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One of Stephen Harper’s most remarkable achievements in politics has been to navigate his way from the nativist, turban-queasy, anti-immigration policies of Reform to those of a modern party, supporting immigration and wooing the ethnic vote.

With his sidekick Jason Kenney scarfing perogies and papadums with equal enthusiasm, in 2011 Harper led the Conservatives to an even bigger victory among voters born abroad than he won among the general population.

To understand how significant this is, look south of the border. After their failure to win the White House in 2012, many Republican strategists worried that the party had a shrinking demographic base — essentially confined to American-born white Protestants. They urged Republicans to reach out to the country’s growing Hispanic population, many of whom shared the party’s values on family and free enterprise.

In that spirit, Marco Rubio, a Republican senator with presidential ambitions, urged compromise with Democrats on the Dream Act, which would have allowed many Hispanics who had arrived illegally as children to get permanent residency. His efforts were crushed by an anti-immigrant backlash in his own party, and his presidential aspirations were left in tatters.

So with his ethnic outreach, Harper has turned a trick that has eluded conservatives in the United States and elsewhere. Now we are about to find out whether the house that Stephen built here in Canada, including its immigrant pillar, can withstand the torque created by his “campaign of fear”, as his opponents have cleverly dubbed it.

And this is a campaign of fear. The government’s security bill C-51 is responding to genuine public concern about terrorism, for sure. But the Conservatives have worked hard to transform anxiety into something colder and darker:

The Conservatives’ Facebook page posted a meme of a supposed Al Shabaab terrorist threatening West Edmonton Mall. It was so similar to actual terrorist posts that some critics wondered whether it might not violate C-51 once the bill is passed.

Jason Kenney, of all people, tweeted a photo of Muslim women hooded and in chains, with a message about Canadian Forces fighting Islamic State. It seems the picture actually depicts a Shi’ite Muslim religious ritual. The Shi’ites and their religious practices are among the principal victims of Islamic State.

A Conservative fundraising email last week was titled, “Murderers in your neighbourhood?” Perhaps there are, but fewer than ever — given that the homicide rate is the lowest since 1966, according to Statistics Canada.

In another fundraising letter, the minister of immigration, Chris Alexander, said that wearing a hijab — a scarf some Muslim women wear that covers the head but not the face, a little like a nun’s wimple — represents a failure to embrace Canadian values.

The party may be consolidating the old-stock Canadian base that brought it to power in 2006. But it may also be turning off some of the new voters that lifted it to a majority in 2011.

All pretty unpleasant stuff. However, it does seem to have buoyed the Conservatives in the polls and the Conservative party in its fundraising.

But what does it do to the Conservatives’ ethnic outreach?

First of all, it’s important to understand that while the Harper government has had a generous immigration policy, its attempts to woo so-called ethnic voters have been narrowly targeted.

For a generation, the Liberal party floated on the votes of new Canadians to whom it appealed more or less indiscriminately with a combination of open-door immigration and a commitment to civil liberties. The Conservatives have tended to pick and choose.

In 2011, according to Ipsos Reid’s massive post-election survey, the Conservatives’ established a foothold mostly among the most well-established immigrants — those who had been in the country longer than ten years. The party’s appeal was apparently greatest among European immigrants, primarily Christians and Jews.

Many of these people are reasonably well integrated into Canadian life and now live in the suburbs — so they may not see themselves as the targets of the Harper government’s more acid tone of late. In fact, they may well share in the general panic about jihadi terrorists and urban crime which the Conservatives are stoking.

There is also some evidence that the Conservatives made inroads in 2011 among Korean and Chinese Canadians, as well as South Asians.

Still, the NDP seems to have won a plurality among visible minority voters in 2011. And even in their shattering defeat, the Liberals managed to hold on to most of the Muslim vote.

So one reading of the current fight over fear could simply be that the Conservatives are playing to their existing ethnic base while the NDP and the Liberals do the same.

But that assumes that immigrant and visible minority voters who are non-Muslim will take the generous view that the recent Conservative rhetoric is not directed at them. That doesn’t seem entirely likely.

Turbaned Sikhs, Lebanese Christians and brown-skinned Hispanics know full well — from looking south of the border, for starters — that when the mood turns ugly for Muslims, the racism that ensues doesn’t bother with fine distinctions. Visible minority voters are critical in many of the seats around Toronto and in the lower mainland of B.C. on which the next election may turn.

Even some Conservatives seem concerned about the tension between the party’s inclusive tone of 2011 and its nativist rhetoric today. The party may be consolidating the old-stock Canadian base that brought it to power in 2006. But it may also be turning off some of the new voters that lifted it to a majority in 2011.

This week, the Canadian Press unearthed a briefing note for a government MP that indicates the government worries its supporters might react badly to discovering how much it’s spending to resettle immigrants.

More dramatically, the Conservative MP and former Harper communications chief, John Williamson, embarrassed the party when he talked about unemployed white people being displaced by “brown” temporary foreign workers.

Stupid. Of course. Not just because it sounds racist, but because at least some of the “brown people” who vote will use it to connect the dots between themselves and Harper’s campaign of fear. That’s why several Conservative MPs criticized Williamson rather than close ranks around him.

Reputations hang on to political parties like original sin. The Liberals arguably ran a more fiscally conservative government under Chrétien and Martin than Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have done since. But the Liberals are still vulnerable to the charge of “tax-and-spend”.

The Conservatives worked hard over a decade to erase the stain of racism that attached itself to the Reform party. But it is resurfacing now, and that may have consequences that long outlast the election of 2015.

Paul Adams is associate professor of journalism at Carleton and has taught political science at the University of Manitoba. He is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

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