On Oct. 2 Canada’s Conservative government announced plans to enact measures aimed at stopping “barbaric cultural practices” if re-elected on Oct. 19. The proposals take aim at “polygamy, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation” and will create new Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) units in major Canadiancities as well as a tip line for citizens to report suspicious activity.

The Conservatives are portraying this initiative as an effort to “defend Canadian values and protect women in Canada and overseas from these heinous crimes.” In reality, the act is just the latest in a series of attempts to score votes by capitalizing off Islamophobia in Canada.

First, the Conservative government’s record does little to suggest they actually care about women’s well being; in fact, the Conservative government has either ignored dangerous and difficult conditions women face, or actively made them worse. More than 1,180 indigenous women in Canada have been murdered or gone missing from 1980 to 2012, and in a December 2014 interview, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the crisis “isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest.” In May 2014 Harper announced funding for safe abortions wouldn’t be included in a globe maternal health initiative because the practice is too divisive, despite the more than 47,000 women who die of unsafe abortions each year.

Harper has also cut universal daycare, stopped funding several women’s groups and shelters, and prevented the Canadian Human Rights Commission from hearing pay-equity complaints. In sum, Harper’s plan to target “barbaric” practices appears to be more of an effort to demonize the communities these women belong to than to help these women themselves.

The Conservatives are quick to point to the 2009 Shafia family murders, in which an Afghan immigrant (as well as his wife and son) were found guilty of killing his three daughters and one of his wives, as an example of why such measures are needed.

This case was largely framed as an “honor killing,” despite the judge simply calling it murder, and used by the conservative establishment to make it appear as though domestic violence is solely, or predominantly, an issue among Muslim communities in Canada. According to Alia Hogben, the executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, media attention made the murders seem like “something exotic, something foreign, as opposed to the fact that this was the murder of four women in Canada. I think it was because that separated us from them. People want to believe it’s other people doing this. Canadians don’t do this.”