A palpable electoral cynicism underlies Quebec’s proposed charter of values.
The charter is justified by its defenders as an embodiment of secularism, but it clearly derives much of its electoral appeal from xenophobia, a fact that should worry the bill’s liberal defenders much more than it does.
Moreover, the debate is largely imported from France. Its implicit target (certainly in the public mind) is the Muslim population, yet Muslims have long been well-integrated and strongly contributing citizens of Quebec. There has been no special tension, except that visited upon them by those offended by their visible presence.
There certainly have been instances of violence against Muslim women. The Shafia family killings in 2009 was a terrible example. But killings of women are not just a Muslim problem. They occur in all our societies. The Shafia killings in particular were denounced by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Then again, it is not quite correct to say that there is no social basis for the proposal for a charter. There is, but it is a social basis that is 50 years out of date. The most prominent liberal voices in favour of the measure are people in their 70s and 80s, reliving the battles of their youth against the Catholic church. This is, in part, a generational conflict in Quebec. The rights-advocacy organizations of today generally oppose the measure.
All these features should give us pause. But are there strong arguments in the charter’s favour?
Among its liberal defenders, one factor is anti-clericalism. This draws on the strand of liberalism that considers religion to be obscurantist and pernicious. For individuals who hold this position, support for the charter is opposition to religion. It is this anti-clericalism that forms the link between the Quebec charter and the generation of the Quiet Revolution.
We tend not to think of anti-religion as important in contemporary liberalism, but it still exists. The argument of the American political philosopher John Rawls that religious reasons should be excluded from public debate is one example.
Such positions suffer, however, from two defects. First, they overestimate the demands of rationalism, treating moral reasoning as though it can be strongly separated from broader cultural phenomena. Often they don’t recognize their own cultural myopia.
And second, they spurn the potential for moral insight carried within religious idioms.
Another factor supporting the proposed charter is a republican commitment to the cohesion of the public sphere. On this view, marks of religious identification emphasize partiality rather than community, bring private claims into the public realm, divide the citizenry and impede individuals from deliberating together simply as citizens.
On this view, requiring public employees to remove such marks is a way of ensuring full inclusion and participation. It is an extension of the principle that citizens need to be able to speak a society’s language in order to maintain a vigorous democracy, or that common schools function as schools of citizenship.
The problem is that, in the name of inclusion, the proposed charter would force citizens to leave crucial aspects of their identity behind when they enter the public realm. Consequently, the majority would have little opportunity to learn about those who hold unfamiliar beliefs.
Moreover, people who cannot remove their headscarves for reasons of conscience wouldn’t be included. They would be forcibly excluded. And this law would certainly affect believers unequally. It is the strange and unfamiliar who would be targeted.
The final factor is women’s equality. On its face, this is insufficient to support the charter, unless religious belief is understood to be inherently anti-women. However, it is clear that for many of the bill’s supporters, the presumed oppression of women within Islam is the true target. But their reading of the meaning of Islamic head-coverings is reductionist, reasoning only from the most complete form of covering and studiously ignoring important meanings such as modesty, opposition to a sexualized view of women, or a simple declaration of faith. It is a simplistic and caricatured approach, one that fails to listen to the voices of the women themselves.
In Quebec’s stratified political culture, then, there are liberals in favour of the Charter, although they exist in unholy alliance with xenophobes. Moreover, the liberal positions proceed from a jaundiced view of religious belief and a strong emphasis on republican commonality. Those views merge, then, with a unifying and homogenizing view of the political community. There is, it appears, more structural similarity between the positions of the charter’s liberal defenders and the xenophobes than the former would like to admit.
Jeremy Webber is dean and Canada Research Chair in Law and Society at the University of Victoria’s faculty of law.
