By grasping at the Holocaust, our politicians set a toxic tone

David McLaughlin is a former chief of staff in Conservative party politics and governments.

Politics is not for the faint of heart, which makes it a compelling spectator sport. But Canada's already toxic election campaign is taking on a poisonous tone. It bodes ill for what lies ahead.

Beyond issues and ideas, the parties are framing the choice this Fall along the fault lines of values, history, identity, and memory.

It's familiar territory for U.S. and European elections, but their surfeit of history has typically been met by collective shrugs here. Our grievances have been mostly regional – energy and the controversial CF-18 contract in the West – with language and bilingualism providing our most common dividing issue across the country.

Seemingly no more.

The insertion of the Holocaust and whether one party's policies or another are ignoring the history of this most singular and tragic genocide in human civilization, is guaranteed to garner attention and stoke passions. It is too charged an example to avert voters' attention. Which makes it all the more deliberate that it has been used on both sides.

The Harper government's interest in history is more than casual. From celebrating the War of 1812, to renaming the Museum of Civilization to the Museum of History, to a new Victims of Communism memorial near Parliament Hill, to re-establishing traditional military uniforms and designations, the Conservative government has not been shy about highlighting history in fostering a more sympathetic conservative Canadian narrative.

History meets politics through denial or telling lies about what happened, and in mythologizing or telling heroic stories about events or people. Once fixed, it is virtually impossible to alter the political memory then in place. It becomes 'official'. All countries do this, including Canada.

In day-to-day politics in Canada, this is normally confined to the middle ground of values. Pollsters routinely ask voters which leader or party most reflects 'your values' on a given topic or just as a politician. Emotive appeals by party advertising reinforcing positive values of the leader compared to negative values of an opponent then follows. This right brain/left brain distinction between appeals to emotion over logic is well-established in political campaigning.

Today's terrorism fears and individual rights and freedoms concerns are a legitimate and necessary proving ground for a mature democracy to confront. It is a very 21st-century problem. How we reconcile these equally valid needs will tell us a lot about ourselves and our democratic institutions.

The danger is in how we do so, specifically, the arguments we use.

Sadly, few of us expect our politicians to use restraint and persuasion these days in their statements. Talking points, dismissive comments, and incendiary charges are far more common because they get reported in the media. 'Soft on terror' garners more attention than 'balancing individual rights'.

Already the damage is present. Minority fears among and about Muslim Canadians has been stoked. Anxiety, if not outright fear, about looming terrorist attacks has risen. The most important issue of the day is getting short shrift in Parliament with truncated hearings.

None of this must be inevitable. But as each party reaches for the political brass ring it is overreaching in its arguments and pronouncements, making it all the more inevitable.

Grasping at the Holocaust to prove two absolutely conflicting arguments – one for new anti-terror legislation and one against victimizing Muslim Canadians – shows both the danger and the absurdity of historical allusion in politics. Arguing that we are on a slippery slope and that another is just around the corner trivializes its historical and personal enormity. Its very singularity as a unique historical event makes it unassailable as truth but unavailable as argument.

The desire of our political parties to harness their opponents to unfavourable historical memory – to fix them with a negative 'official memory' such as 'the party of high taxes' – is common and understandable. The desire to ascribe historical complicity to a political opponent over one of history's most fateful experiences on the most tenuous of grounds is not and invites justifiable concern.

There is a way out.

To paraphrase the eminent historian Erna Paris from her book Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History, the recovery of fact and public accountability will "help return the moral compass as close to the centre as possible."