Trump fuelling racism in Canada?

TORONTO — Canada has long prided itself on being a multicultural nation that values inclusion, opening its borders to refugees and immigrants, no matter their ethnicity or religion.

But has U.S. President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban, his promise to build a wall on the Mexican border and months of pre-election anti-immigrant rhetoric led to a rise in racial intolerance in this country?

Or has such discrimination been bubbling below the surface within some segments of Canadian society, and Trump’s world view and policies have merely validated such sentiments, granting like-minded people tacit permission to voice racist comments and perform hateful acts, where they might not have before?

“I think absolutely the boundaries are porous, the borders are porous, so anything that happens in the U.S. obviously affects us,” said sociologist Barbara Perry, a global hate crime expert at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa.

“We get the same Twitter feeds, we hear the same sound bites on television and radio and in the print media as well. Clearly the messages are crossing the border.”

And those messages do seem to be resonating with some Canadians, said Perry, pointing to a flurry of anti-Muslim postings on social media that followed last month’s Quebec City mosque shooting.

More recently, former prime minister Stephen Harper spoke of Islamicism being the greatest threat to Canada and said during the 2015 election campaign he would consider banning the niqab for public servants.

Conservative Party leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch is running on a platform of screening would-be immigrants at the border for “Canadian values.”

“It’s not like Trump just appeared out of thin air and now people have permission (to discriminate). I think this has been simmering for years,” Rima Wilkes, a professor of sociology at the University of B. C., said from Vancouver.

“But that mosque shooting shows that we are not immune.”

Perry believes many Canadians are in denial about how commonly racially motivated acts occur in this country and that polls over the last five to 10 years suggest a sizable proportion of the population is resistant to immigration and in particular to newcomers from Muslim countries.