CHRIS LOWREY
SHAWVILLE Jan. 16, 2019
An online advertisement for a job posting at Shawville’s newly opened abattoir has stirred controversy online.
The Kijiji ad said the Abattoir les Viandes du Pontiac was looking for a Halal butcher. The ad said the person would have to be in good physical condition and a practicing Muslim.
An excerpt from the ad appeared on social media and the post quickly garnered more than 150 comments, most of them negative and some outright racist.
Several people said that it was against the Quebec charter of rights to require applicants belong to a certain religion. Others complained that the job ad was an example of a hidden agenda on the part of the abattoir.

But according to the abattoir’s new Director General, Shannon Drummond, the reason the new butcher has to be Muslim comes down to dollars and cents.
“With a Halal slaughterhouse, there has to be a person of the Muslim faith to do the actual slaughter,” Drummond said. “They do a prayer over the animal before it’s slaughtered – and it’s slaughtered in a specific way.”
Practising Muslims only eat Halal food because it is prepared according to rules laid out in the Qur’an.
The term Halal means “permissible” and can refer to several aspects of life covered by the Qur’an’s teachings.
In order for meat to be certified as Halal, the meat must come from a healthy animal, the slaughter must be performed by a Muslim and the animal’s throat, esophagus and jugular veins must be cut in one stroke.
“Right now, we have only one person who is able to do that,” Drummond said. “So for us, as an employer, you always want to have more than one person who can do one job.”
“You want to have people who are able to fill in for that person [if] they’re sick and also if we expand [and] go to an additional shift,” she added.
The only way the abattoir’s owners could get the funding necessary for the project was to apply for a Halal certification, abattoir owner Sofiane El Ketroussi said.
“The big picture is we want the Pontiac to be one of the niches of the Halal market,” El Ketroussi said.
He added that the non-Halal market is extremely competitive and dominated by much bigger operations. As a result, getting a Halal certification is what made the business viable.
Although some who commented on social media said that requiring applicants to be a practicing member of a religion is against the Quebec Charter of Rights, that is not the case.
While section 10 of the charter says that employers can’t discriminate based on things like religion, section 20 states that if there are religious requirements for a business, they are able to hire based on an applicant’s religion.
Others who commented on social media said that this was the first they’d heard about the Halal certification, despite the fact that the abattoir’s owners held a public information session in April of last year.
El Ketroussi said that 10 of the 11 employees at the abattoir are from the Pontiac.
“So I think it’s just a [situation] of people not necessarily knowing and understanding and one Facebook message being blown out of proportion,” Drummond said. “We can’t blame them if they don’t understand but that’s what we’re trying to do is educate people as well.”