Suppose you are a woman living in Quebec who wears a hijab. Would you feel safe at this weekend’s nationalist holiday celebrations, a week after the legislature passed a law implying that people like you can’t be trusted?
Premier François Legault said that if his Coalition Avenir Québec government didn’t pass Bill 21 before summer, Quebec’s “social cohesion” would be threatened.
The social fabric was already badly torn, however, by the Islamophobia legitimized by the legislation. Women wearing veils associated with Islam were reported to have been harassed in public, the objects of hostile stares and remarks, discriminated against in workplaces and public services, spat upon, their veils torn off.
The premier, whose moral leadership is as weak as his poll numbers are strong, said nothing about this. Only when an incident outside the Quebec City mosque where six worshippers were killed two years ago led to an arrest was he prompted to draw a line, finally, calling that incident “clearly unacceptable.”
This week, after Bill 21 passed, he was asked in a Radio-Canada interview whether there was a danger of ignoring the province’s minorities. “We have to be careful,” he said, but then immediately changed the subject. “At the same time, we mustn’t forget the majority,” he said, as if there was any danger that he ever would.
“To avoid extremes, you have to give a little to the majority. … I think it’s the best way to keep things from getting out of control,” he said, referring to France’s experience.
He ignored a warning from France itself. A prominent French politician, Ségolène Royal, said in an interview in Montreal that the experience to which Legault referred shows that feeding extremism may simply whet its appetite.
And that’s what was happening in Quebec.
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A well-publicized, anti-immigrant fringe group, La Meute (the Pack) was reported to be breaking up, partly because in Bill 21, it had achieved what a spokesman called “a great victory.” Who needs La Meute when the CAQ is in power?
A Montreal blogger who monitors xenophobia in Quebec posted a photo of a man who, the blogger had been told, celebrated the passage of Bill 21 by going into the street with a large Quebec flag and shouting, “immigrants out! Arabs out!”
The blogger, Xavier Camus, also reported social-media posts recruiting members of a “militia” to ensure the “respect” of Bill 21, and creating a page for reporting violators of the law.
The CAQ government may need Bill 21 vigilantes to enforce the law, like the Bill 101 hobbyists who go around looking for violations of the language law to report.
The minister responsible for Bill 21, Simon Jolin-Barrette, said the government won’t send “secularism police” into schools looking for illegal hijabs, but will have an inspector look into reports of violations.
To get those reports, then, he will need to rely on informants inside the schools, which suits the boyish-looking Jolin-Barrette’s Orwellian title of “minister of diversity and inclusiveness.” School administrators, Little Brother will be watching you.
It’s not only teachers who wear the hijab, and other government employees in “positions of authority” who wear religious symbols, who are affected by Bill 21, however.
It was easier than it should have been in a democracy for the CAQ government to sweep aside Quebec’s commitments to its minorities in its own charter of rights.
In an article in Le Devoir, Montreal lawyer Eric Mendelsohn argues that Bill 21 explicitly reduces an inclusive “Quebec people” to an exclusively French-Canadian “Quebec nation,” “expelling” the province’s minorities, which it treats as a threat.
And the province’s real opinion leaders, the Québecor commentators, declared Bill 21 only a first step in “Québécois identity reaffirmation.”
Legault said Bill 21 has restored Quebecers’ pride. So, how about you, if you live in Quebec? How do you feel on this Fête nationale weekend, when Legault’s Quebec is more widely and deeply dividedthan the province has been since the 1995 referendum? Do you feel proud?
