With Anti-Muslim Campaign, Canada Has Its Trump Moment

New York Times (Op-Ed)

By Partin Patriquin

October 16, 2015

With Anti-Muslim Campaign, Canada Has Its Trump Moment

IT is easy to tut-tut the overindulgences of the American right. For Canadians, it is practically a birthright. None of our politicians, many of us would like to believe, would dare invoke the Trumpian galaxy of Mexican rapists, or ponder publicly, as the Republican nominee Ben Carson did, that Europe’s Jews would have fared better against Hitler if only the Third Reich hadn’t instituted gun control.

Yet over the last several weeks of an increasingly caustic election campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Canada’s ruling Conservative Party have managed to erase much of our trademark smugness.

Faced with a stalling economy and a corresponding dip in the polls, Mr. Harper had a stroke of luck. The Federal Court of Appeal dismissed his government’s ban on the niqab — the face veil worn as part of the hijab by a small minority of Muslim women — from Canadian citizenship ceremonies.

Rather than accept the ruling, the Conservative government proclaimed its intention to appeal to the Supreme Court, and then took the issue to the hustings. During a recent campaign debate, Mr. Harper declared that he “will never tell my young daughter that a woman should cover her face because she is a woman” — as though his political opponents would do just that, given the chance.

Effectively, Mr. Harper hopes to win his fourth term on Oct. 19 in part by demonizing those few who wear the niqab — and much of Canada’s Muslim population by extension. In one particularly pungent mailing to voters, the Conservative Party suggested that the election of one of Mr. Harper’s opponents would turn the country into a dystopia of high taxes, high unemployment and citizenship ceremonies clogged with covered Muslim faces pledging allegiance to the queen.

The truth is decidedly more banal. Since 2011, all of two women out of 700,000 new citizens have refused to doff their niqab during the ceremony, according to a Radio-Canada report. And those who do wear the niqab must remove it before the ceremony for identification purposes. But nuance and perspective only impede the Conservative narrative.

The campaign has since announced its intention to start a police tip line for “barbaric cultural practices,” so that Canadians can report such things as forced marriages and female genital mutilation. Mr. Harper himself mused that he would seek to forbid federal public servants to wear the niqab.

In this fear-mongering, many see the hand of Lynton Crosby, the Australian political operative who had been advising the Conservatives, according to a campaign spokesman. A veteran of winning campaigns for the former Australian prime minister John Howard and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Mr. Crosby is known for his use of divisive social issues, if only to spur political apoplexy from political opponents and populist outrage from the masses.

If Mr. Crosby was indeed involved, then his work is done. Both Thomas Mulcair, the New Democratic Party leader, and Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party leader, have called out Mr. Harper for stoking the fears of the voting public. This very voting public, a government poll suggested, is staunchly against the wearing of the niqab, a sentiment that the prime minister has used as a cudgel whenever he speaks about the issue. (A national poll from The Globe and Mail this week had the niqab well down the list of voter concerns.)

But the Conservative Party’s scapegoating of Canadian Muslims dates from well before this campaign. The government first banned the niqab from citizenship ceremonies in 2011, but its directive was successfully challenged by Zunera Ishaq, a former high-school teacher from Pakistan.

More recently, government officials said Syrian refugees would be prioritized, with first dibs given to the country’s religious (read: Christian) minority. Mr. Harper’s own office was found to have personally intervened in the processing of Syrian refugees. Coincidentally or not, Canada has admitted only about 10 percent of the 10,000 the government had promised it would accept.

The foot-dragging is a marked deviation from Canada’s history of accepting refugees fleeing strife. In 1979, the Progressive Conservative government of the time began admitting some additional 50,000 Vietnamese refugees. The comparatively modest number of accepted Syrian refugees has riled some within the Canadian military, with which the Conservative brand (the “Progressive” was lopped off in 2003) is closely associated.

“We’ve got to stop being afraid of our own shadow,” said Rick Hillier, a beloved retired Canadian general who says the country could easily accept 50,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year.

Though Mr. Harper’s anti-niqab gambit had some initial success, there are indications it might not ultimately be a winning strategy. The latest poll numbers have the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives for the first time in this campaign. The separatist Parti Québécois tried similar fear-stoking in last year’s Quebec election, but the tactic failed miserably.

And Zunera Ishaq recently recited Canada’s Oath of Citizenship from behind those few square inches of face-covering cloth. This is what progress sounds like in a campaign of fear.

!Si se puede!

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