"We receive them here, we feed them, we house them, we give them an education, and they don't integrate at all," Bazinet said into the microphone. "What do they do to accommodate? Nothing." As he sat down, many in the audience winced. But many others clapped ...
Comments like Claude Bazinet's have come with some frequency. "When I'm in Montreal, I don't feel at home when I see these veiled women on Côte-des-Neiges and Côte-St-Catherine," said Micheline Bélanger at the hearings in Rimouski. "I feel like I'm in Saudi Arabia, and I shouldn't. This is my country." Retiree Aimé Dion used his turn to speak at the hearing's stop in St. Jerome to denounce what he saw as an overrepresentation of kosher items in the aisles of his local grocery store. "When I eat, I want quality, not the benediction of a rabbi," he exclaimed ...
But the hearings have at least demonstrated how utterly conflicted Quebecers are on the question of how accommodating they should be to newcomers, and to cultural and religious minorities. And Quebecers aren't the only ones. The past few months have seen a number of high-profile incidents echoing the sorts of sentiments heard in Quebec. In Vancouver on Sept. 13, über-manager Bruce Allen, who represents the likes of Bryan Adams and Michael Bublé and who will be co-producing the opening and closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics, didn't mince words: Canada, he declared on his popular radio show, has "rules." "If you're immigrating to this country and you don't like the rules that are in place, then you have the right to choose not to live here," he said. If immigrants don't like it, "We don't need you here. You have another place to go. It's called home. See ya." ...
Since it was enshrined as official policy in 1971, multiculturalism has been worn by Canadians as a badge of honour even as its consequences have remained happily abstract. But if tolerance has long been one of the touchstones of Canadian identity, there is reason to believe our cherished multicultural tapestry is fraying.
Beyond the incendiary comments, the issue revolves around this question of "reasonable accommodations" of cultural and religious minorities, and where the limits should be drawn. Just how fraught the matter is became clear in this month's Ontario election campaign, when Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory found himself pounded in the polls when he advocated extending public funding to faith-based schools. For most Ontarians, this was one accommodation too far ...
Consider a recent SES poll on reasonable accommodations conducted for the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy. When asked if they agreed with the following statement -- "it is reasonable to accommodate religious and cultural minorities" -- a mere 18 per cent said yes. How many thought immigrants should "adapt fully to culture in Canada"? Fifty-three per cent. When it came to accommodating religious and cultural minorities in public places, such as schools, hospitals and government buildings, 37 per cent thought there should be no accommodation at all, with smaller portions accepting some accommodation but only six per cent advocating full accommodation. The numbers were even more striking for accommodation in the workplace, with 45 per cent saying there should be none, and just four per cent agreeing with full accommodation.
"By significant majorities in Canada as a whole, and by overwhelming majorities in Quebec, Canadians and Quebecers declare limits to reasonable accommodation," reads the poll synopsis.
The geographic breakdowns were indeed stark. A full 77 per cent of Quebecers thought immigrants should fully adapt (just five per cent said it was reasonable to accommodate), and in Ontario 49 per cent agreed (with just 22 per cent saying accommodation was reasonable). Perhaps suprisingly, given their relative provincial images, support for accommodation was highest in the Atlantic provinces, Alberta and the Prairies ...
Of course, religion, and the accommodation of religious minorities and customs, is the flashpoint at the moment. The issue has been on the boil in Quebec for decades, re-emerging in 2006 with a Supreme Court of Canada decision allowing a young Sikh student from Quebec to wear his ceremonial dagger to school. The decision effectively mirrored an earlier agreement between school administrators and the boy's parents, before lawyers became involved, but it remains a source of resentment, and is constantly referenced during the commission hearings.
But even before the hearings began there were signs of a growing belief among Quebecers that secularism has been sacrificed at multiculturalism's altar. Last winter, after the Hérouxville affair, a sugar-shack owner outside of Montreal received numerous threats when, in an effort to attract Muslim clients, he dared to remove pork from certain helpings of his pea soup and baked beans. In February, Quebec's human rights commission awarded ambulance driver Yvon Verreault $10,000 after he was asked to leave a kosher dining hall at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital because he had been eating a lunch of spaghetti with non-kosher sauce from his Tupperware container. (This last incident had newspaper columnists writing themselves into a lather about the demise of Quebec's secularism -- with a few notable exceptions. "Are Francophones, who form 88 per cent of the Quebec population and control its institutions, so fragile that their identity is threatened because pork is prohibited in a kosher cafeteria in a Jewish hospital?" wrote La Presse's Lysiane Gagnon.)
The list goes on: Hasidic leaders in Montreal ask a local YMCA to frost its windows to prevent young Hasids from gazing upon the female form. The YMCA agrees, only to backtrack once the news gets out. A soccer referee, himself Muslim, says a young girl can't play while wearing her hijab. Discrimination, howled team management; choking hazard, said the Quebec Soccer Federation. Most famously, the province's collective temper flared when Canada's chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand ruled there was nothing in the law preventing Muslim women from voting in by-elections there (or in federal elections, for that matter) while wearing a veil. All three federal leaders expressed consternation; Mayrand says he was enforcing a law Parliament had approved. Besides, the law was meant to accommodate not veiled women but write-in voters, who by definition cannot show their faces. So why all the fuss? ...
As unseemly as it may get, however, some version of Quebec's very public debate will have to take place across the country; immigration's demographic weight makes it inevitable. "In Quebec specifically, and in the rest of Canada eventually, there is going to be a broader discussion on what Canada is," says pollster Nik Nanos. If the polls, not to mention the litany of anti-immigrant aggression, are any indication, this discussion won't be pleasant. We may be loath to admit it, but a lot of us have some Claude Bazinet in us.
