Sowing fear to reap votes

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper may have broken the Ramadan fast with supportive Muslims for a pre-election photo op before dropping the writ.

But his government never loses an opportunity to stoke fear about “jihadist (read: Muslim) terrorism,” and to exaggerate the threat that it poses.

Canada is home to a million Muslims. Fewer than 200 have gone abroad as radicals or have been convicted of terrorism here. That’s two bad apples in 10,000 people.

Yet even so, Harper has singled out mosques as centres of radicalization, when imams have been working with the authorities to identify and neutralize threats. He has tried to bar Muslim women from veiling their faces during citizenship ceremonies as “contrary to our values,” even when the courts rule otherwise. And after turning its back for years on millions of Syrian Muslim refugees, his government belatedly announced that it wants to cherry-pick Syrian religious minorities for resettlement here.

Little wonder if, down in the weeds on the campaign trail, things get even uglier.

As the Star’s Tim Harper reports, not every Tory candidate has absorbed Harper’s dark art of sowing fear and playing to prejudice to reap votes, while claiming to be acting only in the country’s best security interests.

Tory candidate Joe Daniel, for one, has been sounding the alarm with his Don Valley North constituents that there’s an “agenda” afoot “to move as many Muslims into some of these European countries to change these countries in a major way.” And “that is something that I certainly don’t want to see happening in Canada.”

Elsewhere on the stump Tory candidate Bal Gosal has said that supporters in his Brampton Centre riding “don’t want them,” meaning Syrian refugees. “The majority of people don’t want them.”

Comments such as these are instructive because they provide some insight into the messaging that the tightly scripted Conservative election machine is putting out, down in those weeds. They’re out to swamp us, and we don’t want them. We Tories get the problem. We can be relied on to deliver a fix.

There’s no denying the anxiety many Canadians feel after the high-profile attack on Parliament and other incidents. Only this week, a court sentenced two men to life in prison for planning to derail a Via Rail train and other terrorist acts. The Conservatives may well feel they have a winning strategy by fanning alarm.

The government’s fear-mongering about a jihadist “war on Canada” has been relentless, as it pushes draconian security legislation such as the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2015, and trolls for votes by styling itself as tough on terror. Meanwhile, opinion polls confirm that public attitudes toward Muslims have hardened. An entire community feels besieged.

However politically adroit, the Harper government’s strategy is ruinously corrosive. It pits Canadians against each other, unfairly tars an entire religion for the misdeeds of a few, and weakens the fabric of the country.

Rightly, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has called out the government for its “campaign of fear” and “politics of division.” Likewise, New Democratic Leader Thomas Mulcair has denounced government-fostered “Islamophobia” and “intolerance.

Both Trudeau and Mulcair have spoken up for a Canada that is civil, tolerant and inclusive, not one that sees enemies everywhere in its midst. They are the voices of our better angels.

The Harper government’s strategy unfairly tars an entire religion for the misdeeds of a few