Quebec’s secularism reigns supreme: Michael Adams

2017/10/28 Leave a comment

Michael Adams on the likely outcome of Quebec’s niqab ban. Not as sanguine as him given how these identity issues continue to poison Quebec politics:

Like Bill 101, Quebec’s (in)famous language law, Bill 62 is likely to be remembered for a long time, both within Quebec and elsewhere in the country. The reason is that the bill highlights differences between Quebec, where secularism reigns supreme, and the multicultural ideology embraced by the majority of those living in the rest of Canada.

Premier Philippe Couillard’s Liberal government is heading into a pre-election period and passed the law, which severely restricts the wearing of niqabs and burqas, to show Quebeckers that it cares about their core values.

A couple of generations ago, Roman Catholic Quebeckers en masse decided to no longer attend weekly service. After centuries under the religious domination of the church, the population flipped to secularism, as if overnight. The pews emptied, and good tee times became impossible to secure on the province’s golf courses on Sunday mornings.

One of the major implications of this radical rejection of traditional religious authority was the consequent embrace of gender equality. No longer would the daughter who could not find a husband be sent off to the convent to spend the rest of her life in service of a patriarchal church, wearing a black-and-white habit that covered her entire body, save her face.

When Quebeckers, especially former Catholics, see a Muslim woman wearing a niqab or a burka that covers the face, either entirely or except for her eyes, they see both their great aunt and a victim of religious patriarchy. And they don’t like it.

In this, they join their compatriots in France (and other Europeans) who have passed laws to ban a woman from wearing such clothing in public spaces, including on beaches where other women choose to go topless.

Canadians living outside Quebec may not like the idea of Muslim women wearing niqabs and burkas in public, but polls have found that a slim majority believe a ban is a bad idea, and no other province seems concerned enough to introduce legislation akin to Bill 62. One Ontario hospital, hoping to draw female talent, released an ad quipping that it cared more about what is in a woman’s head than what’s on it.

In the last federal election, when then prime minister Stephen Harper wished to deny a Muslim woman wearing a niqab the right to be sworn in as a Canadian citizen, public opinion, especially in Quebec, was initially with him. But then the Supreme Court weighed in, ruling that if she exposed her face to an agent of the Crown, she could be sworn in wearing her niqab.

This gesture, together with the “barbaric cultural practices” tip-line proposed by former Harper ministers Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander, also initially attracted public support. But then many people began to realize that their initial reactions clashed with their deeper-held values of empathy and tolerance. If these few women – and they only number in the few hundred across the country – really want to wear this clothing and they do no one any harm, then why the fuss?

The backlash to the backlash redounded more to the benefit of the crafty Liberals than the moralistic NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. Justin Trudeau sensed in the general public – and especially among the four in 10 of us who are first- and second-generation immigrants – that tolerance of difference was more Canadian than imposing strictures on religious garb. If the courts say it’s okay for a woman to wear a niqab, then so be it. A few years ago, the courts said it was okay for same-sex people to marry, and the rest of us quickly followed suit.

Canadians are generally open to immigration from around the world, believe newcomers are good for the economy, don’t take away jobs from other Canadians and don’t commit more crimes than others. Still, the majority of Canadians also believe that newcomers are not adopting Canadian values quickly enough, and those highly cherished values include gender equality and, in Quebec, secularism.

Where do we go from here? The Liberals passed Bill 62 to show they understand the values of the Québécois. But I imagine latitude will be left in the enforcement of the law, allowing for the kind of reasonable accommodation proposed by philosopher Charles Taylor and sociologist Gérard Bouchard in their report on these issues a few years ago.

Why? Because most people will respect the rule of law as expressed in the Quebec and Canadian charters of rights and freedoms; and because many will also be reminded of the treatment of women such as Rosa Parks in the Jim Crow U.S. South, and may reflect that it isn’t women dressed in niqabs, hijabs or otherwise clad who have done real harm to others, but rather young men of many faiths and no faith with a lot of hate in their hearts and a gun at their disposal. In Canada’s pluralistic liberal democracy, that’s the way values and democratic discourse have tended to mediate strident opinions.

Source: Quebec’s secularism reigns supreme – The Globe and Mail

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Quebec’s face-covering bill unites rivals who together question the government’s competence: Hébert

2017/10/27 Leave a comment

Chantal Hébert on the comedy of errors with Bill 62 implementation:

With the law that prescribes that provincial and municipal services be rendered and received with one’s face uncovered, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard has achieved the impossible. His Liberal government has reconciled the two opposite camps in the Quebec religious accommodation debate behind the notion that it is running a gong show.

A week after the adoption of the controversial law, one would be hard-pressed to find a good word about the just-adopted Bill 62 anywhere in the province’s media.

Even Quebec Liberal party insiders privately admit that they are flabbergasted by the improvisation that has attended the government foray into the religious accommodation minefield.

Over the past few days, Quebec Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée has offered conflicting interpretations of her own law, convincing critics that she is making up the rules that pertain to its application as she goes along.

Last week for instance, Vallée fended off allegations that her bill was discriminatory by arguing that the obligation to uncover one’s face to board a city bus would apply as equally to transit riders sporting large sunglasses as to the Muslim women who wear the niqab or burqa. They all would have to remove their face coverings for what she described as “the duration of the rendering of the public service.”

