(Bolding mine)
I have to stop you there, Ibn Warraq. If you’re still going with David Frum’s claim that English schools in Quebec are governed by a Protestant school board and not an English-language school board, I must repeat that this is patently untrue. Look at the website of the English Montreal School Board (which, granted, is only one of Quebec’s English-language school boards) and try to find anything about Protestantism in there.
Now at some point, recently enough, Quebec did have Catholic and Protestant school boards. But this was abolished. By means of a constitutional amendment. So according to Canada’s constitution, Quebec’s public schools must be entirely secular.
The President of the United States is as much a symbol of the state as can be. If he publicly makes statements that support a religious lifestyle over a secular one – which calling for God’s blessings upon America seem to be – we can interpret it as the state supporting a religious lifestyle.
According to the US constitution, Congress may not make any law establishing religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. And Ibn Warraq is quite correct that the document does not contain religious references. (I just checked, and it does surprise me, given the time period when it was written.) But what I say is that there are other ways – non-legislative ways – for the state to express a religious ideology.
So what do you make of Kimstu’s infamous anti-Muslim comments earlier in this thread? (No offense Kimstu, I’m just riffing on straight man’s inflammatory language.)
Honestly this (rather reasoned) opinion seems extremely similar, ideologically speaking, to what this bill was intended to address.
Well, why don’t you start? In another thread if necessary, or you can just PM me. Because right now I can think of nothing that’d qualify as an unusually anti-immigrant policy. Fact is, at work here I’m surrounded by immigrants. Not to mention that I’ve seen polls showing that Quebecers were among the Canadians with the most positive views of immigration.
I see your point, but I do not think that we actually do interpret it as the state supporting a religious lifestyle — in fact, the Supreme Court would naturally have to ban him from saying such things if it did, would it not? In fact, are there not formal presidential proclamations? Do they endorse religions?
Kimstu is not famous, and what she says thus cannot be infamous. It was a big deal at the time, and it was a blatant slap in the face to both Muslims and the Charter. “Infamous” is not an inflammatory term: the draft legislation alienated both immigrants and the rest of Canada.
I wouldn’t start at all, because (frankly) I read this board for fun, not to do homework. Conveniently, Citizenship and Immigration Canada has a blurb on the context surrounding the niqab ban that explains it perfectly well. They actually disagree with me, in that the author thinks the issue was overblown and temporary, but I think it still explains the differences pretty well:
[QUOTE=http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/publications/multi-state/section1.asp]
Finally, some commentators have pointed to Quebec’s recent “reasonable accommodation” debate as evidence of growing polarization. Stirred up by media reports of “excessive” accommodations of minorities, newspapers and radio shows in Quebec were dominated for a period of time by calls for a new, tougher approach to immigrants and minorities, and surveys showed widespread support in Quebec for this idea. For the first time in many years in Canada, a major political party (the Action Démocratique du Québec [ADQ]) ran on an anti-immigrant and anti-multiculturalism platform, and this proved to be a successful tactic, increasing their share of the vote and the seats. To avoid further loss of electoral support, both the Quebec Liberals and the Parti Québécois engaged in their own “get tough” rhetoric, denouncing “excessive” multiculturalism. (This dynamic of mainstream parties having to get tough to avoid losing support to an anti-immigrant party is of course precisely what happened in many Western European countries.)
For some commentators, this was the first crack in the wall – the first real sign of a European-style retreat from multiculturalism, and a harbinger of what was likely to happen in the rest of Canada. Indeed, federal Cabinet memorandums speculated about the possibility of a similar backlash against multiculturalism spreading across the country. And yet, two years later, we see no evidence that this backlash is spreading. No other province has had the same explosive debate about religious accommodations, or the same attempt to win votes by appealing to anti-immigrant views, or the same calls for abandoning multiculturalism policies. So far at least, it appears that the backlash against multiculturalism has largely been restricted to Quebec.
This is not surprising, since multiculturalism has always been less popular in Quebec than in other provinces, largely due to Québecers’ perception of themselves as a vulnerable minority within the anglophone sea of North America (I will return to this issue below), and partly because the anti-multiculturalist debates in France have more resonance in Quebec than in the rest of the country. But even within Quebec, it is now clear that the impetus of the anti-multiculturalist movement has ebbed. The Bouchard-Taylor report has shown that the original media reports of “excessive” accommodation were often wildly inaccurate, and it concludes that there is no need for a dramatic revision of the existing policy of accommodation.
While not everyone agrees with the Bouchard-Taylor report, the issue has subsided, and support for the ADQ has dropped. It now looks more like a case of temporary “moral panic” than the sort of sustained backlash that we have witnessed in, say, the Netherlands, where government reports called for dramatic changes to integration policy, and where anti-immigrant parties permanently changed the political landscape.
[/QUOTE]
If you want a history lesson, I dunno, read some Mordecai Richler?
Incidentally, I would agree with you that Québecois are quite welcoming to immigrants on the whole. But there is a bit of a political movement.
It makes me chuckle witnessing liberal minded people struggle with the idea that allowing lots of non-liberalsinto their countries might be problematic. They can’t complain about non-whites because that would make them bigots! What a bind!
Of course you should vigorously defend your values even if it means condemning behaviour by a non-white/non-western group.
Sorry, that Mordecai Richler line was a bit flippant. Richler was of course well-known for his (controversial) argument that Separatists were antisemitic — but I don’t think it’s so controversial to say that multiculturalism and Quebec’s language politics don’t mix well, and the outcome isn’t good for immigrants. Of course, it helps if you’re a Francophone immigrant.
