In Saturday’s National Post, Andrew Coyne argued that York University’s insistence on accommodating a student who didn’t want to work with women — even after the student in question abandoned the request for accommodation — is much the same thing as Quebecers insisting that some well-liked niqab-wearing daycare workers not be accommodated: In each case, Coyne argued, individuals had arrived at a mutually satisfactory outcome. In each case, other people nevertheless demanded that rules and regulations be brought to bear.
I agree. But interestingly, those aligned from left to right against the York student’s request, and against York’s decision, are also evincing a certain Gallic flair.
A new resolution approved by York’s sociology department, created in response to this recent controversy, stipulates that “academic accommodations for students will not be made if they contribute to material or symbolic marginalizations of other students, faculty or teaching assistants.”
In an editorial, the Winnipeg Free Press argued that while “reasonable accommodation is meant to level the field for the disabled, religious minorities or anyone with a special need … some values and rights are simply not up for negotiation.”
“It’s important for society to accommodate religious beliefs,” the Toronto Star‘s editorial board opined, “but there are limits to what’s acceptable.”
“Gender equality is non-negotiable,” wrote Sheema Khan in The Globe and Mail. “Allowing male students to choose not to interact with female students for religious or any other reasons is a serious step backward,” Daphne Bramham argued in the Vancouver Sun. “No to religious accommodation of any type at Canadian campuses,” declared the Star’s Rosie DiManno. “The claim of a student to vulnerable sensibilities rooted in religious faith should have no purchase on our judgment,” Craig Walker, head of Queen’s University’s drama department, wrote to the Globe.
“I don’t think a university should be accommodating such a demand,” said NDP leader Tom Mulcair. Justice Minister Peter MacKay likened York’s decision to “what we’ve tried to combat in places like Afghanistan.” “It’s nothing short of ridiculous,” Liberal MP Judy Sgro agreed. “This is Canada, pure and simple.”
York’s administration handled this badly, no question. By suggesting that an exemption from group work offered to an overseas student bolstered a local student’s religiously motivated request, it seemed to forsake any notion of professional or institutional judgment. (If a professor lets Student A defer his exam because he has crippling, infectious mononucleosis, must he offer Student B the same because he didn’t bother to study?) And the Dean’s suggestion that the professor in question protect his female students from harm by not informing them of the accommodation was just gobsmacking — a university official in effect saying, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
That said, this notion that it’s somehow un-Canadian to accommodate religious belief even if it offends or impinges upon other constitutionally protected rights is … well, incorrect. As needless and as poorly articulated as York’s decision was, had the student insisted upon accommodation he very well might have been vindicated. There is no hierarchy of rights in Canada. Religion is as protected as race, which is as protected as gender, which is as protected as sexual orientation — at least until we decide to make it otherwise. This is no secret: It’s why Muslim students attend congregational prayers in a Toronto public school cafeteria at Friday lunchtime, to take just one example.
In Quebec, people are divided on whether civil servants should be barred from wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols. They are much more united in support of certain other elements of the Parti Québécois’ proposed secularism charter: For example, a codification of how requests for religious accommodation should be handled and a stipulation that any religious accommodation be “consistent with the right for equality between women and men” — in effect, the very hierarchy of rights the above commentators are appealing to, yet which is nowhere to be found in our own sainted Charter.
If you ask me, Canada works pretty well as it is. But it would hardly be surprising if, in 2014, Canadians decided the days of giving bigotry or intolerance a pass just because it’s religiously derived are at an end. As discreditable as Quebec’s proposed Charter in large part is, its appeals to “Quebec values” are at least far more consequential than those of people in the Rest of Canada who decry religious accommodations as untenable when they are in fact fairly routine, and offer no solutions beyond denunciation.