On Tuesday, Vallée walked back her talk, insisting that the prescription to uncover one’s face applied only to “interaction” between a citizen and a public servant. On that basis, most people could presumably board a bus or presumably take out a library book without showing their faces.

In Quebec, library cards do not feature photographs. Neither do transit passes except in the case of students and senior citizens who are expected to show proof of age to pay a reduced rate.

In any event, the minister assured that no one would ever be thrown off a bus on account of Bill 62 because — she said — someone who did not comply with the law would be left at the bus stop.

The minister’s convoluted explanations did little to reassure those who feel that the bill is a discriminatory solution in search of a problem. It is estimated that there are less than 300 Muslim women who wear a face-covering veil province-wide.

Moreover, as elsewhere in Canada it is already impossible in Quebec to obtain government-issued ID cards such as a driver’s license or a health card without allowing one’s picture to be taken with one’s face uncovered

Vallée’s latest take on her own bill also confirmed the fears of those who feel it is much too narrow

The PQ opposition is working on a more muscular version of Bill 62. It will feature the imposition of a secular dress code on public servants in positions of authority such as judges or police officers. The party also wants to explore the notion of banning face-covering veils from all public places. A pequiste government would use the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to shelter its law from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

The Coalition Avenir Québec also has proposals that go well beyond the Liberal law. Both opposition parties will campaign on their proposals in next fall’s provincial election.

Meanwhile, opponents and proponents of state-enforced restrictions on the rights of religious minorities are united in questioning the competence of the Liberal government.

It is increasingly unclear what constituency Premier Couillard expected to satisfy with the government’s ill-conceived law.

The premier does have a well-documented tendency to political tone-deafness. Earlier this month he seemed surprised and frustrated that a cabinet shuffle that left his ministerial frontline essentially unchanged did not elicit rave reviews about his government sporting a new face.

At the time of the shuffle, Couillard maintained Vallée in her justice role even if she had consistently seemed to be in over her head in that portfolio.

Over the past week there has been a chorus of calls for Bill 62 to be withdrawn in its entirety. It would be pretty unprecedented for a ruling party to shelf a law it has just used its majority to adopt.

Until it is replaced by a government of a different stripe or possibly struck down by a court, Bill 62 will likely remain on the books where it primarily stands as a token of political turpitude.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/10/25/quebecs-face-covering-bill-unites-rivals-who-together-question-the-governments-competence-hbert.html

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Why Quebec’s Bill 62 is an indefensible mess: Wells

2017/10/25 2 Comments

Another great analysis and critique by Paul Wells, going through the issues one-by-one:

Before we begin: Look, I’m one of the good anglos, the ones who’ve lived in Quebec (largely in French) (and enjoyed it), understand at least some of its distinct ways and can recite at least some of the catechism by heart. In this July column I walked readers through the Quiet Revolution and its revolt against the dominance of the Roman Catholic church, to help explain why attitudes toward so-called ostentatious religious signs are often different there. “The Quiet Revolution in Quebec was specifically a rebellion against religious influence,” I wrote then. “Progressive politics in many other parts of the country has been a politics of generalized tolerance; in Quebec progressive politics was often a politics of specific resistance.”

That column won respectful comments from many in Quebec and a long Reddit thread of the imagine-finding-something-so-reasonable-in-Maclean’s-of-all-places variety, along with heaps of scorn from some anglophone colleagues. Chris Selley at the National Post is still subtweeting.

Anyway, having thus re-established my credentials, I’m here to tell you that Bill 62, the so-called “Act to foster adherence to State religious neutrality,” is a ludicrous claptrap that the government of Philippe Couillard should withdraw before it collapses in court under the weight of its own absurdity. Here’s why.

The bill ostracizes behaviour that isn’t religious. Obviously inspired, or provoked, by the face coverings worn by a tiny number of women in Quebec who profess the Muslim faith, the bill hasn’t the guts to say, “Muslim women shouldn’t cover their face.” So it says instead that nobody may cover their face. “Personnel members of bodies must exercise their functions with their face uncovered, unless they have to cover their face, in particular because of their working conditions or because of occupational or task-related requirements,” the bill says. “Similarly, persons receiving services from such personnel members must have their face uncovered.”

This means, as we’ve seen, that if you cover your face for any reason except workplace safety, you can’t do work for the Quebec government—or receive its services—for the duration of the covering. The justice minister, Stéphanie Vallée, has said that this extends to sunglasses. Surely scarves, ski hats and beards are a no-no too. All of which is odd, because this is supposed to be about religious neutrality—it says so right there in the bill’s title—and yet no provision restricts any specifically religious behaviour or garb.

It permits all sorts of religious behaviour. Since the bill limits only face covering, it establishes no prohibition against public servants wearing crucifixes, turbans, kippehs or indeed any Muslim-associated garment short of a veil. So in seeking to establish “religious neutrality,” it forbids things that aren’t religious and has no effect on a wide range of things that are. Faut le faire, as we say.

It tells a lie about Quebec. The bill’s tiny number of supporters—almost all of whom say it is insufficient in itself but that it serves as a kind of handy limbering-up exercise for the really repressive anti-headgear measures that must follow—purport that it is valuable because it reminds everyone that state actors must refrain from identifying their religion, because “the State has no religion.”

