Harper not first to use ‘old stock’ term

While explaining his policy on refugee health care, Stephen Harper uttered what is perhaps the only thing Canada will remember from the Sept. 17 leaders’ debate.

“We do not offer them a better health-care plan than the ordinary Canadian can receive, and I think that’s something both new and existing and old stock Canadians agree with,” he said.

“Old stock Canadians.” Within seconds, the descriptor was seized on as proof the Conservative leader was an immigrant-hating bigot.

Frank Graves, president of EKOS Research, told the CBC it was a deliberate attempt by Harper to isolate Conservatives from “the rest of the electorate.”

“It creates a sense of us versus others,” he said.

Mi’kmaq elder Stephen Augustine took to As It Happens Friday to call the term “offensive and racist.”

Top Liberal adviser Gerald Butts decried it as “dog-whistle, racebaiting politics,” while the party’s leader. Justin Trudeau. said it was a sign of “the politics of division.”

The implication is that “old stock Canadian” is code for “white, probably anglophone Christian.”

“Old stock” is rare. Google records show in the minutes after Harper had said it, dozens of web surfers — mostly in Toronto — began plugging the term into their search engines.

But Harper isn’t the first politician to slip “old stock” into a public comment, although it’s usually been in reference to Quebecers.

Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau said in 1992 Quebec’s attempts to be labelled a “distinct society” was a racist notion that would make “second- or third- class citizens of everyone but ‘old stock’ Quebecers.”

In 1994, a Bloc Québécois MP told the House of Commons once Quebec separated, recent immigrants “will have the same rights as all oldstock Quebecers.”

Another Liberal, Stéphane Dion, brought up the term at a 2014 committee meeting while trying to promote efforts to get more immigrants to hunt, trap and fish.

As he explained, if he sees people fishing in the Laurentians, it’s usually “two middle-aged old stock French-Canadians or English-Canadians.”

Justin Trudeau himself used the term just before he became an MP. In a 2007 interview with a Montreal weekly, he dismissed the idea of Quebec being a “nation,” since he feared the definition only included “old stock” French Canadians.