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Embers Afire
The Turban And
Quebec
 Consider
the message it would send to any new Quebecker if a Sikh member of
the RCMP stationed in
Rimouski was free to wear a turban - a right upheld by the Supreme
Court in 1990 - but his counterpart at the Sûreté du Québec was
forbidden from displaying any hint of faith affiliation. Talk about
a mixed signal, one that Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor knew
implicitly they would be countenancing in recommending that the
Quebec government require certain representatives - including police
officers - to refrain from wearing religious symbols at work.
The category of designated state employees is admittedly small. But
in calling on Quebec to ban, within its sphere of jurisdiction, a
practice that has been legitimized at the federal level by the
highest court in the land, the report tabled by the commission on
reasonable accommodation shows just how far apart Canada and Quebec
remain.
That’s more surprising than it sounds. Globalization might have
brought the two closer together, since both are immigrant societies
whose institutions are grappling with startlingly similar quandaries
about integration. Instead, the Bouchard- Taylor report underscores,
even encourages, the divergences. The 300-page report comes down
squarely in favour of
Quebec’s long-standing approach of interculturalism, with its
emphasis on a “common culture” with the French language at its
fulcrum, while calling the federal policy of multiculturalism a “bad
fit” for la belle province. No two societies ever adopt exactly the
same model of integration, but all have essentially the same goal:
ensuring their citizens live in harmony according to some shared
principles about basic rights and their expression.
It’s an open debate as to whether
France’s republicanism - which, for instance, prohibits hijabs or
kirpans in public schools - is any better (or worse) than America’s
Judeo-Christian melting pot at accomplishing that goal. But the
Canada-Quebec situation is unique, even for a federal regime, in
that it leaves newcomers torn between and asked to comply with two
competing visions of integration.
The Bouchard-Taylor report does nothing to ease this dissonance; if
anything, it promises to turn up the volume on it. The document
offers a compelling version of the factors that led
Quebec to slide into a dangerous and polarizing debate over
religious accommodation in late 2006 and provides an essential road
map to help ensure it never again goes to a place quite as ugly as
that one. But, surprisingly, it glosses over something rather
fundamental. That is, as long as
Quebec
remains part of the federation, newcomers to the province become
Canadian citizens - with all the rights and obligations that
implies.
It
is not enough to say
Quebec’s minority status as the only francophone-controlled state in
North America,
one apparently under chronic threat, exempts it from adhering to the
federal policy of multiculturalism. That’s likely not the impression
new Quebeckers come away with when they take their citizenship oath.
Ottawa makes sure of that. This is not an insurmountable problem.
But it is one that the report does nothing to address. Indeed, it
chooses to accentuate the differences by calling on the Quebec
government to enshrine in law a definition of interculturalism, the
doctrine - still nebulous to many - that has guided the province’s
approach to integration since 1990.
Interculturalism, according to Bouchard-Taylor, implies that the
ethnic and religious groups that make up the society nteract in the
common space according to some basic principles of liberal
democracy. According to the commission’s definition,
interculturalism differs from multiculturalism
in
that the latter “can lead to the idea that the common identity of a
society is defined exclusively with reference to political
principles rather than by a culture, an ethnicity or a history.”
Multiculturalism is laissezfaire. Interculturalism is a bit more
dirigiste. The four-century-old struggle of the Québécois to forge,
protect and assert their identity demonstrates, however, that there
is more than mere jargon at play here. Anyone who witnessed the
public hearings that Prof. Bouchard and Prof. Taylor held last fall
across
Quebec knows how viscerally Quebeckers experience these matters.
This is why you can already predict Quebeckers’ reaction the day
that ban on Sûreté du Québec officers wearing turbans, should it
ever be enacted into law, is overturned by the Supreme Court - as it
surely would be.
In
Quebec,
the embers are never dead. The report may even stir them up.
Excerpted from Globe and Mail
28
May,
2008
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