But the State isn’t Leviathan, the aggregate total of all human activity on its behalf. In a modern democracy, the State is plural. The state isn’t colourless: it has the skin of whichever bus driver or file clerk you’re talking to at the moment. It isn’t dimensionless: it is as tall or short as the judge or cop you’re facing. It isn’t even devoid of political opinion, for its members are free to vote. And it isn’t faithless in retail, only wholesale. While the Quebec government has no established religion—never mind the crucifix over the Speaker’s chair in the National Assembly, it’s just there for dramatic irony—its employees are, of course, free to turn toward whatever deity they dread or cherish, or to ignore them all.

What they aren’t supposed to do, of course, is impose their religion on others. But that leads me to the bill’s worst outrage:

It reintroduces the coercive State. If the best (and still none too good) argument for Bill 62 is that “the State has no religion,” then it is absurdly out of bounds for the bill to dictate how the citizen must behave in her interactions with the government, on vaguely, passively-aggressively half-assed religious grounds. Even if every public servant in Quebec were made to read the collected works of Richard Dawkins, spayed or neutered, chopped or stretched to measure, issued the regulation skin tone, accent, wardrobe and whatever else were necessary to telegraph the State’s neutrality on a hundred relevant axes of faith, appearance, socio-economic status and whatnot else—even if you stipulate that the State may do that to its own emissaries, then it’s still really weird for the State to require an equivalent neutrality of the citizen.

Here we see Bill 62 dipping into the territory Richard Hofstadter described in his classic essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics: the odd propensity of groups to imitate, unconsciously, the behaviour they most despise in the opposing groups they fear or target. Hofstadter was describing anti-Communist groups in the Cold War United States, imposing the same secrecy, rigid organization and even penchant for falsification that they feared in Stalinism. But Hofstadter specified that the instinct was owned by neither the left nor the right, and that it wasn’t restricted only to Cold War contexts. The paranoid style is easy to spot in all kinds of contexts where people worry too much.

What’s wrong with Islam, after all? The Couillard government’s response comes in layers: (i) nothing, which is why the bill doesn’t name Islam; (ii) terrorism, though of course, most Muslims shun and hate terrorism, and at any rate, wearing a niqab on the bus has nothing to do with terrorism, so never mind; (iii) coercion—in this case, the belief that some women wear certain clothes because they know men who require it. Well, ain’t it the damnedest thing, then, that Bill 62 seeks to fight coercion with coercion. A singularly time-limited, bashful, unevenly applied, hypocritical coercion, but coercion all the same. Orwell said some things are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them. Similarly, some things are so reminiscent of the overweening Catholic Quebec state of the mid-20th century that only in the name of purging such authority could anyone dream them up.

The fear at the root of bills like C-62 and the substantially more odious Parti Québécois Charter of Quebec Values is that noxious ideas will spread: that the most backward and extreme interpretations of Islam will win converts simply by being permitted to exist. But that’s silly. There’s no perceptible rate of conversion to Judaism in Outremont simply because a lot of Hasidim live there. Muslims don’t make me Muslim by standing near me.

If the State has no religion, then the simplest way to express this principle—after unscrewing the crucifix from the National Assembly’s rear wall—is to forbid the active promotion of religion while on the taxpayer dime. Proselytizing, in other words. If the guy at the SAQ folds religious tracts in with your wine receipt, it’s okay for the government to say that’s a no-no. If your Jewish or Muslim doctor tries to trade a hernia operation for a conversion, that could be seen as going a step too far, and appropriately sanctioned. That all of this sounds ridiculous, because of course there is no doctor or liquor sales clerk who acts like that, is simply further evidence that there is no real problem here to solve.

The Quebec Liberal Party could have been the one to say so. But a characteristic of the Quebec Liberal Party, going back decades, is that it keeps forgetting that a “Quebec consensus” exists only to the extent that every player in the society’s elite chooses to play. On religious accommodations as on various elements of the national unity debate, if courageous leaders would simply say, “I disagree,” there would therefore be no consensus.

The Couillard government having failed to do so, it has fallen to just about every serious commentator in Quebec to point out Bill C-62’s obvious incoherence.  Many are doing it in a curious two-step: the bill is terrible, but isn’t it awful that those obtuse anglophones outside Quebec, with their worship of multiculturalism, don’t understand it. We are reminded that France has laws similar to Bill C-62. As if comparison were justification. As if any element of France’s relations between Muslims and the non-Muslim majority were worth copying. The enclaves where communities rarely mingle? The very low rate of integration?

Bill C-62 deserves criticism because it is a terrible bill. Its title doesn’t match its contents, it permits and forbids things with no logic, it would lead to a government whose actions would be less just and less coherent than they already are. I don’t associate sloppy work with any ideal of Quebec, and I’m surprised that some of the province’s politicians and commentators think anyone should.

Source: Why Quebec’s Bill 62 is an indefensible mess – Macleans.ca

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Loi 62: Vallée rendra publiques les règles d’application

2017/10/25 Leave a comment

I have sympathy for the public servants in charge of developing these rules, but good that the government will make them public:

La ministre de la Justice, Stéphanie Vallée, s’apprête à rendre publiques les règles d’application concernant l’échange de services publics à visage découvert, un document qui était à l’origine destiné à l’administration seulement.

