Referendum result not binding, Julius Grey says
A civil rights lawyer says Quebec City Muslims would probably win in court if they contested a weekend referendum that narrowly rejected a cemetery for the community.
“Referendums are not binding when it comes to fundamental rights,” said Julius Grey, noting the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled “it doesn’t matter what the majority thinks of our freedom of expression and religion.”
On Sunday, residents of St Apollinaire rejected, by a vote of 19 to 16, a plan to create what would have been the region’s first Muslim-owned cemetery.
The plan to open the burial ground on land currently owned by a funeral-services company divided the town, a 5,800-resident bedroom community 45 kilometres southwest of Quebec City. A zoning change was required.
Several residents made antiMuslim comments as they spoke against the cemetery at public meetings, while others, including the town council, welcomed the project.
Grey said St-Apollinaire could either ignore the referendum results, raising the possibility that opponents would take the issue to court, or the Muslim community could go to the Human Rights Commission or Superior Court to contest the results.
“I believe that in either scenario, our courts would say that a majority cannot decide a question like that,” he said. “If it is in fact the belief of some Muslims that they need a Muslim cemetery, then they have to be permitted to have it, and it doesn’t matter what the majority opinion is.”
He said “in a liberal democracy, as opposed to some sort of populist democracy, it’s not majority opinion that decides everything.”
“Majority opinion decides those things that have to be taken in common — there can only be one budget, one Criminal Code, one bankruptcy law and so on — and that’s done through our legislatures.
“But on matters of fundamental rights, the opinion of the majority is not the be all and end all of the issue. It’s not the decisive factor.”
Mohamed Kesri, who was mandated by the Centre culturel islamique de Québec to lead the project, told reporters on Sunday the community might file a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission.
Embittered by the result, the centre said Monday it has not abandoned the dream of creating a Muslim cemetery.
“We do not intend to give up,” the centre said in a statement posted on its Facebook page Monday.
Muslims “bitterly note” that it took just 19 votes to reject a cemetery project the community has been working on for 20 years, the statement said.
The centre runs Quebec City’s biggest mosque, where a gunman killed six Muslim men on Jan. 29.
Fear, ignorance and Islamophobia fuelled the No side in St-Apollinaire, the centre said.
“The 19 against came out to refuse to write a beautiful page in the history of happy coexistence in Quebec and Canada,” the statement said.
It’s unclear if the community intends to push ahead with the St-Apollinaire project or try elsewhere. Officials at the centre did not return calls on Monday.
The mayor of St-Apollinaire says he has no intention of reopening the debate any time soon.
“For the moment, we have done our bit and we’re going to take a break, I hope for a long time, from the issue,” Mayor Bernard Ouellet said.
“I don’t want to put the population through something like this again soon.”
In May, 22 St-Apollinaire residents signed a register, enough to compel the town to hold a referendum in which 49 people who live near the proposed cemetery were allowed to vote.
Ouellet, who said “fear and disinformation” led to the No vote, wanted a town-wide referendum, but Quebec law would not allow that. If all residents had been eligible, “it would have been more likely that the Yes side would have won,” he said.
In June, as part of an effort to give local elected officials more power, Quebec’s National Assembly passed Bill 122, which allows municipalities to avoid referendums on zoning changes.
But cities and towns that want to abolish the referendum process must first adopt “information and consultation” policies, and the provincial government has yet to set out guidelines for those policies.
Ouellet said he has no plans to take advantage of the changes to reintroduce the project.
Muslims have lived in Quebec City for generations, yet there is no Islamic-owned cemetery in the area. Instead, the community buries its dead in Montreal or sends bodies back to birth countries.
Though the community has been negotiating to buy the land since the fall, the issue came to a head after a mosque shooting. Five of the six victims were buried overseas.
This month, the Lépine Cloutier Athos funeral home opened a Muslim section of its cemetery in St-Augustin-de-Desmaures, near Quebec City. It has set aside 500 lots for Muslims.
But that project was not supported by the Centre culturel islamique de Québec, which wants a cemetery that is owned by the Muslim community.
In St-Apollinaire, the centre had negotiated to buy 60,000 square feet of land adjacent to a nondenominational funeral-services company, for $215,000.