern.
Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta lead in numbers, but there are some candidates from other states where very few Indo-Canadians live - Nova Scotia and Winnipeg.
Ten of the Indo-Canadian candidates are incumbents, and some of them may get re-elected.
{{/usCountry}}Ten of the Indo-Canadian candidates are incumbents, and some of them may get re-elected.
{{/usCountry}}An overwhelming number of 25 are from Ontario, seven from British Columbia, six from Alberta, four from Quebec one each from Winnipeg and Nova Scotia.
If, as some analysts are predicting, the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, gets a majority in parliament, it will probably bring back Rahim Jaffer and Deepak Obhrai from Alberta and Raminder Gill from Ontario.
It might even have new Conservative blood like Rakesh Khosla from Halifax West, Nova Scotia.
Alberta and British Columbia have a Conservative bent while the Liberal Party draws most of its seats from Ontario, where of late, the opposition parties have been trying to gain ground with ethnic minorities.
A poll commissioned by The Globe and Mail newspaper and the television channel CTV News reported January 10, barely 12 days before the election, that Conservatives now hold an eight percent lead over the Liberals.
In the last election, the Liberals got 133 of the 308 seats with the Conservatives bagging 98 and the Bloc Quebecois (from Quebec province) 53 and the New Democratic Party (NDP) 18, leaving the Liberals shaky.
A total of 1,634 candidates are in the running for the total 308 seats. The election was necessitated after the Liberal Party's minority government lost a no-confidence motion in December.
The Liberals have been fighting a slew of scandals that surfaced after they were re-elected to parliament in 2002. Inquiries regarding misuse of sponsorship funds and election monies have been front-page news now for months.
Elections Canada, the country's election commission, disseminates electoral information in 27 languages including English and major Indian languages like Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu and Bengali, a testament to the multicultural fabric of this country. Canada is also home to a large number of Sri Lankan Tamils.