Devant «l’escalade» des derniers jours, il est devenu essentiel de «bien communiquer et de bien expliquer» la nouvelle loi 62 à la population, a affirmé la procureure générale lors d’une entrevue de fond avec La Presse canadienne, dimanche.

Mme Vallée s’est dite étonnée des réactions parfois virulentes des Canadiens, à la suite de l’adoption de la loi québécoise sur la neutralité religieuse, mercredi dernier.

Elle a dit ne pas comprendre leur réaction, puisque son gouvernement avait annoncé ses couleurs depuis belle lurette, et que le débat fait rage au Québec depuis au moins 10 ans.

«Il faut repositionner la loi dans son contexte, a-t-elle déclaré, tout en lançant un appel au calme.

«C’est un principe qui fait consensus au sein des parlementaires de l’Assemblée nationale. Donc je vous avoue que l’interprétation donnée est assez particulière, parce qu’on a eu un souci tout au long du projet de loi de préserver l’équilibre et surtout de préserver les libertés individuelles», a-t-elle renchéri.

Un sondage Angus Reid, publié le 4 octobre 2017, démontre que 87 pour cent des Québécois soutiennent les objectifs de la loi 62.

La mesure législative prévoit que tous les services publics au Québec devront être donnés et reçus à visage découvert – notamment dans les transports publics et dans les hôpitaux. La loi permet toutefois des accommodements raisonnables, accordés à la pièce, et n’est pas coercitive, c’est-à-dire qu’aucune pénalité (amende, ou autre) n’y est inscrite.

Les règles d’application, qui seront publiées dès lundi ou mardi, viendront expliquer ce qu’est une prestation de services, et donc, concrètement, où, quand, et comment les gens devront se découvrir le visage.

Les lignes directrices quant aux accommodements raisonnables viendront plus tard.

Par exemple, les Gatinois ont une carte d’accès avec photo qui leur accorde une certaine tarification pour les services municipaux, a illustré la ministre.

«Lorsqu’il y a un enjeu d’identification, parce que la municipalité a fait le choix d’avoir une identification, bien il est certain qu’il sera tout à fait raisonnable de demander à la personne de s’identifier, au même titre qu’on le fait dans la loi électorale, pour s’assurer qu’il s’agit de la bonne personne qui a droit aux services publics», a-t-elle affirmé.

Le Québec trace le chemin, selon la ministre

Les premières ministres de l’Ontario et de l’Alberta ont été les premières à dénoncer la loi, cette dernière allant jusqu’à la qualifier «d’islamophobe».

«Je crois que ça va causer du tort à des femmes marginalisées et c’est très malheureux», a réagi Rachel Notley vendredi.

Le premier ministre du Canada, Justin Trudeau, leur a vite emboîté le pas, arguant qu’aucun gouvernement ne devait dire aux femmes comment s’habiller.

Si on ne veut pas que les femmes soient forcées à porter le voile intégral, peut-être ne devrions-nous pas les forcer à ne pas le porter, a-t-il raisonné alors qu’il était en tournée au Lac Saint-Jean.

Or, Mme Vallée a rappelé que l’obligation du visage découvert touche autant le voile intégral que la cagoule ou le bandana qui masquent le visage.

Elle a affirmé que si les politiciens canadiens étaient si mal à l’aise, qu’ils réagissaient si «rapidement», c’était parce qu’on était dans du «droit nouveau» et que le Québec traçait le chemin, tout comme il l’a fait avec sa loi sur l’aide médicale à mourir.

«Ce n’est pas facile de tracer la voie lorsqu’on légifère, lorsqu’on présente du droit nouveau; d’un côté comme de l’autre, on est la cible de critiques, de ceux qui considèrent qu’on va trop loin, de ceux qui considèrent qu’on ne va pas assez loin», a déclaré la ministre.

L’obligation du visage découvert n’a jamais été codifé au pays, à part en 2007, lorsque des amendements ont été apportés à la loi électorale québécoise. Le Québec pourrait donc servir de modèle, a suggéré la ministre.

Dans une lettre ouverte qu’elle a fait parvenir «à la société en général» vendredi, Stéphanie Vallée soulignait justement le «leadership» de son gouvernement, qui a osé établir des règles de vivre-ensemble, alors que la question des accommodements pour motifs religieux fait couler beaucoup d’encre ici, comme ailleurs dans le monde.

À ce stade-ci donc, pas question de reculer, selon elle. La loi 62 passera le test des tribunaux.

À M. Trudeau qui ouvre la porte à une contestation du fédéral, elle répond qu’il «serait dommage qu’on doive faire ce débat-là avec nos homologues fédéraux».

Mais s’il le fallait, le Québec «n’abdiquera pas» et défendra son droit de légiférer, ainsi que les éléments de sa loi, «bec et ongles», a-t-elle dit.

La ministre Vallée a indiqué en entrevue que le débat entourant la loi 62 était «vraiment l’illustration de la particularité de la société québécoise».

Elle ne croit toutefois pas fournir des munitions au Parti québécois, qui pourrait faire ses choux gras de cette affaire. La formation affirme déjà être «déçue» du manque de respect des Canadiens envers le Québec.

