Thread: Quebec town spawns uneasy debate

Accommodation of religious and ethnic minorities reveals ugly urban-rural split
Feb 05, 2007 04:30 AM
Sean Gordon
QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF

MONTREAL–The hamlet of Saint-Roch-de-Mékinac, home to 308 souls, perches on the banks of the St. Maurice River, hard by the verdant hills of La Mauricie National Park.

According to the most recent Statistics Canada figures, there are precisely zero foreign-born residents in the town and zero visible minorities, neither of which has deterred Saint-Roch's civic leaders from adopting a code of conduct for new arrivals.

The document, which was approved unanimously at a council meeting Friday night, mirrors a citizens' code adopted by nearby Hérouxville, which solemnly forbids stoning women, the donning of burqas, and wearing Sikh ceremonial daggers in school.

"This should have been done here long ago," Claude Dumont, Saint-Roch's elected mayor, said last week.

Dumont admitted he doesn't know much about immigrant communities and that "we don't live with them side-by-side here like they do in Montreal, but if I've chosen to live here it's because I like the way we live ... and I don't want it to change."

While the council decisions in Hérouxville and Saint-Roch have been vigorously attacked for being over-the-top, there is nevertheless strong public support for a discussion on how far a society should go to accommodate religious and ethnic minorities.

"It's actually a bit strange, because Quebec is the one place where this has been talked about and enshrined in policy for 15 years," said Université de Montréal professor Marie McAndrew, an expert on race relations and immigration. "But evidently the principles and guidelines haven't necessarily filtered down to public officials who should implement them.

"If anything, I would think that this debate would be happening in English Canada, where there is more ambiguity in terms of multiculturalism policy."

In recent months, Quebecers have been inundated with a raft of headlines, each detailing a seemingly more egregious controversy than the last.

A recent prime-time television debate on questions of "reasonable accommodation" – following a controversial poll that concluded a majority of Quebecers expressed some form of "racist" sentiment – drew more than 1.5 million viewers.

And the last week has been perhaps the stormiest period in Quebec's continuing struggle to reconcile the accommodation of minorities with the established rights of the majority.

Last weekend, the Hérouxville controversy broke in the pages of La Presse.

Last Monday, a Montreal police officer was hauled before a disciplinary panel for putting a tongue-in-cheek ditty on an Internet joke site that intimated immigrants who aren't happy with their treatment in Quebec should "head for the airport."

Then followed reports that a Montreal school board has been granting three extra statutory holidays for teachers who are observant Jews and Muslims, prompting the teachers' union to cry foul (the board said it is simply complying with a 1994 Supreme Court decision).

Last Wednesday, Quebec's automobile insurance board acknowledged it has adopted a policy of accommodating Hasidic Jews who insist that their driving test be administered by a male.

And then the capper: five other Quebec towns announced they were planning on following Hérouxville's lead.

In a release late yesterday, the Canadian Islamic Congress and Canadian Muslim Forum said they plan a joint complaint against the Hérouxville resolution listing behavioural norms, arguing the norms violate Section 27 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which calls for preservation and enhancement of Canadians' multicultural heritage.

Clearly, what some quarters see as special treatment is prompting others in Quebec to wonder whether the province has reached the outer limit of official multiculturalism policy.

Some of the rhetoric surrounding the discussion has been characterized as xenophobic, prompting warnings from race-relations experts about the dangers of going too far.

"There is a debate to be had on this issue, but there are really two discussions going on: one that is legitimate, and the other, among people like the mayor of Hérouxville, that is a major societal problem that politicians should do something about quickly," said McAndrew.

She also pointed out that controversies like the one swirling around Saint-Roch and Hérouxville deepen the rural-urban rift in Quebec, and exemplify the disconnect between those who actually live among minority groups, and those who don't.

And the former president of a group that represents rural municipalities fretted publicly that rural Quebecers have done themselves a disservice in allowing a handful of civic officials to paint them as xenophobic rubes.

Premier Jean Charest has brushed off the Hérouxville controversy as an "isolated incident," while Health Minister Philippe Couillard was more categorical.

"This in my view, is an exaggerated phenomenon that is linked with ignorance, with not knowing others," he said last week.

Action démocratique du Québec Leader Mario Dumont bristled at that characterization, and said there's nothing wrong with a majority standing up for its beliefs and traditions.

"(Accommodations are) going in a direction that, obviously and clearly, the people of Québec do not want to go and they're right to believe that it should not go there," he said.

Dumont's right-leaning party is proposing a policy revolution of sorts: a Quebec constitution that spells out rules concerning accommodations.

Dumont rejects the suggestion that Quebec is at a turning point in its inter-cultural relations.

"I think we had a number of successes in terms of immigrant integration and I think Quebec, in many areas, has done a pretty good job in that ... there's no panic here," he said, "but anybody who looks at the way things are evolving in the last year or so, it's obvious that things are slipping on a number of our common values."

And such sentiment is felt well beyond Quebec's borders.

A Léger Marketing poll conducted for the University of Ottawa's Law School and the Association for Canadian Studies shows that a large majority of Canadians disagrees with a Supreme Court decision that said schools cannot invoke blanket bans on ceremonial daggers.

And 48 per cent of respondents said the courts have gone far enough in protecting religious rights, and 23 per cent said they have gone too far.

Experts suggest the debate is at its fiercest in Quebec partly because of the natural affinity with France, which has confronted the question of secularization amid a clamour from its growing Muslim population.

There is also a demographic shift of sorts among Quebec's immigrants: 700,000 have arrived in the province over the last decade – almost 10 per cent of Quebec's population.

Some pundits have theorized that Quebec's rapid transition from church-dominance to secular modernity has left many, especially in rural areas, feeling adrift and nostalgic.

Others, like Couillard, reject that rationale, arguing for co-existence: "The problem that we see is that the majority of our citizens feels they are losing something. Our duty is to remind them that we are growing through the addition of these communities."

with files from La Presse

TheStar.com - News - Quebec town spawns uneasy debate

Hmm...I can see decent arguments for both sides on this.