A closer look at the growing diversity of Conservatives under Poilievre

Jamil Jivani, earlier this week, won the right to be the next member of Parliament for the Ontario riding of Durham, succeeding former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole.

In doing so he also became the first Black man to hold a seat in the 20-year-old history of the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

Jivani’s byelection win follows two sets of byelections in 2023, the first full year in which Pierre Poilievre was Conservative leader, and those byelections brought two South Asian men into the Conservative caucus: Shuvaloy Majumdar in Calgary—Heritage and Arpan Khanna in the Ontario riding of Oxford.

Jivani, Majumdar, and Khanna joined a caucus where one deputy leader, Melissa Lantsman, is a gay Jewish woman and the other, Tim Uppal, is a turbaned Sikh.

That group of young, diverse MPs will almost certainly form the core of a Poilievre cabinet should he ever get the opportunity to form one.

“Not every one of these names may be a household name yet,” said Jason Kenney, the former Alberta premier who spent years in federal politics and laid the foundations for the federal Conservative’s ethnic outreach program.

“Maybe some of them don’t have a big prior elected record, but there are truly talented and accomplished people stepping up. And I think any objective observer can start to see the outlines of a credible cabinet.“

Poilievre’s tenure as leader thus far has featured a renewed focus on connecting with Canada’s cultural communities and finding a way to diversify the gender and ethnic mix of his overwhelmingly white and male caucus.

Of the 117 Conservative MPs in the House of Commons before Monday’s byelection, 86 are white men.

The election of Jivani, Majumdar, and Khanna alone nearly doubled the number of visible minority MPs in