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To gauge how remarkable a moment this was, we need only re-examine the frame, created a year ago during the 2015 federal campaign. It was the question of refugees — specifically from the Syrian civil war and the war with ISIL in Iraq – that dominated the 78-day contest. The debate over the niqab, the veil worn by a few Canadian Muslim women, rounded out a campaign that got away from the Conservatives early and stayed ahead of them for the duration.

It was in early October, three weeks before voting day, that the story broke of the Prime Minister’s Office having intervened in the selection of refugees from Syria. The subtext was that senior members of the Harper government, perhaps the PM himself, were unhappy with the UN refugee-selection process. The slam against them — which the Liberals and New Democrats seized on with alacrity — was that the governing Conservatives had prioritized Christian and other non-Muslim refugees over Muslims.

The next day, Harper defended his government’s policy, arguing it made sense to protect the most vulnerable, those targeted for the most horrific oppression, persecution, slavery, mass rape and mass murder by ISIL. That included any expression of Islam not recognized as theologically sound by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s monstrous caliphate.

Yazidis, of whom there used to be about 700,000 mostly in northern Iraq, are not strictly Muslim in an orthodox sense. The religion blends elements of Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Sufism (an esoteric strain of Islam) and Shia. That makes Yazidis apostates in ISIL’s theo-fascist conception, and thus marked for slavery and death, more so even than Christians or Jews.