Will Charest and Brown force the Conservatives to confront their Islamophobia problem?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/03/2022 (1049 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The hour of reckoning has finally arrived for the Conservatives, thanks to the entry of Jean Charest and Patrick Brown in the leadership race. Both seem keen to confront the Islamophobia that Stephen Harper fostered and too many in the party have continued to trade in.

Long inactive on the federal scene, both are free of that baggage. Brown lost no time in pillorying Pierre Poilievre, the front-runner in the race, for having been a staunch supporter of the ban on the niqab for citizenship ceremonies and for a hotline for Canadians to snitch on (Muslim) “Barbaric Cultural Practices.”

The Charest campaign followed, with an added zinger: the party must tackle its “racism.”

Erin O’Toole had about the same idea. But he never named names or disavowed specific policies. He couldn’t, having been part of the 2015 Harper re-election committee. He was oblique: the party must embrace minorities — a.k.a. immigrants, newcomers, cultural/racialized communities, visible minorities, BIPOC people. But that was never the problem with Harper and his ardent devotees Poilievre, Chris Alexander and Jason Kenney. Their bigotry was more sharply defined. They didn’t like Muslims. They waged relentless cultural warfare on Muslims. They assiduously courted groups that didn’t like Muslims — white nativists, Hindu extremists, and those who equated supporting Israel with opposing Muslims. They wooed groups that came to Canada fleeing persecution in Muslim nations — Coptic Christians from Egypt, Baha’is from Iran, and Christians and Ahmadis from Pakistan.

That was the Harper rainbow coalition. Long before Donald Trump’s.

Reminded of his role in the dark art of such wedge politics, Poilievre is lashing out — Brown is a liar, Charest is a closet Liberal, etc. — and sounding defensive: “There was no niqab ban. I’d never support that, nor did Mr. Harper. What Mr. Harper proposed was that a person’s face be visible while giving oaths at citizenship ceremonies.”

Not quite. Harper wanted to extend the niqab ban to the public service. It’s the courts that stopped him well before he could get there. He also wanted to rob niqab-wearing women of their right to vote. He was thwarted by Marc Mayrand, chief electoral officer, one of the principled civil servants who refused to be intimidated by Harper.

The niqab ban and the hotline were only the more well-known of many Muslim-baiting gambits used to micro target specific voting segments and raise funds. Hate Omar Khadr? Press 1 to donate. Scared of jihadists in your neighbourhood? Do stay afraid but don’t forget to donate.

The more dollars an issue raked in, the more the Harperites kept it in the news — for example, dragging Khadr through the courts, and Zunera Ishaq, the woman at the centre of the niqab case. Never mind the cost to the taxpayers or the likely judicial outcome.

The Harper government shunned the then 1 million-strong Muslim community and boycotted their institutions. It patronized pliant Muslims, about a dozen or so, who attacked Islam and other Muslims. It gave them parliamentary platforms as “expert” witnesses and paraded them as props at press conferences. Tactics not all that different than what the British colonials used in India and the French in Algeria — relying on a selected few Good Muslims vs. the overwhelming majority of Bad Muslims.

When civil war broke out in Syria, the government refused to take Muslims as refugees, even though they, the majority community, were the chief victims of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous crackdown. It demonized them as potential terrorists and carriers of sharia. It chose Christians, Yazidis and others instead.

Such tactics can produce unintended results — and did.

A majority of Canadians, not just Muslims, were incensed.

The politically docile Muslims organized themselves into a formidable voting bloc. In the 2015 election, 87 per cent turned out in key Toronto area ridings, according to the group Canadian Muslim Vote. Nationally, they voted 65 per cent for the Liberals, 10 per cent for the NDP and just 2 per cent for the Conservatives, while 19 per cent refused to say whom they had voted for, according to an Environics survey.

Yet Conservative Muslim bashing continued long after Harper was gone. Following the 2017 Quebec City massacre, Mississauga Liberal MP Iqra Khalid introduced a motion to acknowledge “the increasing climate of hate and fear,” and “condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.” The Conservatives questioned whether there was a climate of hate; objected to the term Islamophobia; whined that Muslims were being singled out for “special treatment”; and posed as free speech warriors — demanding that Ottawa “reject any call to further restrict free speech.” They were not demanding free speech to have the freedom to

be misogynists, anti-Semites, homophobes, etc. but rather to say whatever they wanted about Islam and Muslims.

All Conservatives voted against the motion, with the honourable exception of Michael Chong. Yet a similar motion at Queen’s Park was passed unanimously with the support of Doug Ford Conservatives. It clarified that the federal Conservatives were a breed apart.

Many have remained so. Only a handful have recanted. Tim Uppal, the turban-wearing Sikh MP from Alberta, who served in the Harper cabinet, has apologized. O’Toole never did. Andrew Scheer never did. Poilievre hasn’t. Nor has his campaign manager Jenni Byrne, the chief architect of that nasty 2015 campaign. Nor has the party. Unless it does, a whole lot of Canadians are not likely to forget and forgive.

Brown is not likely to win the leadership. In fact, he may be running only to be kingmaker for Charest, whose ambassador he’d be to minorities, especially Muslims and Sikhs, two must-win urban blocs for a majority government. Harper had made some headway with the Sikhs, but that got eroded in 2015, and more so since the emergence of Jagmeet Singh as NDP leader.

Just two weeks back, Poilievre was coasting along merrily, peddling conspiracy theories about Justin Trudeau’s Bank of Canada, Trudeau’s high inflation, Trudeau’s this and that. He was busy signing up caucus members to his leadership cause. He was cavorting with the ‘Freedom Convoy’ in Ottawa — “Truckers, not Trudeau,” “I’m proud of the truckers and I stand with them.” He didn’t mind that many of them were Trumpians waving MAGA flags, cursing their own prime minister, “F– Trudeau,” and demanding their Miranda rights.

Joining Poilievre in adulation for the honking yahoos were such luminaries as Scheer and interim leader Candice Bergen.

Then, suddenly, the earth shifted. The convoy is long gone and forgotten. Trudeau is posturing well on Ukraine. And Charest has arrived, looking like the only adult in the unruly Conservative dorm, mostly white and male.

Sure, Charest has a bit of baggage himself. As Quebec premier, he failed to provide leadership at the first sign of overt bigotry — bans on hijab-wearing girls in soccer and taekwondo competitions, and hysteria over the Montreal YMCA frosting windows so that students at an Orthodox yeshiva next door wouldn’t be tempted by women in exercise outfits. He named the Bouchard-Taylor commission on “reasonable accommodation.” It concluded there was no crisis, minorities were not making unreasonable demands. Yet it sowed the seeds of the Charter of Quebec Values and, finally, Bill 21, outlawing religious symbols from public service.

Charest has let it be known he won’t do much about it — just like Trudeau and O’Toole and others. That may cost him a few delegates, given that some Tories have lately been demanding a tougher stance — either they’ve awakened to its dangers or decided that opposing it is one way to mitigate their own record of religious bigotry. Such delegates can turn to Brown, the first mayor to pledge funds for the court battle against Bill 21.

Whatever damage that law has done in Quebec in the last two and-a-half years, it is small change compared to the ugliness the Harper government perpetrated on a national scale for nearly a decade, and with greater brazenness, misusing the full power of the federal government.

It is said that Harper is still the most popular figure among Conservatives. All the more reason for Canadians to hear the party debate his record in this regard.

Correction — March 21, 2022: This column was edited to correct Jenni Byrne’s name.

Haroon Siddiqui, editorial page editor emeritus of the Star, is a senior fellow at Massey College. Siddiqui.canada@gmail.com