Couillard bet on a handful of voters, and Quebec lost

Premier lacked the political courage to intervene on behalf of Muslims

A handful of votes can make all the difference. Consider last Sunday’s municipal referendum in the Quebec village of StApollinaire on a proposed zoning bylaw allowing the Muslim community centre of nearby Quebec City to buy land there for a cemetery.

For a vote that would eventually have political and social implications for the whole province and attract attention across Canada, the numbers of people involved were ridiculously small.

The signatures of only 17 voters living near the proposed cemetery site were required to force the referendum. Only 49 were eligible to cast ballots.

That was hardly representative of the village’s population of about 6,000, whose mayor and council supported the bylaw, let alone of Quebec’s eight million.

Out of those 49 eligible voters, only 19 felt strongly enough against the cemetery to turn out to cast their ballots against it. But that was enough to defeat the bylaw, by a margin of three votes.

In other words, had only four more votes been cast for the proposal, the story would have been very different.

It would have been about the native-born, French-speaking, Catholic inhabitants of a Quebec village opening their arms to a Muslim community that had lost six of its members to a gunman’s attack on worshippers at their mosque six months ago.

Instead, St-Apollinaire has been linked to another Quebec village, Hérouxville, whose council 10 years ago adopted a “code of conduct” warning prospective immigrants that such things as burning women alive were not allowed there.

The Muslims of Quebec City and the rest of eastern Quebec have been left without a cemetery of their own, though there is a Muslim section in a cemetery in a suburb of the city.

Immediately before and after the vote, there were Islamophobic incidents elsewhere in the province that received national attention, including one at the Quebec City mosque itself.

A rapidly growing, anti“Islamist” organization called La Meute — the Wolf Pack — gained free recruiting publicity from being linked to the campaign against the cemetery.

And Philippe Couillard’s Liberal government may be forced to defend the referendum outcome against the Quebec City Muslim community centre in court, if it doesn’t quickly come up with the alternative solution the premier promised after the vote.

The referendum appears to comply with provincial law, but the Muslim community is considering challenging it on grounds of religious discrimination.

This all started out as an apparently isolated event, a vote among a handful of inhabitants of one village on what was officially a strictly local question.

It ended up, however, as another episode in a decade-long story of strained relations between religious minorities, especially Muslims, and the majority in Quebec.

As such, and inflated in the news vacuum of July, it has done further damage to Quebec’s reputation, as one media-monitoring service reported, and as Couillard acknowledged.

The premier and several of his ministers expressed disappointment at the referendum results. Yet the outcome should have come as no surprise to anyone who had paid attention to media

coverage of the process, starting with a stormy public consultation meeting in late March.

That gave the government more than three months to do something. It could have shown moral leadership and invested political capital in the referendum campaign, or it could have come up with an alternative that would have rendered the referendum moot.

Couillard, however, lacked the political courage to intervene on behalf of the Muslims to whom he had promised solidarity after the mosque attack. Instead, he abandoned them.

For that matter, so did the opposition parties in the National Assembly, including the Coalition Avenir Québec, whose candidate had carried St-Apollinaire in the last general election in 2014.

It was the government, however, that would be responsible for cleaning up whatever political and social fallout would be left by a rejection of the cemetery.

It bet on 49 voters in SaintApollinaire to spare them that chore, and it lost, by three votes. And so did Quebec.