Source: Loi 62: Vallée rendra publiques les règles d’application | Caroline Plante | Politique québécoise

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Banning the niqab is bigoted and sexist. Or is it? Margaret Wente

2017/10/25 Leave a comment

Wente plays the contrarian:

If you’re a liberal thinker, you probably know where you stand on Quebec’s controversial religious neutrality bill. You hate it. Banning women in face veils from receiving public services (such as, potentially, riding the bus) is cruel, intolerant, unworkable, discriminatory, sexist, divisive, and an attack on religious freedom. The bill has been denounced by Rachel Notley, Kathleen Wynne, human-rights lawyers, Muslim groups, and nearly every opinion writer in English-speaking Canada. “Quebec’s niqab ban is a shameful sop to nativist voters,” thundered the Toronto Star. (The Globe’s editorialists oppose it, too.)

At least a dozen countries have passed similar laws. Some of them might surprise you. Take Norway – widely hailed as one of the most tolerant nations on Earth. The Norwegian government wants to ban face veils in all schools and universities, for students and instructors alike. “Face-covering garments such as the niqab or burka do not belong in Norwegian schools,” said the acting minister of immigration and integration. “The ability to communicate is a basic value.”

Then there’s Germany, whose leader, Angela Merkel, put out the welcome mat for more than a million immigrants and refugees. But that welcome is conditional. Germany should ban face veils “wherever legally possible,” she said last year. Why? “We do not want any parallel societies, and where they exist we have to tackle them.” France has banned face coverings in public spaces since 2011. In other words, not all countries with these bans are sinkholes of bigotry and oppression.

Can you be a progressive and also favour banning the niqab? Plenty of Quebeckers think so. A whopping 87 per cent of them support the bill, and many say it doesn’t go far enough. Despite the views of the Toronto Star, not all are knuckle-dragging xenophobes from Hérouxville. Yet the English-language commentary has been downright hysterical. According to the critics, women wearing veils will be kicked off buses in the dead of winter, denied life-saving medical treatment, and essentially cut off from life. As Warda Naili told CTV, “I will be a prisoner in my own house.” (Like some of the most ardent champions of the veil, Ms. Naili is a Western convert to Islam.

Niqab bans aren’t likely to spread to the rest of Canada – at least for now. It’s a Quebec thing. It has to do with secularization, the strict separation of church and state, and the obsession with preserving Quebec’s distinct identity. If the doctrine in the rest of Canada is diversity, the doctrine of Quebec is maintaining its distinct culture at all costs. As for religious freedom, it’s worth noting that even in Canada this freedom is not absolute. (We don’t tolerate polygamy, for instance.) Religious rights always compete with others, and even the European Court of Human Rights has agreed that the requirement to show one’s face in public is not unreasonable. As Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard put it, “You speak to me, I speak to you, I see your face, you see mine. It’s part of communications. It’s a question in my mind that is not solely religious, it’s human.”

What’s notable is that the views of the English-language commentariat are out of step not only with Quebeckers but with English Canada as well. Only three in 10 Canadians across the country support the right of women to wear face coverings. Is this proof that anti-Muslim sentiment is dangerously widespread? Or does it simply mean – as I believe – that Canadians want immigrants to fit in?

To be sure, Bill 62 is fraught with politics and hypocrisy. Although it is supposedly aimed at all religions, the only people it will affect are Muslim women. Mr. Couillard would like to be re-elected next year, and this improves his chances. One suspects he wouldn’t be too distressed if the whole thing were tossed out by the courts.

For what it’s worth, my own view is that you shouldn’t pass a law unless you need it – and given the handful of veiled women in Quebec, we don’t need it. But I could be wrong. Recently I talked with Roksana Nazneen, a Muslim from Bangladesh, who describes the growing embrace of the niqab in Quebec and elsewhere as an enormously regressive trend. “It fights integration,” she says. She argues that guilt-ridden feminists just don’t get it. They do not know what the niqab means and they should not be fighting for the right of women to self-oppress. And make no mistake: “The niqab means that men should not hear your voice.”

What kind of Muslim community do we want 10 years from now, she asks? And what will be the consequence of the backlash that would almost certainly be unleashed by the spread of Muslim religious conservatism? These are among the many questions raised by Quebec’s controversial new law. Some of its opponents might be wise to ponder them.

Source: Banning the niqab is bigoted and sexist. Or is it? – The Globe and Mail

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Quebec ban on face coverings a blatant violation of religious freedom: David Butt

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

At some point in time, the ban will be successfully challenged:

With Halloween imminent, people turn their thoughts to the good-natured duplicity of costumes. But there is a much darker duplicity afoot as well. Under the mask of pursuing “social cohesion” the Quebec legislature has passed a bill denying women the right to receive public services while wearing a veil for religious reasons. The law is a blatant violation of religious freedom guaranteed by the Charter of Rights, an exercise in oppression of a socially vulnerable minority and gender discrimination to boot. Quite a litany of legal lapses in one bill.

Our Charter protects religious freedom regardless of whether our beliefs are shared by a majority, a minority or nobody. It matters not if others think our sincere religious beliefs benign, wacky or offensive. The freedom to believe as we choose is protected nonetheless. To understand what is so wrong with this new law one must first accept, difficult as it may be, that people who hold religious beliefs we dislike intensely are just as free to hold them as we are to hold our own. Embracing diversity can be hard and challenging work.

