Will ethnicity be hurdle for NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to win votes in Canada?

As per the poll conduced by the Angus Reid Institute, majority of the people, who were asked said they have no problem in voting a person with a turban on his head.

The survey was conducted on 1,477 people, out of those, 69% of them are completely open to voting a Sikh man, though 50% of the respondents also said that their friends and relatives might not choose such a candidate.

The survey was conducted for three days, between October 2 and 5, after Singh became the leader of the NDP.

Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, told the Star: "It is kind of a good-news-bad-news story” for the NDP.

The poll suggested that Quebec mostly dislikes voting the newly elected NDP leader.

The 47% of the respondents in Quebec said they won't vote Singh as compared to 32% in Alberta, 23% in British Columbia and 24% in Ontario.

Singh (38) will be the first ethnic minority to become the leader of the NDP in the upcoming federal election of Canada.

He has been chosen as the leader of the NDP by a margin of 53.6% in a ballot-voting.

Singh was quoted by BBC as saying: "This race has renewed excitement in our party."

He has termed the win as "incredibly profound honour".

The NDP, a left-centric party, secured 44 out of 338 seats in the last federal election in 2015. The NDP came third in the previous election.

Singh, who was a criminal defence lawyer, will take on prime minister Justin Trudeau in the federal election 2019.

Jagmeet Singh aka Jimmy Dhaliwal was born in 1979 in Scarborough, Ontario to Harmeet Kaur and Jagtaran Singh, who had migrated to Canada from Punjab, India.

Apart from being the first ever to become a leader of any party in Canada, Jagmeet was also the first to become provincial legislator in Ontario as a Sikh.

(Reporting by Souvik Ghosh)