It is indicative of Canada's famously tolerant national character that the loudest standing ovation Prime Minister Jean Chrétien received on Monday night came when he departed from his primary theme of fighting terror, and began speaking of a parallel battle against discrimination. "Since September 11th, some groups and individuals have been the target of racial and religious slurs and even violent attacks," he told Parliament. "There is no place for this behaviour in Canada. The [new] anti-terrorism bill contains measures that will strengthen the protection of religious freedom and counter hatred based on race, religion and ethnic prejudice." To Arabs and Muslims, these are no doubt comforting words. But while the PM is right to denounce hatred and bigotry, we should not pretend that an effective fight against terrorism can be waged in a truly colour-blind fashion.

The fact is, those who plot the annihilation of our civilization are of one religion and, almost without exception, one race. Yet admitting this is a problem for Mr. Chrétien, for it conflicts with the doctrine of multiculturalism, which many Canadians treat as inviolate. Multiculturalism is a relativistic creed that assumes all immigrant cultures are equally tolerant, civilized and enlightened once you scratch the surface. In many cases, it requires that we turn a blind eye to the hatreds and pathologies that pop up disproportionately in some groups. We pretend, for instance, that the high incidence of domestic abuse, violent homophobia, honour killings, teen pregnancy and gang violence among certain communities is a result of external factors such as racism, disenfranchisement or poverty.

In peacetime, indulging this wilful blindness is a low-stakes game. But in times of war, such self- deception carries a heavy price. New Jersey police recently stopped using racial profiling to decide which cars to pull over and search, with the result that drug busts dropped by 55% on the Garden State Parkway in 2000. Making cops fight with one hand tied behind their back may be acceptable in the war on drugs. But who would accept a 55% reduction in terrorist arrests if that were the price of avoiding distinctions "based on race, religion and ethnic prejudice"?

We are not talking about imprisoning all Arabs, or all Muslims. We are talking about devoting a disproportionately large part of our investigative apparatus to these communities. We are talking about ethnic profiling at airports, the use of informants in suspect mosques (several North American imams have recently been implicated in terror activities) and tracing the expenditures of Muslim charities. This is a democracy -- no one goes to prison without being convicted according to the same rules of evidence and due process that apply to all. But our investigative resources are limited. And it is dangerous to pretend terrorists are diffused evenly throughout the population.

As an example of how the war on terrorism may be compromised by a reflexive adherence to multiculturalism, consider what might happen if a Sept. 11-type terrorist plot were to unfold in Canada. In 1999, when Mohamed Atta was attending Hamburg Technical University, he asked the student council to provide his coterie a room for, as he described it, "an Islamic prayer group." The request was denied. According to The New York Times, Marcus Meyer, a student council representative, was "suspicious that such organizations were cover for terrorist recruitment." Last week, however, I called the council offices near Hamburg and spoke with a member named Eake Schirrow. "The [New York Times] story leaves out something," he told me. "Mohamed Atta came back to the council a little while later and asked the group to [reconsider]. In the end, they gave Atta a room. The vote of the council was unanimous."

Was Mr. Meyer's original decision to deny Atta and his friends a room "based on race, religion and ethnic prejudice"? In part. At the time, Atta did not have a terrorist record. Mr. Meyer presumably based his judgment on the sum of other factors -- Atta's skin colour, his accent, his country of origin, his fundamentalist beliefs and the anti-Western creed he spouted. To Canadians steeped in the precepts of multiculturalism, such a judgment may smack of bigotry. Yet if such "bigotry" had won the day when Atta appealed the decision before the student council -- if more investigations were done, if the police had been alerted, if rooms had been searched and phone lines tapped -- 6,000 lives might have been spared.

Imagine if the student council of a Canadian university were to reject a request for a prayer room under similar circumstances. Despite the events of Sept. 11, the Canadian Atta would take his case to a human rights tribunal, and, no doubt, he would win. "This is about my life," Atta reportedly told Mr. Meyer in 1999. "If I cannot pray here, I cannot study here." The human rights complaint, not to mention the outraged, supporting editorial in The Toronto Star, practically write themselves.

In Ontario, we have recently seen another example of how the war on terrorism is being compromised by misplaced multicultural sensibilities. Earlier this month, retired Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, a security advisor to Ontario Premier Mike Harris, made the perfectly sound and obvious observation that Canadian airport staff should undertake more thorough checks on passengers arriving from countries that openly support terrorism. Screening resources are finite, and it is only logical they should be deployed against those who potentially pose the greatest risk. But Howard Hampton, leader of the provincial New Democrats, attacked the plan. Apparently, he would prefer that white native English-speakers from, say, New Zealand, are accorded the same level of scrutiny as Arabic speakers from Gaza or Syria.

While the war against Afghanistan may be over in a few months, the conflict between Canada's tolerant instincts and the need to snuff out terrorist cells at home will go on for years. Politicians, who endlessly and truthfully remind us that terrorists are aberrations within the Muslim community, seem to believe we can have our multicultural cake and beat terrorism, too. But notwithstanding the standing ovation Mr. Chrétien received on Monday, they are wrong. Multiculturalist pieties, however noble in the abstract, are a luxury we cannot always afford to indulge in this time of war.