Anti-niqab bill isn’t a solution, it’s a problem
Bill 62 is a harmful response to pressure to ‘Do Something’
Some good has come out of the Jan. 29 Quebec City mosque killings; they have prompted some Quebec politicians to propose measures to fight discrimination against immigrants.
The official Opposition Parti Québécois led off, proposing 20 measures concerning the job market, housing and other areas. This week, the Liberal government followed suit, resuming after a five-month interruption study in the National Assembly on a bill to make it easier for immigrants to work in their chosen professions.
Otherwise, however, we have shown that not even such a tragedy can make us capable of having the “serene” debate on identity that all parties promised in its aftermath.
Since the Assembly resumed sitting, it has been dominated by predictably acrimonious, partisan competition over restricting the religious freedom of Muslim women in particular. The issue is not whether that freedom should be restricted by legislation, but how much.
The pretext is Bill 62, the Couillard government’s proposed legislation governing the provincial public sector, providing a “framework” for religious accommodation requests and banning face-covering Muslim veils such as the niqab for both employees and the public receiving services. As legislation, the bill is useless. There are no provincial public-sector employees wearing facial veils, and no practical reason why a Muslim woman should have to bare her face in order to be taken by ambulance to a hospital after an accident.
An accommodations “framework” is already provided by the provincial human-rights commission, along with practical advice to managers on how to handle requests.
Outside the Assembly, in Quebec society, there is no accommodations “crisis,” not even one invented by the Quebecor media, as there was a decade ago. Accommodation requests are made and handled quietly, without attracting headlines. So the bill is a response to a political problem, namely pressure from the opposition parties to Do Something, not a social one. As such, it is a failure.
A lighter version of the former PQ government’s “charter of values,” Bill 62 has failed to settle the political debate. It has failed to satisfy the opposition parties in the Assembly, as well as many French-language commentators.
The opposition parties proposed a compromise based on a 2008 recommendation by the Bouchard-Taylor commission on accommodations, to amend the bill to forbid the wearing of religious symbols by persons with “coercive” authority, such as judges and police. If the government accepted the proposal, the opposition parties would then vote to pass the bill.
Premier Couillard has rejected that offer, and dared the opposition parties to run against Bill 62 in the general election due in October 2018. But even if Couillard had accepted the opposition proposal, the debate on Bill 62 would have been far from over.
For the so-called “consensus” would have been only temporary. The two major opposition parties, the PQ and the Coalition Avenir Québec, had said that even if they voted for an amended Bill 62, they would still campaign in the next election to strengthen it. And then, if either of them formed the next government, it would propose its own, tougher legislation.
Bill 62 is not only useless and a failure, it is harmful. Like the PQ charter, the Liberal bill, and the intensifying, prolonged debate over it, stigmatize Muslims and, however unintentionally, embolden outright Islamophobes.
The premier, in his isolation, received some encouragement this week from Charles Taylor, co-chair of the accommodations commission, who in a letter published in La Presse repudiated the commission’s recommendation on which the opposition parties had based their compromise proposal.
Maybe, however, Couillard didn’t read Taylor’s letter all the way to the end.
“I believe,” Taylor wrote, “we cannot afford the luxury of making new gestures that would renew this effect of stigmatization, whatever the good intentions of some of their defenders. Let us not open the wounds again. Let us leave time for reconciliation.” That could be interpreted as implicit criticism of Bill 62.