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But there was no mistaking the undertone to this seemingly even-handed secularism. It wasn’t the idea of Protestant schools receiving funding, as Catholic schools always have in Ontario, that lit up the talk-radio shows or fuelled the whisper campaigns. It was all about the madrasas. Likewise, it wasn’t the kippa or the cross that supporters of the Values Charter had in their sights. It was the hijab, the niqab and the burka.

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So the Conservative campaign’s attempt to prod those same nerve endings, with its many and varied prongs — from the ban on wearing the niqab while swearing the oath of citizenship, to the tip line for reporting “barbaric practices,” to the battery of anti-terrorism bills — has its antecedents. Most political campaigns attempt to exploit some fear or another. It just so happens that at this moment in Canadian history the fear of choice is Muslims.

Parties do it because it works; or rather, it works if they do it right. It worked for McGuinty. It did not, in the end, for Marois. It may or may not for Stephen Harper. Why it works, and why it does not, is therefore a matter of some interest. It is too simple to say, as some have, that they are “playing on bigotry” or “appealing to the prejudices of a small slice of the population” or even “hate mongering.” It’s much more insidious than that.

The two-thirds or more of the Canadian public that polls show favour the niqab ban, for example, is rather more than a small slice of the population. I very much doubt you could rally such support for outright bigotry, and I don’t think that’s what’s going on. It’s not a hate campaign or even a fear campaign so much as a nervousness campaign. And it thrives not by appealing to intolerance, but to tolerance: not to our worst side but, perversely, to our best.