On Monday, Quebec voted against the possibility of a second Parti Québécois government and elected Philippe Couillard’s Parti Liberal du Québec to the National Assembly. PQ leader Pauline Marois was defeated, and with her, the infamous charter of values that has been causing the province so much anxiety over the last few months.
It’s clear, of course, that many Québécois didn’t vote Marois out on the basis of the charter and, indeed, that many people supported both the charter and the xenophobia that it was intended to capitalize on.
It’s just that Couillard’s campaign focused on pan-social issues, such as health care and the economy, which ended up looking more attractive the further and further Marois’s campaign morphed into a march toward sovereignty.
Sovereignty’s not dead in Quebec, not by a long shot, but it’s clear the timing and the technique weren’t right this time around. Quebec is hurting just like the rest of Canada, and in retrospect, divisiveness was clearly the wrong card to play.
I remember feeling positive about Marois in 2012. She had done some good things in education reform, and she rose to power in the context of the student protests. She attempted to capitalize on that social unrest by talking change, which seemed exciting and progressive to those of us who were buoyed by the Occupy spirit.
Unfortunately, “change” turned out to be more of the same xenophobia and racism that often rears its head when you start talking social issues in Quebec.
Not that Quebec is alone in its political racism — just that the identity-politics dynamic that is specific to Quebec falls so clearly along ethno-nationalist lines.
I usually get antsy when my non-Québécois friends start criticizing provincial politics. As a rule, we’re so deeply unsympathetic to the identity anxiety that’s a very real part of Franco-Canadian life that we usually miss the point by a wide, wide mark.
But the charter’s defeat is something that should matter to all Canadians. The charter is still a living document, of course, but Quebec’s human-rights commission has been extremely critical of it, as has the Liberal party, and without government backing, it’s likely to die a quick death.
While it’s too optimistic to say that Marois was rejected because of the charter, its main proponents are out of the picture, and we can enjoy the irony that the premier was the first person to lose her job because of it.
I have argued before that the charter was a racist document, intended to de-legitimize and “other” non-Christian faiths under the guise of “neutrality.” The language used to ban “conspicuous” religious symbols was code for non-Christian.
The stipulation that only people with uncovered faces could provide or receive state service was also clearly aimed at specific people. Women’s bodies are often the battlefield in the war against minority rights. The charter’s defendants argued that niqabs and hijabs are symbols of women’s cultural and religious oppression, and could not be accepted in a secular society. That’s a bit much for me to swallow, personally.
My rule of thumb is, if you wouldn’t say it to a woman wearing heels, then you shouldn’t say it to a woman who chooses to cover her face. I don’t love the idea behind face-veiling, but I also don’t love the cultural pressures that can contribute to women’s decisions to wear heels or makeup, and we’re not trying to regulate those. Also, a niqab never gave anyone permanent back problems.
Are we all navigating the difficult path of being women living in a patriarchal society? Yes! Are we all using all the tools at our disposal to make life better for ourselves and our fellow women? I hope so! Is the state going to help us when it outlaws things that fundamentally matter to our identities? No!
As a Canadian, this makes me extremely happy. In pandering to her right, Marois promoted not an inclusive version of secularism, but a secularism born of xenophobia and a vision of a nation based on ethnic rather than civic lines.
The charter represented state-sanctioned racism, and Quebec voted it down.
But it’s important to remember that if Quebec’s charter of values seemed outlandishly xenophobic to us, a lot of the coded language it used is stuff you’ll hear every day on the street in B.C. We’re not out of the woods yet.
