It looked as if it was going to be a lot worse.

In the early stages of the 2019 federal election, purveyors of racial and social division were in a giddy mood. Anti-immigration billboards popped up in cities across Canada, the fringe Canadian Nationalist Party (who advocate that Canada maintain a “European-descended majority”) got national media coverage, and swastikas were reportedly scrawled on campaign signs. A group of New Brunswick NDP operatives jumped ship to the Green party, in part because of concerns the NDP couldn’t counter a persistent belief among some voters that leader Jagmeet Singh is a Muslim, misinformation they calculated would cost the NDP votes. Meanwhile, Singh famously had to contend with being asked to take off his turban to look more “Canadian.”

Recall the 2015 election, perhaps best remembered as a referendum on whether a few Muslim women would be allowed to wear niqabs during citizenship ceremonies, with a subplot involving a proposed “Barbaric Cultural Practices” snitch line. On the heels of that ugly campaign, the 2019 election had the potential to become a massive culture war, with an unholy alliance of racists, nationalists and Islamophobes on one side, and everyone they hate on the other.

Fortunately, that war didn’t really materialize. If the 2019 election was about anything, it was probably about climate change, or about whether Canadians had confidence in Justin Trudeau’s leadership. The closet white supremacists who paraded around as free-speech warriors representing some make-believe majority of “real” Canadians should see the results of the 2019 election as a stinging rebuke. Canadians were asked who they are, and they answered.

After a strong performance in the leaders’ debates, Singh saw a surge in momentum that belied earlier concerns about whether Canadians could accept a visible minority as leader of a political party — especially one that many Canadians still believed was a Muslim.

Ultimately, Singh’s seat count is a mark better than Jack Layton achieved in his first round as NDP leader and compares favourably to some of NDP legend Tommy Douglas’s results, too. At a minimum, Singh’s success shows that his skin colour, or misinformation about his religion, was not a barrier to achieving fairly standard NDP results.

For mainstream political parties, who right now are looking ahead to the next election and trying to identify potential areas of growth, the lesson is clear. Canadians want less divisive rhetoric, not more. Because of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada and its well-publicized calls to cut immigration, we now know how much support there is for that idea: a mere 1.6 per cent of Canadians. It’s not exactly the untapped resource of voters that majority governments are made of.

None of this diminishes the enormity of work still to be done to confront the racism and prejudice that remains in our society. The several controversial incidents involving well-known Canadians that took place in this past year, most notably the revelations of the Prime Minister’s past use of blackface, prove just how much conscious or unconscious racism is ingrained in otherwise well-intentioned people.

There’s a lot we can do to continue to make progress.

First, media need to be a lot more judicious about how much airspace they give to extremists. Yes, it’s important to shine a light on prejudice — whether it is racism, sexism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or any other — and confront it forcefully, rather than allowing it to go unchallenged. In so doing, however, there is always a risk of providing fringe viewpoints with a platform — and the accompanying trappings of legitimacy — that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

It’s a balancing act we’ve gotten wrong a few times now, at various points along the political spectrum.

The now-forgotten Kellie Leitch got headlines for her plan to test immigrants for “Canadian values” and was portrayed as a front-runner in the 2017 Conservative leadership contest, but ultimately topped out at less than eight per cent of the vote. People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier was defeated in his own riding. Both politicians played some role in the national discourse, but clearly their overall support was wildly overestimated.

The Canadian Nationalist Party coaxed only three candidates across the country to run under its banner, and they managed less than 100 votes each. In retrospect, the cost of reporting on them, and creating an impression of a greater influence than they merited, clearly outweighed whatever was newsworthy about them.

Of course, far more dangerous than the easily ignorable rantings from the fringe are the true extremists, such as Alexandre Bissonnette, who murdered six worshippers and injured 19 others when he opened fire in a Quebec City mosque in 2017. Violence from far-right hate groups is a significant national security threat that deserves, and is finally starting to get, serious attention from law enforcement.

The rest of us should focus on the more systemic issues in which we all have a role to play. One of the most pressing battles against prejudice that needs fighting in Canada is against Islamophobia, an affliction whose prevalence many Canadians still do not acknowledge. But there are remedies.

Whether we hear it from politicians, media, friends or neighbours, non-Muslims must question portrayals of Muslims that either depict them as some sort of security threat (an empirically refutable prejudice), or as foreign Others who don’t share some imaginary marker of who counts as Canadian.

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We must recognize that Islam is not homogenous, and that legitimate theological debate about its tenets does not justify Islamophobia. We must demand greater accountability from security agencies to ensure they are not harassing innocent people and that Muslims, like other Canadians, have the benefit of due process. If we see that they are not, if another story like Maher Arar’s arises, we must harness our privilege and rally behind that person with all the political pressure we can muster.

The last few years have shown us that the bottom of U.S. political discourse is deeper and uglier than we knew. Now, we have a better understanding of the Canadian bottom as well. It’s deep and ugly, too, but at least it’s lonely. Let’s keep it that way.

Graeme Truelove is the author of “Un-Canadian: Islamophobia in the True North” (Nightwood Editions, October 2019

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