Some religious practices can be limited by government. But the government must tread lightly. The limits must be reasonable and carefully tailored to pursue legitimate social objectives. For example, a religious belief that prohibits being photographed cannot exempt the believer from a driver’s licence photo: Driving is necessarily heavily regulated, so anyone wishing to drive must have a proper licence.

The Quebec government ban on veil-wearers receiving government services pursues no legitimate social objective and is not carefully tailored to anything. How does a Muslim woman quietly riding a public bus create any harm, or risk of harm, to the broader public good? She doesn’t. Nor is there any harm flowing from a Muslim woman using a library, visiting a hospital ER or getting a building permit from City Hall. So there is no valid objective pursued by denying these services to Muslim women who wear a veil.

Wherever photo ID is required, briefly lifting a veil to confirm identity is indeed a legitimate ask by those providing government services. But this new law goes far beyond such reasonable limits on religious freedom. The veiled woman might properly be required to lift her veil to use a photo-ID bus pass. But she should not have to keep the veil off for the entire bus ride. So the law is not carefully tailored either. It is a vastly over-reaching intrusion on freedom of religion.

If the Charter of Rights so obviously dooms this law to oblivion, why would the Quebec Legislature pass it in the first place? In fact, democracies function rather well on a certain degree of tension between legislatures and courts, which protect fundamental freedoms. Legislatures fulfill basic democratic norms by enacting laws conforming to majority views. The Quebec Legislature has done so here, where public support for the law hovers around 87 per cent. And it is for courts to do the politically unpalatable, but necessary, work of striking down bad laws that violate the minority rights of those lacking sufficient numbers for political clout. Such tension can be healthy in a vibrant democracy committed to both democratic rule and minority rights.

But the Quebec government doesn’t get off so lightly here. If we look at why people are so strongly and viscerally opposed to women wearing veils, we will see that the Quebec government is catering slavishly to the meanest urges of the voting mob, stooping to the lowest depths of democracy.

Behind much visceral opposition to veils is unwarranted fear of the unfamiliar. Veils make women perpetually unfamiliar in a shallow visual sense, and this allows the unreflective among us to wrongly build the irrational bridge from unfamiliarity to loathing. Sadly, that is what the Quebec government has encouraged. Anyone making the effort to know veil wearers will of course discover a rich humanity that whether agreeable or disagreeable, reduces wardrobe choices to near irrelevance and invisibility.

Also behind much opposition to veils is the infuriatingly persistent social tendency to tell women what their choices mean, and then impose that meaning on them. The Quebec government is paternalistically telling women that even their most thoughtful, sincere and highly individual religious choice to wear veils categorically denotes nothing more than mean-spirited rejection of the community that sustains them. And the government is then punishing these women for sending the message the government has told them they are sending. This is oppression, pure and simple.

At Halloween, the Quebec legislature has rejected treats in favour of a mean-spirited, insidious trick. Let us hope the courts will not be fooled by the legislature’s poorly crafted disguise.

Source: Quebec ban on face coverings a blatant violation of religious freedom – The Globe and Mail

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‘Problematic’ and a ‘dog’s breakfast’: Quebec face-covering ban panned by authors of landmark report [Bouchard and Taylor]

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

Always worth listening to Bouchard and Taylor:

A new Quebec law purported to deal with secularism and the accommodation of minorities is being called a “dog’s breakfast” of contradictions by one of the authors of a landmark study of the issue.

The other author of the study says it would be “problematic” in its application by health-care and transit workers.

In their 2008 report, sociologist Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor offered solutions aimed at assuaging concerns about the erosion of Quebec identity while respecting the rights of minorities.

The Liberal government’s Bill 62 on religious neutrality, passed in Quebec’s National Assembly on Wednesday, aims to address some of the recommendations laid out in their report.

However, speaking separately, both men say it misses the mark.

“It’s a bit surprising that a law that purports to be about secularism reduces it to one dimension — religious neutrality — and doesn’t explore separation of church and state, equality of religions and belief, freedom of religion,” Bouchard told Radio-Canada’s morning radio program Gravel le matin.

Bouchard pointed out that the law does not address the crucifix still hanging at the National Assembly.

Taylor had an even more scathing assessment. In an email, he called it “excessive and badly conceived, in fact, contradictory.”

The bill represents Quebec’s latest attempt to address the question of religious neutrality.

The separation of church and state is viewed as a central pillar of Quebec society, but successive governments have struggled to implement guidelines on what this should look like on a daily basis — with neutrality and secularism running up against religious freedom.

How will law be applied?

Bill 62 extends to municipal services, meaning Muslim women who wear a niqab or burka wouldn’t be able to take out a book from the library, visit the doctor or take the bus or Metro.

The guidelines on how the law should be enforced won’t be ready until next summer. The law also provides for exceptions to be made on religious grounds, though exactly how that would work is unclear.

All this makes the law’s application “problematic,” Bouchard said.

“A woman with a covered face who presents herself at the hospital emergency room, we’re not going to send her home if it’s life-threatening,” he said.

“Another scenario, the bus stops in winter and it’s –30 C, and the woman with a niqab is there with her two small children. Will the driver leave her on the curb?”

The union representing workers at Montreal’s public transit authority, the STM, has already said its members don’t want that responsibility, while civil rights advocates say the law infringes on freedoms enshrined under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In an email, Taylor pointed out that the province justified the law for safety, communication and identification reasons.

