[6] While the term can refer to Canadians who are descendants of settlers or immigrants who have lived in the country for one or more generations as then PM Stephen Harper said in 2015,[7] it is most typically applied to those whose families were originally from France or Britain.

For example, Liberal MP Stéphane Dion used the term in 2014 in the following manner: "If I'm fishing with a friend on a magnificent lake in the Laurentians ... and I see a small boat in the distance ... usually it's two middle-aged old-stock French-Canadians or English-Canadians.

[11][12] Some writers describe the effort to construct a Canadian identity encompassing First Nations peoples, old stock Francophones and Anglophones, and recent immigrants and their Canada-born descendants.

"[15] In 2007, Justin Trudeau, later Prime Minister but then a candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada, raised the ire of some commentators for using "old stock Canadian" during an interview, dismissing Quebec's claim of being a "nation".

"[16] In the 2015 federal election campaign in Canada, which was taking place against the backdrop of hundreds of thousands of refugees of the Syrian Civil War (2011-) fleeing to Europe, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper's use of the appellation 'Old Stock Canadians' created a media frenzy.

Tu Thanh Ha claims that Harper was trying to pitch to minority voters "by drawing a line between the law-abiding ones, whose social values also happened to be conservative, and the others, those who were portrayed as queue-jumping terrorist-sympathizing bogus asylum seekers.

"[24] In an interview with the Toronto Star George Elliott Clarke, a Canadian poet and playwright and a 7th-generation descendant of black refugees of the War of 1812, said,[25] "The true 'old-stock' Canadians are the First Nations and Inuit and Metis, followed by the many divergent ethnicities who were also present in colonial Canada, from African slaves in muddy York to 'German' settlers on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, from the Chinese merchants present in Nouvelle-France to the Portuguese and Basque fishermen of Newfoundland...Personally, I think the current Prime Minister is unsure about his own identity and possibly nervous about the true, multicultural, multilingual, multiple-faiths and multiracial Canada that now beautifully, proudly, lives and flourishes."