There is a delightful irony in the latest social engineering scheme announced by the Quebec provincial government.
“If the state is neutral, those working for the state should be equally neutral in their image,” said the minister in charge of the charter, Bernard Drainville, as reported in the Globe and Mail.
So, no Muslim headscarves, Sikh turbans, Jewish kippas (yarmulkes) and other “overt” religious symbols for the public service, says Drainville (whose name could be the answer to “What do the Quebecois call the emigration of some of the province’s best brains when the provincial government unleashes yet another social engineering scheme on its non-French-descendent citizenry?”). OK are “discreet” cross pendants or Star of David rings. No mention about tiny turbans or subtle skullcaps, though. Catholics have a divine right to wear crosses and Jews get a bit of a pass, but Sikhs and Muslims can go suck eggs, though, provided that egg sucking isn’t associated with their religious practices.
All this in the name of maintaining a secular society, say the law’s proponents. To be honest, I didn’t catch the name of the person defending the law on Jian Ghomeshi’s CBC Radio morning show on Friday, but I couldn’t help but smile at his response to a question about whether the large cross that adorns a wall in the Quebec parliament would be removed.
That would be ridiculous, he scoffed. It’s part of our cultural heritage, as is the naming of many streets and buildings in Quebec after Roman Catholic saints.
So let me get this straight — if your particular ethnic group is the first to arrive in a land (would it be hair-splitting to mention that Indians preceded French and other European settlers by thousands of years?) then your ostentatious use of religious symbols and names is “cultural heritage”. But the symbols of others who came late to the party are overt promotions of their religions and therefore a detriment to a secular society.
What happens when Quebec’s First Nations tribes decide to take offense at the use of Roman Catholic symbols and names? Can they call firstsies and have them removed? Oh, no, and not because they are in a minority, but because their people don’t form the government.
Isn’t Quebec really Canada’s least secular province? Isn’t Québécois culture closely intertwined with that of the Roman Catholic church? Don’t residents mark Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day as one of the highlights of the year? Isn’t it a statutory public holiday, giving workers a paid saint’s feast day off? How on earth does one explain away this very Roman Catholic celebration as fitting in with a secular society?
Quebec, with its desperate obsession with regulating language and now religious expression, seems to me to be in danger of becoming an anachronistic society, a living but barely breathing paean to a past that wasn’t particularly glorious. Unlike the Amish, though, who remain comfortable enough in their own skins to live as they did a century ago, Québécois, or at least their rulers, seem to want the best of all worlds. They want to be treated as major players in Canadian affairs, despite their disproportionately small portion of the population. They want to have all the benefits of modern society and yet to keep their feet rooted in the past. Most dangerously, they want to dictate personal behavior and dress, which is as wrong-headed as discriminating on the basis of skin colour or, well, religious belief.
I doubt that soldiers who fought along side turban-wearing Sikhs in the First and Second World War trenches spent much time worrying about the headgear.
We should all learn to play nice with others. Like it or not, it won’t be too many generations before the shoe is on the other foot and the scarf is on the other head.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.