But, he said, none of those are at stake when someone takes a bus or is treated by a doctor in hospital.

“It’s a dog’s breakfast,” Taylor said.

Source: ‘Problematic’ and a ‘dog’s breakfast’: Quebec face-covering ban panned by authors of landmark report – Montreal – CBC News

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Quebec law banning face coverings is neither neutral nor constitutional: Emmett Macfarlane

2017/10/20 1 Comment

Good assessment by Macfarlane:

The Quebec National Assembly has passed Bill 62, legislation introduced by the Liberal government that bans public workers and anyone receiving public services from wearing the niqab or any other face covering.

Although it is described as imposing a duty of religious neutrality on public servants and people using government services, the new law is neither neutral nor constitutional. It is impossible to reconcile this law as anything other than the targeting of a minority group, a slightly narrower spin on the now perennial Quebec debate over the wearing of (non-Catholic) religious identifiers.

Much like past proposals by the former Parti Québécois government under Pauline Marois, the law here is defended on the grounds of Quebec secularism, but it is a perversion of secularism, which would normally see the state refuse to adopt or sanction particular religions over others. Instead, the version of secularism to which Quebec’s political class seems to adhere is simply anti-religion, and more specifically, religions not reflected by the giant cross hanging in the National Assembly.

Protections under the Charter

It is this systemically discriminatory aspect of the bill which will fail to meet constitutional muster under the Charter of Rights. For not only does the bill violate the freedom of religion guarantee, it undoubtedly violates the Charter’s equality rights protections as well. The ban takes effect immediately, but detailed guidelines for exemptions – specifically, religious accommodation – apparently will not materialize until next July. In the meantime, the government better hope no Muslim woman wearing a niqab is prevented from accessing government services, for the law is unlikely to survive a court challenge.

No doubt the government has attempted to shield the law from precisely this sort of legal challenge. The ban applies to all face coverings, not just religious ones. But rights are held by individuals, and where it may be constitutional to force someone to remove a winter scarf or a pair of sunglasses, governments must justify imposing limits on religious freedoms like wearing the niqab.

Niqab

You will not see the Supreme Court sailing into the text of the Bible or Qur’an to determine which religious practices are “legitimate” requirements and which are not. The test is whether a rights claimant has a sincere belief. (Luc Lavigne/Radio-Canada)

It is at this point that some readers might object: “the niqab is a cultural affectation, not a religious requirement!” But courts in Canada do not engage in theology when ascertaining whether someone’s religious freedom has been infringed. Religions are not monolithic, and adherents have a diversity of viewpoints on all sorts of religious rules and practices. You will not see the Supreme Court sailing into the text of the Bible or Qur’an to determine which religious practices are “legitimate” requirements and which are not. The test is whether a rights claimant has a sincere belief that their religion requires particular practices or traditions.

So what justification does the government have for this law? The justice minister has cited reasons of communication, security and identification. You will be forgiven for wondering if you missed the news about a rash of nefarious people riding public transit lately, for it is unclear what security-related issues are actually at stake. As for identifying people using public services, there haven’t been any issues when people legitimately do need to show their face, such as when obtaining driver’s licenses.

But let’s stipulate that courts will accept this rationale as a pressing and substantial purpose for limiting people’s rights (courts normally accept any reasonable-sounding government purpose). The crucial question will be whether the ban minimally impairs the rights in question, and the clear answer is no.

There is no reason, security or otherwise, that anyone needs to see anyone else’s face on the bus. Especially in Canada with its pesky winters. To meet the Charter’s requirements, the benefit of a law needs to outweigh the harms imposed, and here religious freedoms will be violated for entirely illusory benefits.

There is one other common objection to this analysis, and that relates directly to why the government might have a legitimate reason to ban niqabs specifically: that niqabs are themselves oppressive, as Muslim women may be forced to wear them by their husbands or fathers or even their broader communities.

Banning women from the bus

Proponents of this view like to present a niqab ban as the feminist policy. But it is telling that some people will argue they are defending women, while defending the state telling women what they can or cannot wear. It is also unfortunate for this particular brand of “feminist” that Canadian women who wear the niqab have explained their own reasons for choosing to wear it and most have denied they are being forced. It is at best patronizing, and at worst xenophobic, to pretend that all of these Muslim women in Canada are suffering from a lack of personal agency in this regard.

It is also worth noting that if any of these women are oppressed, subject to such misogynistic control by their husbands or fathers, the effect of the law will not be to free them from their shackles but instead will be to simply ban them from using the bus.

The state cannot impose freedom by restricting it.

Source: Quebec law banning face coverings is neither neutral nor constitutional – CBC News | Opinion

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Don Macpherson: The Couillard government’s anti-niqab bill gets worse 

2017/08/21 Leave a comment

Good pointed commentary:

Batman will not sit in the Quebec National Assembly.

This would be the effect of one of the amendments to the Couillard government’s proposed anti-niqab legislation announced this week. Bill 62, targeting Muslim women who wear facial veils, would ban giving or receiving public services with the face concealed. The amendment would extend the ban to MNAs, municipal councillors and school commissioners.

