Any community, from a couple to a country, must involve compromise. A healthy, dynamic society learns to negotiate its way to common ground as demographics change through immigration.
A year and a half after the Bouchard-Taylor commission made a number of recommendations to help Quebec deal with its crisis of "reasonable accommodation," the good will needed for fruitful negotiation seems to be in short supply here. This week La Presse published the results of a poll in which 1,046 adults across Quebec were asked for their views on reasonable accommodation.
Ninety per cent were opposed to sex segregation in swimming pools; 81 per cent nixed the idea that someone could ask for a male or female driving examiner; 76 per cent did not want to allow religious insignia to be worn in schools. The same percentage did not want schools or workplaces to provide spaces for prayer.
But those figures, and the questions that elicited them, are unfortunately divorced from the way issues of accommodation are handled and resolved in real life. Few issues genuinely must be handled in yes-or-no, black-or-white, all-or nothing terms. The polarity of abstract poll questions is a poor reflection of the real choices Canadians must make on such issues, choices often replete with subtleties, other options, and opportunities for compromise. In the same poll, 87 per cent of Quebecers admitted that they never, rarely, or only very occasionally are confronted with situations requiring any sort of accommodation.
Many of the scenarios invoked in the poll could be resolved, we suspect, without a big problem. Anyone who wants a driving examiner of his or her own gender, for example, can wait until one is available, however long that takes. Many schools and workplaces have spare rooms that could be made available, if only informally, for prayer.
On the other hand, public swimming pools often have times set aside for children, mothers and tots, swimming lessons, adults doing lengths, etc. Fitting in women-only or male-only slots might not be possible. You win some, you lose some. That's the nature of compromise.
The key public perception underlying the lopsided numbers in the La Presse poll, we believe, is that some immigrants are unwilling to make sufficient accommodations of their own to the culture and mores of their adopted society. That's not all wrong. Accommodation needs to work both ways.