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This article was published 18/9/2015 (1831 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Editorial

Mr. Harper seemed to come so far.

He moved his party of Reformers to a more moderate space on sensitive issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

In 2011, his Immigration and Citizenship lieutenant, Jason Kenney, worked hard to build on the Conservative base by reaching out to visible minorities. In 2008, only three of the 143 Conservative-won ridings were where new Canadians lived. In the 2011 majority win, 20 per cent of the constituents in Conservative ridings were immigrants. Mr. Kenney’s efforts paid off.

When you see photos of Mr. Harper answering questions in the House of Commons, you can usually see right behind him Tim Uppal, the Edmonton-Sherwood Park MP nodding in agreement, resplendent in a bright blue turban. While Mr. Uppal has decided not to run again, his tenure as MP was viewed as a positive note for the Harper cabinet.

Mr. Harper has made a point of apologizing for past Canadian wrongs on issues of race. In 2008, he offered a full apology "to aboriginal peoples for Canada’s role in the Indian residential schools system." He apologized for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident in which hundreds of Indians seeking a better life in Canada were turned away. And he got some traction after an initial misstep on the Syria file by showing emotion when talking about Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old refugee found dead on a Turkish beach.

However, on Thursday Mr. Harper dealt a body blow to his party’s efforts to be open and tolerant.

It came down to the use of the words: "old stock Canadians." During the televised leadership debate broadcast out of Mr. Harper’s hometown, Calgary, the Conservative leader was responding to a criticism of the decision to clip health-care funding for refugees, a claim he denied.

"The only time we’ve removed it is where we have clearly bogus refugee claimants who have been refused and turned down," he said. "We do not offer them a better health-care plan than the ordinary Canadian can receive."

Mr. Harper ended with a statement that the policy is something new and "existing and old stock Canadians agree with."

Now, not much was made of this in the actual debate by either Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau or NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, but the Twitter-verse — often more interesting than leadership debates — exploded with Tweets questioning what exactly "old stock" means (along with references to a beer brand). Old-stock Canadians, as Mr. Harper explained on Friday, are "Canadians who have been the descendants of immigrants for one or more generations."

The term is loaded. It is referenced in a 1926 piece published in the North America Review by the newly installed Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans who said the Ku Klux Klan "gives expression, direction and purpose to the most vital instincts, hopes and resentments of the old stock Americans." In the 1960s in vote-rich southern Ontario, old-stock Canadians were those who had been farming in that province since the early 1800s and not the newly arrived Dutch who came after the Second World War. The distinction was clear.

In short, old-stock is a divisive term, aimed at categorizing Canadians by when their lineage first stepped down on Canadian soil.

It’s not clear if this was an accidental slip of the tongue by Mr. Harper, who was on the defensive as Mr. Trudeau badgered him about Syria. Perhaps this is something he would only say behind closed doors.

Or was it deliberate? The Tory campaign has brought in as manager Lynton Crosbie, an Australia seen as the architect of "dog whistle politics" — the use of code words that may seem benign to most but below the surface can be viewed as racist or distasteful in a bid to target specific voters comfortable with that world view.

Maybe that’s what’s really behind old-stock. A signal to voters Mr. Harper’s policies will protect "real" Canadians. Perhaps instead, he should re-embrace the Canadians who helped him win a majority in 2011. Not exactly old-stock.