A First Nations teenager full of the righteous zeal of youth once pulled nationalistic rank on me while we sat around a fire drinking camp tea.

The late Chief Dan George intervened. He asked the kid how old he was, then he asked me how old I was — six years older than the teenager — then he told the kid with straight-faced irony: “He’s been here longer than you have.”

I remembered that when Prime Minister Stephen Harper parsed Canadians into “old stock” and lesser-status newcomers like me.

From my place on the hill, it’s the prime minister who is the newbie. I’ve been here longer than he has.

I arrived in Canada as an infant immigrant in 1948. Our future prime minister only arrived in 1959. He was still having his diapers changed when I took my first paying job — picking prunes for 37 cents a bushel.

Still, it’s a bankrupt argument to imply pre-eminence as a Canadian on the basis of who’s been here longer. A country is not a hockey team with veterans and rookies.

Claiming descent from “old stock” is offensive — like arguing English ancestry bestows a greater claim to “Canadian-ness” than Ukrainian ancestry; or that Cree ancestry bestows a greater claim than Sioux.

This is the 21st century, not the 19th. Ours is a pluralistic, democratic country striving to the ideal of equality. We’re not perfect but we are all Canadians together, not Canadians and conditional Canadians. At least, we were trying to be.

Now nativist claptrap pumped up by the prime minister himself provides convenient camouflage for those inciting prejudice, bigotry and racism while wrapping themselves in the flag of patriotism.

As respected Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi notes, this strategy is “unbelievably dangerous.”

Look, every Canadian came here from elsewhere (either physically or metaphysically) and 99.9 per cent of us won’t be here a century after we arrived. We are all just visiting.

This “old stock” versus “new stock” rhetoric is a cynical attempt to pit Canadians against each other on the basis of origin. We’ve seen this before. It’s victimized Irish, Jewish, Italian, Asian, Central European and South American immigrants.

This abuses the idea of our commonality. And that empowers the equally offensive concept of two-tier citizenship.

Who’d have thought 863,000 Canadians could go to bed secure in their Canadian citizenship and wake up the next morning to find government has put an asterisk beside their name. Unlike Canadians born here, immigrants and even, in some cases the children’s children of immigrants, discover that they’re now Canadians only at the pleasure of some politician.

Say you were born in the United Kingdom, like me and 126,000 other Canadians, and have dual citizenship. Even if you’ve never lived and never intend to live in the U.K., you can now be deported if government thinks it has cause. In fact, the new rules say that all you have to do to merit the asterisk is have a claim to citizenship elsewhere, so anybody with a grandparent born in the U.K. likely falls into this category.

Overnight, we have some Canadians discovering they suddenly have fewer rights as citizens than, say, native-born career criminals.

If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry is the rosy justification.

Oh? Maher Arar did nothing wrong and he got turned over to torturers. Eddy Haymour did nothing wrong and he was subjected to such cruel regulatory harassment by the B.C. government that he wound up in a mental hospital. Roderick MacIsaac did nothing wrong and the B.C. government helped drive him to suicide.

As the B.C. Civil Liberties Association points out in seeking a judicial review of the asterisk law, a Chief Justice of the United States put it this way 57 years ago: “Citizenship is not a licence that expires upon misbehaviour ... and the deprivation of citizenship is not a weapon that the government may use to express its displeasure at a citizen’s conduct, however reprehensible that conduct may be.”

Given government’s record, I’d say it’s entirely reasonable for any Canadian who isn’t of government-approved “old stock” — and who now wears the asterisk — to wonder on what trumped up grounds Big Brother might come knocking on the door at midnight.

shume@islandnet.com