Two days, two tales of two candidates vying to lead the country, each so very telling.

On Thursday, Canadians — old-stock and new — found out that Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer holds dual American and Canadian citizenship. Ordinarily that’s shrug-worthy news.

But in the context of how the Conservatives questioned other leaders’ dual citizenship in the past, you could say their hypocrisy is eye-roll worthy.

In 2015, former prime minister Stephen Harper said about Liberal and NDP rivals Stéphane Dion and Thomas Mulcair’s Canadian and French citizenships, “I’m a Canadian and only a Canadian,” while Scheer sat silent. Perhaps he was studying to finish three out of the four courses he still needed to be an insurance broker.

Pre-Mulcair NDP were no better; they also held a parochial view about Dion’s dual citizenship.

In 2005, Scheer knew he had an American passport, lapsed or otherwise, when he questioned Michaëlle Jean’s legitimacy to become governor-general in a blog. “Would it bother you if instead of French citizenship, she held a U.S. citizenship?”

He was paying American taxes when he was elected to lead the party two years ago and he only began the process of denouncing his American citizenship two months ago — something that nobody is asking him to do.

However, there’s another more insidious societal dynamic at play here. When asked on Thursday why he didn’t come forward with this before, Scheer inadvertently hit the nail on the head. “I was never asked about it,” he said.

In that quote lies the nub of a profound problem of identity: who gets to be unquestionably Canadian?

Scheer was not asked because nobody thought to question his Canadianness as a white man.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is white. She was born in the U.S. and only came to Canada as a teenager in 1972. Nobody questions her belonging to Canada.

For people like them, citizenship in another country simply mean ownership rights, voting rights, taxes, perhaps. Their loyalty to Canada is never under scrutiny.

That is as it should be. Loyalty lies not on paper but in the conscience.

Yet, it isn’t so for everyone.

Their rival NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, born in Scarborough, Ont., is Canadian born, Canadian bred.

It has been exhausting just to witness how much Singh doesn’t get to be “only a Canadian,” to see him reduced in the broad strokes of public discourse to “grace on race” — whether it was his heartfelt commentary after images of Justin Trudeau in blackface appeared or his response to yet another racist comment on the campaign trail or the party’s response to a cartoon that denigrated him.

There are only so many ways to say the word “unacceptable.”

On Wednesday, as Singh was strolling through a Montreal market to meet voters, a man came up to him, leaned in — an instantly recognizable gesture to many Canadians of colour — and said, “You know what? You should cut your turban off. You’ll look like a Canadian.”

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“Oh, I think Canadians look like all sorts of people. That’s the beauty of Canada,” Singh replied.

It matters not a jot how the man — who told Singh “I hope you win” as he walked away — meant those words. However benignly delivered, they are vicious. Asking a man to destroy articles of faith central to his identity amounts to verbal desecration.

The incident was made public only because Singh happened to be wired to a media microphone. Who knows what other overt racism he faces away from the media’s eye.

Earlier this week a candidate from Maxime Bernier’s we’re-not-racist People’s Party of Canada tweeted a cartoon that depicted a transphobic image of Trudeau in a skirt and of Singh with a ticking bomb poking out of his turban.

There it is. The terrorist. The ultimate other.

Once again Singh was asked to respond. His party simply said, “This cartoon is obviously unacceptable.”

The Bloc Quebecois tested that line of acceptability when it blew a dog whistle rather shrilly. On Thursday, the party posted on Twitter Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet’s statement during the previous night’s French-language debate, urging voters to choose men and women “qui vous ressemblent”: “who are like you” or “who look like you.”

It is this blatant.

Trudeau, Scheer, May and Bernier get to talk policies and poke holes in their rivals’ campaigns, ideas and stories.

Singh has to do all of that and also continually explain and defend his being — his long hair, his articles of clothing, his identity, and do it without showing anger. This is what the burden of an emotional tax looks like.

Singh’s very presence on the campaign trail makes it impossible for Canadians to shield ourselves from the myriad forms of racism embedded in our society. Even the Americans — based on whom we derive our superior identity — were able to rise above skin colour a decade ago when they voted for a Black man to be president.

It’s us, the good, the polite and the nice “we don’t see colour” Canadians who are being felled by the most surface of differences.

Shree Paradkar , a columnist covering issues around race and gender, is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar

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