The Parti Québécois is turning Quebec into a xenophobic hellhole where the Charter rights of Canadian citizens to freedom of religion and freedom of expression are about to be revoked.
Meanwhile, the federal government, which should be protecting those citizens’ rights, is sitting idly by, contenting itself with making noises about this not being Ottawa’s problem.
The Quebec government has confirmed it wants to pass legislation that will prohibit all public-sector workers from wearing any religious clothing or symbols. The reason, as Premier Pauline Marois explains, is to preserve “our identity, our language, our institutions and our values.”
How the wearing of religious symbols by individuals going about their daily routine prevents French culture from flourishing is beyond comprehension. Why should Marois care if a Jew wears his kippah to work? How does forbidding a Muslim daycare worker from wearing her hijab preserve Quebec’s identity and language? Is Marois afraid the children might see the hijab, and realize there are other people in the world who are different from them?
Yet, the PQ has the gall to call this religious “accommodation.” True accommodation is allowing people to wear whatever they want — the way it should be in a democracy.
No, this is not about values or any of the other high-flown words the PQ may toss around. It’s about discrimination and hate. One appalling example illustrates it: Bernard Drainville holds the title of Minister Responsible for Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship in the Quebec government, a portfolio which, if Orwell were alive, he’d be kicking himself for not including in his novel 1984.
Last spring, Drainville got angry because the Montreal borough of Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which has a sizable Jewish population and is not in Drainville’s riding, makes a point of not ticketing cars that are parked on the streets around synagogues on the Jewish high holidays.
Why a provincial politician should concern himself about a municipal parking policy in a riding not his own is more than passing strange. When a provincial politician gets hot under the collar about where Jews park their cars a few days out of the year, the optics reek of anti-Semitism.
Drainville may be interested to know that Montreal’s Shearith Israel synagogue was established in 1768, and that records of a Jewish presence in the province go back 30 years before that. Jews are Quebecers as much as any francophone is.
Last spring, Drainville told Le Devoir that “if we want to be able to properly manage this diversity, we will have to give ourselves rules and common values.” The notion of “managing” diversity has echoes of other regimes in other times which also found ways to “manage” diversity, many of them highly unpleasant, and frequently fatal to the diversity who found themselves being managed.
The federal government, possibly fretting about its fortunes in Quebec in the next election, has shrugged off the matter as one of provincial jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, Drainville says the new law provides “a good balance between respect for individual rights and the respect of Quebecers’ common values.” What a joke. There is no respect for individual rights; when you legislate how citizens may dress, you’ve killed off individual rights.
If the legislation passes, public-sector workers should ignore it. They should continue to wear their religious symbols to work. If they are fined, which one assumes would be the method of enforcement the law would propose — since surely even the rabid dogs of the PQ would not make jail an option — they should refuse to pay.
The federal government needs to stop walking on eggshells around Quebec. The Tories must take their eyes off the ballot box. Forget the Orange Crush and squelch this intolerable crushing of Charter rights.
