Don Macpherson: Values charter is ‘conspicuously’ not about secularism
Don Macpherson
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By Don Macpherson, The Gazette September 11, 2013
QUEBEC - If the Parti Québécois government’s proposed
“Charter of Quebec Values” was really about the religious neutrality of public institutions under provincial jurisdiction, it would be a Swiss style of secularism.
That is, “Swiss” as in Swiss cheese.
The “charter,” as
outlined in a discussion paper made public here Tuesday, would consist of vague rules that would be interpreted subjectively and inconsistently, and with many exceptions.
So, for example, public employees would be allowed to wear visible religious symbols if the symbols were small in size, but not if they were “conspicuous,” whatever that means, to the local administrator making the decision.
Depending on the interpretation of the word “conspicuous,” the same symbol might be allowed in one office, but not the one next door.
There would be one rule for the boss, and another for the workers.
Provincial civil servants would be forbidden from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols because the government is supposed to be neutral.
But elected officials at all levels up to the premier, the head of the provincial administration, would remain free to wear them.
Other public employees would be allowed to wear even “conspicuous” symbols if they worked for any of the hundreds of institutions, including every municipality and borough in the province, that would have the right to opt out of the provision indefinitely. The exemption would be limited to five years at a time, but could be renewed an indefinite number of times.
School boards could also opt out, even though Democratic Institutions Minister Bernard Drainville
told reporters schoolchildren need to be “protected” against the sight of a teacher wearing a hijab because they are “vulnerable” and “susceptible to influence.”
Drainville confirmed that he had rejected advice simply to prohibit all visible religious symbols, regardless of size, because he wanted to allow small ones.
So the small crosses worn by devout Catholics would be
allowed, while the Muslim hijab, Jewish kippa and Sikh turban would not.
Similarly, Drainville said the conspicuous crucifix in the National Assembly and other Catholic symbols and names would be protected by one of several amendments to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
These amendments, Drainville’s
discussion paper said, would limit the “concepts of accommodation and excessive constraint” in the Quebec rights charter.
That “excessive constraint” is, apparently, the rights charter’s protection of religious freedom and against discrimination on religious grounds, in the private sector as well as the public one.
For, with the exception of the rules on religious symbols, the values charter would also apply to the private sector, where it would set hurdles intended to prevent religious accommodations.
The values charter, as described in the discussion paper, contains two damning tacit admissions.
First, by allowing so many institutions, theoretically representing the entire population, to opt out of its prohibition of “conspicuous” religious symbols, it admits the absence of a consensus on what “Quebec values” actually are.
And secondly, by establishing a double standard for religious symbols, favouring those of the Catholic religion over all others, it admits that it is not really about secularism.
One of the few Quebec commentators who supports the PQ values charter, Mathieu Bock-Côté, wrote on his Journal de Montréal blog that the crucifix in the Assembly is a symbol not only of religion, but also of identity.
“It represents the symbolic predominance of the historic French-speaking majority in the public space,” he wrote.
That’s what the PQ values charter is about. It’s about the supremacy of old-stock French-Canadians, and the ethnic nationalism characteristic of right-wing parties elsewhere in the world.
