Canadian experts say incident involving a Hindu sect and the Eiffel Tower would not happen in this country

2026/09/17 2 Comments

But it did in in 2014 (CBSA allowed religious travellers to avoid female guards), which generated considerable media attention and condemnation:

A Hindu temple grand opening in France has turned into a global controversy over whether followers of the Swaminarayan sect asked female employees not to be present during a delegation’s Sept. 6 visit to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The Hindu sect, the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), has a substantial following in Canada, but constitutional law and workplace experts say this country’s human rights and anti-discrimination laws would prevent a similar incident from happening here.

BAPS, which originated in the Indian state of Gujarat, has a strong following in Canada and has been expanding. A Toronto temple was built in 2007 and the Calgary temple was built in 2021. A third one is under construction in Belleville, Ont.

If a similar request were made in Canada — to ask female staff members to step away from their positions — the guiding legal principle would be the “duty to accommodate” outlined in human rights codes, according to Pearl Eliadis, a human rights lawyer and associate professor at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal.

Eliadis said Canada’s duty to accommodate, the legal principle that requires employers to make room for an employee’s religious or medical needs, likely does not apply to a case like this because the request would come from a visiting third party rather than an employee needing protection. …

Source: Canadian experts say incident involving a Hindu sect and the Eiffel Tower would not happen in this country

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Opinion: Scorn for multiculturalism in Quebec yields troubling results

2016/12/17 Leave a comment

Quebec human rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis:

Interculturalism starts from the premise of the de facto precedence of Quebec’s majority culture over others. That practical reality was not supposed to have morphed into legal precedence, nor to have operated in a way that perpetuates the privileges of that majority. However there are troubling indications that it has done just that.

Other rights have been subordinated, including racial and religious equality. This is in part the result of Quebec’s brand of laïcité-lite that has imposed religious neutrality on non-majoritarian faiths and individuals as well as on the state. Equality and reasonable accommodation for minorities have become battlegrounds in the fight for “Quebec values.” The Supreme Court keeps having to intervene, as it did in the Multani decision in 2006 (to permit an observant Sikh boy to wear a sewn-in, concealed kirpan to school) and in several other cases after that.

In 2011, the National Assembly barred Sikhs from its precincts after having invited them to participate in a debate on reasonable accommodation. In 2013, there was the PQ’s nativist Charter of Values, Bill 60, built squarely on the foundations of Quebec values and interculturalism.

In 2015, the Quebec Liberals introduced Bill 62. It is nowhere as troubling as the Charter of Values, but it does weaken the flexibility of the public sector in accommodating religious minorities. Both Quebec’s human rights commission and the Quebec Bar Association have objected to several aspects of the bill.

As for the practical effect of protecting the “de facto precedence” of the majority, minorities are dealt with as satellite communities revolving around the “host society” until they are absorbed, effectively assimilated, and no longer seen as threats. Nowhere is the impact of this approach clearer than in the relatively poor employment prospects of immigrants in Quebec and, of course, in the low representation of minorities among the senior ranks of the Quebec public service. The issue is systemic and transcends party loyalties, and yet we continue to be forced to ask questions for which the answers are, depressingly, well known. How many senior appointments among Quebec’s public institutions, agencies and commissions are from racialized or ethnic minority backgrounds? How many are anglophones or allophones?

When the news about Thermitus [candidacy for the presidency of Quebec’s human rights commission] became public, the PQ quickly pivoted, perhaps mindful of the appalling optics, and said it would support the appointment. That is good news, even if it’s not yet clear whether Thermitus will get the job. But the broader issue of the rejection of multiculturalism in Quebec reminded me of something that Zadie Smith, the British-born novelist, said in November while accepting a literary prize: “The people who ask me about the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences.” That is not an outcome any of us should be prepared to accept.

Source: Opinion: Scorn for multiculturalism in Quebec yields troubling results | Montreal Gazette

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