ETA: Jacques Parizeau! How could I forgot him. “Money and the ethnic vote.” Indeed.
Except that most liberals don’t actually have any trouble condemning violent or oppressive behavior by a non-white or non-western group. Nobody here is trying to excuse or condone gay-bashing, honor killing, etc. etc., on the part of fundamentalist Muslim extremists.
What the illiberals like you and Valteron can’t stand is that the liberals insist on condemning the behavior of such extremists without condemning the racial, ethnic or religious group that they belong to. For the crypto-bigot illiberals, there’s no point in condemning the behavior if you can’t simultaneously insult the group.
If Valteron, for example, would simply stick to denouncing hatred and violence on the part of Islamic-fundamentalist radicals under the name “Islamic-fundamentalist radical hatred and violence” or the like, nobody here would be criticizing him at all. Everybody would simply be nodding in agreement with the assertion that violent radicals beating up gays or bombing newspaper offices is A Very Bad Thing indeed.
But instead, he can’t resist calling it “Muslim hatred and violence” tout court, being very careful not to limit the category to any particular ideological subset of Muslims who are actually the ones responsible for such behavior. If his expressions of indignation and outrage couldn’t be phrased so as to accuse and insult Muslims as a whole and Islam in general, he wouldn’t bother to make them.
Meanwhile, of course, he attempts to camouflage his bigoted rhetoric by periodically throwing in a disclaimer that it means something different from what it plainly implies: “Muslim violence is a serious threat! (Of course, I don’t mean that all Muslims are violent.) The growing presence of Islam in the west is a great danger! (Of course, most people who follow Islam are not dangerous.) Muslim sexual morality is antiquated and oppressive! (Of course, that doesn’t apply to every single Muslim.) WAAAAHH, WHY DOES EVERYBODY KEEP THINKING I’M A BIGOT?!!???”
A non-bigot would have no trouble being specific and accurate about identifying the actual group(s) he was condemning, such as “violent radical Muslim extremists”, “Muslim-fundamentalist supporters of terrorism”, “followers of this or that hate-spewing radical imam”, etc. But for bigots, making accurate specific condemnations instead of broadly sweeping generalizations just takes away all the fun of the thing.
Obviously it’s not illegal for him to do so. But it shows that separation of church and state is not as absolute in the US as people have claimed here. Why would this not matter, while the fact that the Canadian constitution mentions God matters?
OK, sure. But she says the same thing as the Quebec government, and a good number of Quebecers as well. And it’s undoubtedly a liberal viewpoint on the issue.
The fact is, a good number of Canadians, probably a majority, would have agreed with the position of the Quebec government. But Canadians as a rule are primed to consider everything that happens in Quebec in a negative light, as an example of intolerance and xenophobia. (Or as an example of waste; see for example Sun News’ recent bashing of Monsieur Lazhar, the Quebec film that’s currently a finalist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Here and reported on for example here.)
Remember: those are two nations with a rather conflictual relationship, and who live in many ways in disjoint media bubbles. It’s very easy for one side to set up a narrative about the other, and about itself as well, and to make every factoid fit into them. Even the jokes you tell about the other serve to reinforce the narrative. Most people don’t try to make the effort to really understand the other.
But for the sake of my mental sanity and blood pressure, I’ve got to stop giving a flying fuck about what the rest of Canada thinks. A snowstorm in Saguenay would probably “alienate” those guys.
Maybe so, but it’s always good to have somebody who can challenge what you “know”.
Now as for your article, I of course have many issues about it. For one, saying that the ADQ was “anti-immigrant” is misleading: I checked and this article mentions that immigration was actually “neglected” in the 2007 campaign. Still, it mentions that an ADQ government would add funding to the integration and francisation programs, which makes no sense if they were really against immigration.
As for multiculturalism, this article severely underestimates the backlash against this policy that we see in English Canada. Seriously. If Quebec has always been wary of multiculturalism, largely because it is seen as intended to reduce Quebec francophones’ role in Canada from “founding people” to “one ethnic group among thousands”, but a significant percentage of English Canadians view the policy as either too costly, or too tolerant of illiberal values.
And in any case, what is multiculturalism anyway? Your article suggests that it’s great but that Quebecers are against it, but when I ask what it means, all I get is some talk about Ukrainian parades or Jamaican festivals. Well, if that’s all it is, I can’t object to it either. Fact is, Canadians enjoy tokenism and “ethnic colour”. They like having people from all ethnic origins around them, in order to feel open-minded and xenophilic, as long as they’re not too different. The fact that street signs marked “rue Metcalfe St.” in Ottawa make the hearts of many Canadians swell with pride in their country, while the existence of Quebec, with those francophones who actually do live in French and who have a culture and values that are slightly different from theirs, weirds them out, is indicative of what I’m trying to tell here.
Never read him. Don’t especially want to read someone who hates me and my people. Anyway, if you think you can learn all you need to know about Quebec and Canada form Richler, you’re sorely mistaken.
And he was wrong. Probably quite xenophobic as well.
This makes no sense. Unless you’re trying to say that immigrants to Canada should speak English as a matter of course, and that in Quebec they may be expected to speak French is an undue burden.
Fact is, he was right. If anglophones and allophones weren’t overwhelmingly against independence, Quebec would have voted yes in 1995. And the federalist side did funnel a lot of money into the campaign, some of it against Quebec’s electoral laws. Of course it wasn’t something he should have said, seeing how it risked creating divisions instead of healing them. Which is what he should have been doing.
He may also think that Spaniards baptised Jesús and now called Yusuf are not white, but then, I’ve heard both “but you can’t be Hispanic, you’re white!” and “but you’re not white, people from Spain are not white!”