“Let us be English or let us be French, but above all let us be Canadians.”

In Sir John A. Macdonald’s time, the tension between English and French concerned Canadian policy-makers. Today, a new cultural tension is undermining our social fabric — importing foreign conflicts onto Canadian soil through the growing power of diaspora politics. It should alarm Canadians from coast to coast.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent trip to India is a wake-up call. How did Jaspal Atwal — a Khalistani terrorist and a man convicted of attempted murder — become our government’s honoured guest?

The answer is deceptively simple: votes. Khalistani separatism — a radical nationalism seeking territorial secession from India — is a movement with disproportionate political influence in Canada. Former B.C. Premier Ujjal Dosanjh has been sounding the alarm for decades.

For his courage, Dosanjh was assaulted with a crowbar outside his office in 1985. Where Dosanjh has been courageous, federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has not. When asked by the CBC’s Terry Milewski, Singh refused to condemn Talwinder Singh Parmar, widely believed to be the mastermind behind the 1985 Air India bombing, the single deadliest mass murder in Canadian history. This is not Canadian politics as usual — it’s a frightening flirtation with ethnic nationalism.

And this style of pandering is not limited to Khalistani extremism. It is only the most recent example of the pernicious influence of diaspora grievances seeping into our national political life — and our political parties are all too willing to play along.

After all, playing along yields votes, and a motivated ethnic base can tip the balance in swing ridings. This is not another case of harmless politicking.

Instead of treating these communities as unhyphenated Canadians, our parties are pandering to the politics of grievance — grievance that has everything to do with ancestral conflicts and nothing to do with Canada. Political parties then reward community leaders with plum posts and seats in our legislatures.

During December’s historic protests in Iran, the Trudeau government’s silence was deafening. The notable exception was MP and regime apologist Majid Jowhari, who callously suggested oppressed Iranians appeal to their “elected government” — the same one beating them in the streets.

He expected brownie points, but he didn’t count on his constituents’ integrity: they condemned him for his cowardice.

We used to decry the two solitudes. Yet today we risk 100 solitudes. The very notion of common citizenship is becoming a relic of the past getting smaller in our rearview mirror. We cannot allow it to disappear.

Newcomers once yearned to leave their cultural baggage at the airport and become full, unhyphenated Canadians. A strong and shared Canadian identity was not viewed as colonial or racist but as the promise of a new beginning after harrowing experiences in ravaged homelands.

In pandering to ancestral conflicts and prejudices, our politicians are doing a great disservice to new Canadians. They are robbing them of the full richness of the Canadian experience: the deep and meaningful rootedness that comes from shared values steeped in history, and a shared commitment to writing the next pages of that history together.

Chesterton once wrote, “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” Canada has no claim to immortality. As our glib politicians parade around in foreign dress smiling for tomorrow’s newspapers, Canadians suffer silently as the sinews of our shared citizenship erode.

Such issues will undoubtedly provoke discomfort in our tranquil northern Dominion, but we must summon the courage and nerve to address them. In so doing, we must never yield to the demons of divisiveness but aspire to be nation-builders — embodying the spirit of generosity, sacrifice and audacity that has defined us in our finest moments.

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It is time we listen to the words of Sir Wilfrid Laurier: “Canada first, Canada last, Canada always.”

Karim Jivraj is a past candidate for Parliament and represented the Conservative Party of Canada at debates on Canadian identity, citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism. He lives and works in Calgary.

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