It should not have come as a big surprise last week when Quebec’s minister responsible for the French language, Jean-François Roberge, called for the resignation or firing of Ottawa’s recently-appointed anti-Islamophobia representative, Amira Elghawaby.
Elghawaby’s alleged transgression came in 2019, four years before her current appointment, when she co-authored a newspaper column on Quebec’s Bill 21. The article referred to a poll that found that 88 per cent of Quebecers who hold negative views of Islam support the Bill’s ban on wearing religious symbols in public-facing government jobs. The accompanying commentary that anti-Muslim sentiment appears to have significant sway in Quebec was received as sufficiently hurtful to the people of Quebec as to warrant calls for her immediate dismissal.
Attacking the asker is a familiar reaction from someone who does not have a good answer to a question or criticism and wants to avoid a reasoned discussion that would reveal the flaws in their position.
We saw it from Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet during the televised English debate among party leaders in the most recent federal election. In her question to Blanchet, the moderator, Shachi Kurl, used the words ‘discriminatory laws’ to describe Bills 21 and 96.
“Those laws are not about discrimination. They are about the values of Quebec,” retorted Blanchet, effectively shutting down the conversation by casting her question as an affront to the Quebec people. Simple as that. And her important question about the protection of fundamental rights in our country went unanswered.
When a government enacts legislation that favours one segment of society over another on the basis of religion or language, it is pretty hard to see it as anything other than discriminatory. It is a choice the state is making to reward or punish citizens depending on their faith and the language they speak.
In a democracy, we should be allowed, even encouraged, to require our political leaders to explain how such legislation is not discriminatory. Yet, when someone attempts this, what we get in response is indignation. A sense of ‘how dare you insult the Quebec nation by asking such a question?!’ An echo of Quebec’s former sovereigntist-in-chief Lucien Bouchard’s petulant refrain, this is a provocation.
It is a strategy of intimidation where the stakes for stumbling through the Quebec nationalist trip wire are so great that leaders of all the federalist parties have steered well clear. The last to pay the political price for defending human rights in Quebec was Tom Mulcair who, in the 2015 federal election, was quickly passed by a resurgent Justin Trudeau who had carefully side-stepped the issue.
And very seldom does the PM wade into the quagmire that is the ‘notwithstanding clause’. But he did so recently.
“I do not think any province should proactively, pre-emptively use the notwithstanding clause,” he said in an interview a few weeks ago. “What they are doing is suspending fundamental rights and freedoms and preventing the courts from even being able to weigh in on that. As a government, we will always stand up for peoples’ fundamental rights and freedoms.”
Sounds good. And it might have come as a big relief to Shawville’s Mary McDowell Wood. Last year, she wrote a letter to the PM asking him what his government was going to do to protect the rights of the English minority in Quebec. She cited a passage extracted from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that is printed on the latest $10 bill:
Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination …
Unfortunately, a few months later, Mary received a response from the prime minister’s office advising her that, as the issue she raised falls within provincial jurisdiction, she should direct her concern to the Quebec justice minister.
That kind of advice plus ten dollars might get you a grande caffe latte with extra foam. But it leaves the question open as to whether the Canadian commitment to equality you can find on the back of a ten spot is even worth the paper it is printed on.
Charles Dickson
