Chris Selley - I’m not quite sure what Quebec’s new Bill 94 means, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean what Premier Jean Charest and Immigration Minister Yolande James are saying it means.
Here’s Ms. James: “To work in the Quebec public service or to receive the services of the Quebec state, your face has to be uncovered.”
Here’s Mr. Charest: “Two words: Uncovered face. The principle is clear.”
And here’s Bill 94: “The general practice holds that a member of the staff of the administration of government ... and a person to whom services are being rendered ... will have their faces uncovered during the rendering of services.”
Huh? General practice? Oh: “When an accommodation involves a change to this practice, it must be refused if motives related to security, communication or identification justify it.”
So there will be accommodations, then? You sure wouldn’t have known it from Wednesday’s news conference. “There are some fudges,” University of Montreal political science professor Daniel Weinstock says of Bill 94. “And that’s a strange fudge.”
“It certainly doesn’t jibe with the public relations message they’re putting out there,” he adds.
In fact, the whole thing’s a bit inscrutable. The Montreal Gazette ran an article yesterday on the premise that the government intends to enforce a blanket ban on niqab-wearing women attending CEGEPs and universities — which would be an idiotic move, I should say, and counterproductive to the stated goal of assimilation. But while the law would cover such institutions, it’s far from clear which, if any, of the “security, communication or identification” criteria would apply there — or anywhere else for that matter. We know what happens when a Muslim woman refuses to show her face in a small French-language class, but what if she’s just sitting quietly in an anthropology lecture? What if she’s just asking a police officer for directions? For now, we are left to wonder.
Whatever Bill 94 means, though, I’m thoroughly uncomfortable with the impetus for it — which is nothing but ludicrously outsized xenophobia. Canadian Press reported this week that of 118,000 visitors to the Quebec Health Insurance Board’s Montreal office in 2008-09, there were all of 10 niqab-wearers asking for special treatment — at the Quebec City office, there were none. There must have been a hum-dinger of a cabane à sucre up Hérouxville way on Wednesday night, but this really shouldn’t be as big an issue as it is.
In some ways, it’s all reminiscent of the dementia that overcame Ottawa in 2007 over veiled voting: The government passed a law claiming to mandate visual identification of voters, but which actually didn’t; it pilloried the Chief Electoral Officer — with help from Stéphane Dion — when he dared point that out; it tabled another bill that also didn’t accomplish its stated goal; and then, as the issue died down (temporarily) in Quebec, it quietly abandoned the project altogether. It was an incredibly ugly chapter in the history of Canadian pandering, and so, one might argue, is Bill 94.
But though Mr. Charest is clearly trying to have his cake and eat it too, I have some sympathy for him. Where Stephen Harper and Mr. Dion were provoking an anti-Muslim backlash, the Premier is arguably doing the opposite. While the Rest of Canada struggles to wrap its mind around this unprecedented restriction on personal freedom, many of Mr. Charest’s political opponents are demanding far more draconian measures. If a statement of “general practice” and some doublespeak is what’s necessary to keep the wolves at bay, then so be it. But it doesn’t speak well of Quebec society that it’s necessary in the first place.
National Post
cselley@nationalpost.com