OTTAWA — Two months after the killings at Charlie Hebdo, French President François Hollande’s popularity is again in free fall; the big boost he earned over his handling of the episode in January is little more than a fleeting memory.

Conversely the Front National — France’s anti-immigration party — is riding higher than ever.

With the first round of elections since the terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine to take place at the end of the month, two recent polls place the extreme-right party ahead of its more mainstream opponents.

For political analysts it is no longer a stretch to imagine FN leader Marine LePen as the candidate to beat in the 2017 presidential election. If anything the attack on Charlie Hebdo has brought her and her controversial party a step closer to power.

Canada is not France but nor is it a xenophobia-free oasis and the French developments offer cautionary lessons to its political class

The first is that it is hard to turn an event-driven spike in voting intentions into a lasting trend.

In the cold light of morning, long-held impressions inevitably resurface — as do some of the old habits that turned some voters off a party or a government in the first place.

It is one thing to have one’s flagging fortunes restored by an alarming development — as the ruling Conservatives did on the heels of last fall’s Parliament Hill shootings — and another to sustain momentum.

The other lesson is that it is a slippery slope that links collective fear with the selective fear of minority communities.

There was a time, not so long ago in this country, when it was fashionable in some quarters to suggest that if one scratched the surface of a francophone Canadian one would likely find a Quebec nationalist and, under that veneer, a separatist, and, below that latter surface, a potential terrorist.

It is on the basis of that dubious rationale that scores of law-abiding Quebecers were arrested without cause under the War Measures Act in the fall of 1970 and that Canada’s security services gave themselves a licence to play dirty tricks on legal organizations such as the Parti Québécois over the same period.

It was not limited to Quebec. When École secondaire Étienne-Brûlé, Toronto’s first French-language public high school opened in 1970, some of its opponents — including a few North York neighbours — considered it little more than a training school for terrorists!

Since the Parliament Hill shooting, the core Conservative message has been that Canadians have cause to be scared of an enemy in their midst.

On that basis the war on Islamic extremists in Iraq is portrayed as a preventive war against a domestic threat.

The same narrative serves as an underpinning for the government’s anti-terrorism bill.

But a government or a party cannot spend its time relentlessly warning against a fifth column without taking the risk that it will lead to witch hunts.

With every passing day the ruling Conservatives are at greater risk of trapping themselves in the web of fear they have been weaving.

It is less and less rare to hear people — including politicians — equate terrorism with fundamentalism and the latter with Muslims. From there, it is ultimately a small leap to visible minorities in general.

If you think that’s a stretch you may have missed the utterings of New Brunswick MP John Williamson as he criticized the temporary foreign workers program last weekend.

It makes no sense, he told fellow Conservatives at the Manning Networking conference, for Canada to pay for “whities” to stay home while companies bring in “brown people” as temporary foreign workers.

Williamson has since apologized for his remarks. But there is more than a slip of the tongue in his statement. It speaks to a racist vision of Canadian society that is at odds with Conservative efforts to make lasting inroads within the country’s cultural communities. It won’t take many more statements like those to undo all that hard work.

Williamson is not some maverick coming out of right field.

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In a previous life he served as the prime minister’s director of communications. He also ran the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

It is not always necessary to take a scissor to a country’s social fabric — as the Front National so consistently does in France — to rip it. Pulling at it one loose thread at a time can achieve the same result.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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