A widespread debate on the “reasonable accommodation” of minorities has convulsed Quebec society and could set precedents that impact all of Canada.
Some observers have even suggested the debate could lead to “serious persecution of minorities,” particularly religious minorities.
The debate began with a series of somewhat minor incidents over the past two years. A Sikh student went to court and won the right to wear a kirpan at school. Some Hasidic Jews asked the YWCA to install tinted glass so women in shorts could not be seen exercising from outside the building. A Muslim girl was forbidden to wear a hijab or head scarf on the soccer field. A worker was asked not to eat his lunch containing a pork sandwich in the kosher cafeteria of a hospital. Some Muslims and Hasidic Jews objected to being interviewed by police personnel of the opposite gender or wanted driving instructors of the same gender. Some Hindu, Muslim and Jewish women asked to be seen only by a female doctor at medical clinics.
The legal term applied to many of these issues is “reasonable accommodation.”
However, “regular laws that govern the majority sometimes cause injustice if applied to a minority,” said Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal.
For instance, labour laws that might work fine for the majority might force another person to work on a religious holiday.
Therefore, courts and human rights tribunals have ordered institutions to make “accommodations” for minorities as long as those accommodations are “reasonable — as long as they do not cause undue hardship to the institution.”
For instance, having a school provide a private place where Muslim students can pray quietly at the times required by their religion would be a reasonable accommodation, but requiring the school to build a mosque for them would not.
However, said Elmenyawi, minorities are often asking not for accommodation but only tolerance. For instance, allowing a Muslim girl to play soccer while wearing a hijab does not cost anybody anything or require anybody to do anything other than just allow it.
Backlash
Nevertheless, court decisions in favour of reasonable accommodation over the past 15 years have created something of a backlash in mainstream Quebec society, especially when the majority have gotten the sense that the values of the minorities are being imposed on the majority.
The backlash became visible in January, when the small town of Herouxville adopted a “code of conduct” telling immigrants how to “integrate socially.” Specifically, it denied almost all efforts at accommodation, strongly defended women’s equality against certain religious and cultural practices and defended the use of crosses and Christmas trees as part of Quebec’s “national heritage,” though not as religious symbols.
When Mario Dumont’s Action Democratique du Quebec party began to gain ground by aligning with this backlash, Liberal Premier Jean Charest set up a Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences in February.
The Commission is headed by two well-known academics — Charles Taylor, a philosopher at McGill University and a practising Roman Catholic, and Gerard Bouchard, a historian and sociologist at the Universite du Quebec a Chicoutimi and brother of former Premier Lucien Bouchard.
The creation of the Commission did not prevent Dumont’s party from placing a close second in a National Assembly election March 26, which reduced the Liberal government to a precarious minority.
The Commission’s public hearings, beginning in August, have sometimes been dominated by mainstream Quebecois opposed to accommodation.
Glenn Smith, general director of Christian Direction, an evangelical resource ministry in Quebec, said the hearings have sometimes been a “collective catharsis” of Quebecois anxieties, a venting of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish feelings.
Elmenyawi went farther and said the hearings have become “a platform for racism and xenophobia.” He noted that since the Commission was established, 450 Quebec Muslims have applied to legally change their names, compared to less than 30 such applications after 9/11. While he is confident that a majority of French-Canadians are more tolerant, he said he is concerned that a desire for integration might lead to a demand for assimilation.
Political manoeuvring
The Commission’s hearings are scheduled to continue throughout the fall, and the Commission will issue a report in March 2008.
One of the early submissions to the Commission, by the Quebec Council on the Status of Women, recommended that the Quebec Charter of Rights be amended to give women’s equality rights priority over religious rights. Without waiting for the Commission to report, Charest announced October 9 that he would accept the recommendation and introduce the amendment.
Not to be outdone, newly elected Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois introduced a private member’s bill October 18 that would strengthen “Quebec identity” by requiring immigrants to have an adequate knowledge of French in order to run for public office, fund political parties or address the National Assembly.
Smith said the moves are an attempt by both parties to regain ground lost to the ADQ.
Serious implications
Political scientist John Redekop said the recent developments could lead to “serious persecution of minorities in Quebec” and to the sidelining of religion.
Some of the trends threaten basic democratic values such as freedom of religion and freedom of thought, said Elmenyawi, which would be tragic since “these are the values we came here for.” What is happening in Quebec could become “a trend all over Canada,” he suggested, adding, “I don’t want to be alarmist, but I am very worried.”
The largest religious minority in Quebec and the one that has brought the most cases to the Quebec Human Rights Commission is Protestant Christians. This is the reverse of the situation in the rest of Canada, where Protestants are often considered to be the majority and rarely take cases to human rights commissions, so Protestants are watching developments in Quebec carefully.
Context
The recent developments have to be understood against a backdrop of some fundamental Quebec realities, said Smith.
First is the fragility of Quebec identity. As a minority themselves, many Quebecois see their own language and culture as being threatened by the dominant North American culture. Thus, other minorities in Quebec are seen as advance agents of this dominant culture who need to be resisted.
Second, he said, is the ongoing secularization of Quebec society. Even though Quebec is the most secular province in Canada, Quebecois are continuing to “punish” the Roman Catholic Church which dominated Quebec life until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.
In this context, Quebecois tend to see Muslim subordination of women as a continuation of the previous Roman Catholic subordination of women and thus as a serious threat to women’s liberation. As a result, there is a desire to push God and religion to the sidelines and to establish “laicity,” a strict separation of church and state.
John Redekop added a third factor. While the legal system in the rest of Canada is based on English common law, Quebec’s legal system is based on the French civil code, which tends to be more concerned with protecting collective rights and less concerned with protecting individual rights.
Religious freedom
Redekop said he is particularly concerned with giving certain rights priority over other rights rather than trying to keep various rights in balance and allowing judges to decide each case on its merits. Since judges in Canada already have a tendency to tilt toward equality rights, he said, the amendment that Jean Charest has proposed could cause judges to neglect religious rights altogether and rule against them in every case.
In a worst case scenario, the courts could be asked to use equality rights to determine church leadership — forcing churches to accept women and possibly homosexuals as clergy — and to limit what is said in the pulpit, as well as to limit public demonstrations by churches and Christian organizations. Redekop said this is particularly concerning because some of these threatened rights are fundamental democratic rights “that allow us to even talk about matters.”
Monsignor Pierre Gaudette, general secretary of the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Quebec, agreed that “it is not acceptable to give one person’s rights priority over another person’s rights” and that there are many in Quebec who want to “send religion to the private sphere.” Still, he said he is confident that the Commission will be more open to religion. “We don’t think it will be a problem for the Catholic Church, but we don’t know.”
Smith said he also doesn’t think it likely that Charest’s amendment will be enacted or that the courts will uphold it. “They can’t shut down all 210 parishes in the Montreal area because the Catholic Church refuses to ordain women as priests,” he said.
Still, the marginalizing of religion is “a legitimate concern,” he added, because “religion is not private.” The secular assumption that goodness, loyalty and similar values are fundamental human traits cannot be supported, he said, adding that only religion can offer values that can transcend the here and now and overcome violence and racism.
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