Graeme Hamilton
Just as sowing division could serve the PQ’s short-term political goals, so could a Supreme Court defeat of its Charter of Quebec Values aid its long-term strategy to break with Canada.
MONTREAL — Premier Pauline Marois insists her planned Charter of Quebec Values is intended to establish clear rules and bring people together. But so far it has been more like a recipe for discord.
Quebec Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard says he was astonished when he read the remarks by Marois in a newspaper interview and asserts they are unworthy of a head of government.
“I almost could not believe it,” an incredulous Couillard said in an interview with The Canadian Press on Friday. “I had to read it two or three times to be sure.”
In her interview, Marois conceded that the France’s model of secularism “isn’t perfect,” Montreal’s Le Devoir reported, but Marois said that “in England, they’re knocking each other over the head and throwing bombs because of multiculturalism and nobody knowing any more who they are in that society.”
The charter will pit minority religious groups against the majority of old-stock Quebecers who, polls show, support the proposed Parti Québécois ban on such religious symbols as the Muslim hijab and Jewish kippa in the civil service.
Muslim leaders have linked acts targeting their community — including a Saguenay mosque splattered with what the attacker claimed was pig’s blood and women harassed for wearing the hijab — to the heightened emotions created by the PQ proposal, expected to be officially announced next week.
The social cost seems that much higher when one considers that the most contentious element of the PQ plan — the ban on religious symbols — would not likely withstand a constitutional challenge. But just as sowing division could serve the PQ’s short-term political goals, so could a Supreme Court defeat aid its long-term strategy to break with Canada.
Montreal constitutional lawyer Julius Grey has pleaded several cases before the Supreme Court of Canada that have established precedents concerning freedom of religion and conscience. In fact, Quebec’s current debate over the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities can be traced back to his successful 2006 defence of a Sikh boy’s right to wear the ceremonial dagger known as a kirpan to school.
