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And in all this disgraceful appeal to fear and intolerance McGuinty had the full support of the province’s progressives.

What makes Leitch’s intervention objectionable, rather, is that she said it: or rather, as with McGuinty, it’s the emphasis

So spare us, please, the wave of hot indignation at Kellie Leitch. I don’t doubt the Conservative leadership candidate is playing, as the phrase has it, dog-whistle politics with her as-yet-unexplained proposal to screen immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.” But there’s nothing particularly new in this, and though there are lots of reasons to object to it, her critics seem to have fixed on all the wrong ones.

It cannot surely be maintained that there are no such things as Canadian values, or even, as some have claimed, that there should not be (“our value is not to have any values” is self-rebutting). Every community, no matter how liberal, has some sort of shared understandings and beliefs. We express those values formally every time we pass a law. To say that certain values are broadly shared in a society is not to suggest that every person in that society believes in them, or must: only that most people do.

I see nothing wrong, then, with reminding ourselves every now and then of the values we share, the ideals to which we are committed — provided we stick to those on which there is genuine consensus. It is likely to be a short list: freedom, democracy, maybe a couple more. Otherwise we are trying to close debates that ought to be open, as if dissenters were unCanadian.

There is, alas, a long history of this. Leitch is hardly the first to invoke Canadian “values” or “identity” for political advantage. It was the special project of the Canadian Left for half a century, and remains a staple of their rhetoric (see: “American-style” anything). I have shelves full of books on The Canadian Identity.