One tried and tested Republican dirty trick is to place an emotional issue, such as abortion or same-sex marriage, on the ballot as a referendum. Worked-up voters get diverted from the economy and other more relevant issues. The party’s conservative base gets motivated to turn up on election day.

The dynamic works even better if wars coincide with elections.

Stephen Harper has implanted his war on the Muslim jihadists and the not unrelated issue of a Muslim woman’s niqab into national consciousness in this election year. With a real war in Iraq and a phony cultural war at home, the NDP and the Liberals are having a hard time getting the economy, and the missing federal budget, back on the agenda.

With the niqab, the Harperites are scaling new heights of hypocrisy.

Standing on guard against the Islamic hordes, Ayatollahs Harper and Jason Kenney are reciting the sharia to argue that the niqab is not Islamic. Kenney says he has it on the authority of the grand mufti of Egypt, “the most pre-eminent sharia authority in the Sunni world,” and also of “a vast majority of Muslims that I’ve spoken with.” Harper cites “the views of the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims.”

Egypt’s mufti is a paid employee of a police state. It’d be useful to know how many of the one million Muslims Kenney has spoken to, given that his government boycotts that community and pursues a policy, copied from the old colonialists and contemporary authoritarian states, of cultivating a handful of pliant people, some of whom it funds and uses as props at press conferences and parliamentary hearings. It would also be interesting to know who, in Harper’s book, qualifies as a “moderate Muslim,” given that he classifies adversaries as enemies and has characterized two leaders of Her Loyal Majesty’s Opposition as terrorist sympathizers.

But none of that is pertinent. Nor is the fact that a majority of Canadians agree with Harper on the niqab. If a majority believed in some anti-Semitic nonsense, would he oblige?

Mackenzie King’s internment of Japanese Canadians and others in the Second World War was also popular. He did it, as Justin Trudeau said this week, “because people were afraid” — just as Canadians are about Muslims today.

It does not matter that Harper believes that the niqab is “rooted in a culture that is anti-women.” Several Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other practices, right here in Canada, are anti-women.

Even more irrelevant is whether or not the niqab is a religious requirement (Muslims have been arguing that for 1,400 years). It is of as little value as the proposition floated by some in the 1990s that a turban for Sikh males was not a requirement of the Sikh faith.

What matters in democratic, secular Canada is the rule of law — our law, not the law of some sacred text.

For the purposes of public policy, a religious belief is not what a mullah or a rabbi or a priest or a Harper or a Kenney dictates. It is what a believer sincerely believes it to be, according to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In Canada, it matters not whether the niqab is Qur’an-compliant but whether banning it would be Charter-compliant.

It is strange to be invoking theocracy to uphold secular values.

It is stranger still to be promoting gender equity when ordering what a woman should or should not wear.

It is ironic in the extreme that a law-and-order government is refusing to accept a Federal Court ruling that Ottawa’s ban on the niqab is “unlawful.”

Judge Keith Boswell said Kenney contravened his own ministry regulations that citizenship judges should administer the citizenship oath “with dignity and solemnity, allowing the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation thereof.”

But it’s a mistake to look for logic or consistency with this gang.

In 2009, the Prime Minister’s Office said of the niqab: “In an open and democratic society like Canada, individuals are free to make their own decisions regarding their personal apparel and to adhere to their own customs or traditions of their faith or beliefs.”

On Wednesday, Treasury Board President Tony Clement said that federal civil servants can wear the niqab.

But no one can become a Canadian citizen wearing one.

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That the Harperites are getting away with this nonsense testifies either to their brilliance in brainwashing a majority of Canadians or our collective culpability in being so easily manipulated because we have been whipped into anti-Muslim hysteria.

Muslims cannot be maligned any more than they already have been in the post-Sept. 11 era. Yet Muslim minorities in the West have reacted with remarkable equanimity, perhaps born of the knowledge that vile attacks on their faith and their identity dating back to the Crusades have made no difference to the inexorable growth of Islam and Muslims worldwide. What Canadians should worry about is the erosion of Canadian values by a government that’s displaying the same fascist tendencies as did the Parti Québécois with its charter of Quebec values and as do the Republicans with their bouts of bigotry against African Americans, Latinos and others.

I felt ashamed as a Canadian Tuesday when our prime minister thundered against a sole niqabi woman in the Commons and his trained seals on the Conservative benches bobbed up and down in delirious approval — the ugly moment transmitted on national television.

But there’s always a democratic antidote. Trudeau’s speech on Monday skewering Harper’s dirty tactics was a refreshing enunciation of the remarkable Canadian balance between “individual liberty and collective identity. We have created a society where both thrive and mutually reinforce one another.”

Yet, he bemoaned, “across Canada and, especially, in my home province, Canadians are being encouraged by their government to be fearful of one another. For me, this is both unconscionable and a real threat to Canadian liberty.”

As for the niqab, “cloaking an argument about what women can wear in the language of feminism has to be the most innovative perversion of liberty that conservatives have invented in a while. It is, of course, not the first time the most illiberal of ends has been packaged in the language of liberation.

“You can dislike the niqab. You can hold it up it is a symbol of oppression. You can try to convince your fellow citizens that it is a choice they ought not to make.

“This is a free country. Those are your rights.

“But those who would use the state’s power to restrict women’s religious freedom and freedom of expression indulge the very same repressive impulse that they profess to condemn.

“It is a cruel joke to claim you are liberating people from oppression by dictating in law what they can and cannot wear.

“We all know what is going on here. It is nothing less than an attempt to play on people’s fears and foster prejudice, directly toward the Muslim faith . . .

“What we cannot ever do is blur the line between a real security threat and simple prejudice, as this government has done. I believe they have done it deliberately, and I believe what they have done is deeply wrong.”

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