That Quebecers would choose a masked candidate to represent them is almost as hypothetical as the fictional cowled crusader leaving Gotham City for this province, acquiring citizenship, and running for office here on his record as a crimefighter. But then so was the possibility of a niqabi seeking employment in a public service.

Still, one can’t be too careful. That appears to be the thinking of the “bare-face” bill’s sponsor, Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée, to the extent she has thought about the bill at all.

Another of her proposed amendments would extend the original ban from the provincial public services to municipal ones, and to public transit. When a reporter asked Vallée the reasonable question of whether this would stop a woman wearing a veil from taking the bus, the minister was unwilling, or perhaps unable, to answer.

Her amendments would make what was already a bad bill even worse.

Bill 62 stigmatizes the tiny number of Muslim women in Quebec who wear facial veils. It encourages their persecution, like the harassment of women wearing Muslim head scarves during the debate on the former Parti Québécois government’s ill-fated “charter of values.”

It would enshrine in legislation the hypocrisy of Quebec’s “Catho-laïcité,” or Catho-secularism. One of Vallée’s amendments pretends that Quebec’s public institutions are founded on the separation of church and state, while the bill would preserve the crucifix placed in the Assembly to symbolize an alliance between the two.

The government pretends that the ban on face coverings in general does not discriminate on religious grounds. But its intent is given away by the fact that the ban is contained in a bill to restrict religious accommodations.

And the bill is useless, not only because it addresses imaginary problems, but also because its guidelines for handling accommodation requests are so general.

Not only is the bill bad policy, it’s bad politics, another demonstration of the sheer political stupidity of the Couillard Liberals.

It won’t achieve its political objective of settling the accommodations issue once and for all before the general election due by October 2018. The Liberals’ relatively feeble entry in the competition to defend the majority against the undesirables in their midst doesn’t go nearly far enough to satisfy the nationalist opposition parties.

It is nevertheless useful to them. Since it was presented by Quebec’s most diverse and least nationalist party, it gives political legitimacy to the restriction of minority rights.

Bill 62 is the Couillard government’s version of Bill 22, adopted in 1974 by Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government. As the first Quebec legislation restricting minority language rights, Bill 22 enabled the succeeding PQ government’s more draconian Bill 101.

Originally, Premier Philippe Couillard intended to get the accommodations debate over with at the beginning of his term. Instead, his government squandered its time, and begins the pre-election year fighting on ground favouring its adversaries.

Couillard continues to entrust that fight to a minister who has already shown she’s not up to it. Listening to Vallée’s poorly prepared news conference on her amendments this week was like watching somebody juggling blindfolded with running chainsaws.

The PQ and the Coalition Avenir Québec party, vying for position as the leading alternative to the Liberals in the election, can be expected to prolong the debate on the bill in the Assembly as much as possible.

And on his other side, Couillard was forced to back Vallée against Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, who indicated the province’s metropolis will defy her legislation.

Source: Don Macpherson: The Couillard government’s anti-niqab bill gets worse | Montreal Gazette

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Niqabs make witnesses more truthful? Not so fast, says critique of landmark Canadian study 

2017/01/16 Leave a comment

Strikes me as a valid critique but look forward to debate and further research:

A team of researchers schooled in deception has cast doubt on a landmark Canadian study which found that the wearing of niqabs actually improves courtroom truth-telling.

A critique of the study published this week claimed there were so many “limitations” to the niqab study that any move by the Canadian justice system to adopt its findings would be “naıve and misinformed” and could cause “irremediable harm to the judicial system.”

“The benefits of paying less attention to witnesses’ and lawyers’ facial expressions are neither theoretical nor empirically grounded arguments,” read the critique, published in Psychiatry, Psychology and Law and written by Vincent Denault, a lawyer and co-director of the Montreal-based Center for Studies in Nonverbal Communication Sciences.

Last year, a study out of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology directly challenged Canada’s Supreme Court ban on witnesses testifying while wearing a niqab.

The study, published in the journal of the American Psychological Association, had women don niqabs and tell lies while being questioned on camera. Then, volunteers were asked to judge the women’s truthfulness as compared to liars who weren’t wearing veils.

The results were that the veiled women were less likely to get away with lying.

“People were focusing on what the women are saying, rather than what they look like,” lead researcher Amy-May Leach told the National Post in July.

Most notably, Leach added at the time that “the courts were incorrect.”

The critique by Denault, which was co-written with deception psychologists in France and the U.K., criticized Leach’s methodology, asserting that the degree of truth detection may not have been as dramatic as depicted.

“The experimental setting improved the lie detection ability of the participants above chance, but the improvement is very weak,” wrote Denault in an email to the National Post.

But the main thrust of the paper was how the Leach study did not accurately replicate courtroom conditions.

For one thing, liars in the study were given only two minutes to craft false testimony, while under Canadian law a witness can practise their testimony for months.

The liars were asked “open-ended questions” rather than having to cope with the leading questions that would have been posed in a real cross-examination.

The women in Leach’s study were cast as impartial witnesses to a crime, when in reality most courtroom lying comes from either plaintiffs or defendants.

And the study only tested how a visible face affected truth-telling. “The function of witnesses’ and lawyers’ facial expressions goes well beyond the issue of lie detection,” it read.

Source: Niqabs make witnesses more truthful? Not so fast, says critique of landmark Canadian study | National Post

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