Proposed charter is too popular with the wrong people

The Marois government’s proposed “charter of values” may already be backfiring against the Parti Québécois.

Paradoxically, the charter may be too popular, and with the wrong people, for the PQ’s own good.

Poll results published this week confirmed what we already knew from previous surveys and Quebec’s recent political history: Limiting minority religious freedoms would be popular with a solid majority of the Frenchspeaking Quebecers who decide elections.

This appears to have put pressure on the Coalition Avenir Québec party, which has been struggling in the polls, to align itself this week with the PQ.

Three weeks before the National Assembly resumes sitting, the CAQ made public a proposal of its own that is only slightly watered down from the PQ charter as leaked a week earlier.

Like the PQ’s charter, the Coalition’s would prohibit public employees in “positions of authority,” including school teachers and principals, from wearing religious symbols.

Also like the PQ, the Coalition would require women and girls to remove facial veils to attend school or receive health care.

And it would give gender equality precedence over religious freedom in the Quebec charter of rights and declare Quebec to be secular — while keeping the Catholic crucifix in the Assembly as part of Quebec’s heritage.

The main difference is that the CAQ would exempt doctors, nurses, civil servants and daycare workers from the ban on religious symbols in public services.

Since the CAQ holds the balance of power in the Assembly, this would enable the PQ minority government to pass most of its proposed charter in time for a possible general election next spring.

But this might neutralize the charter as an election issue for the PQ.

It would be better for the PQ if the opposition blocked its charter entirely, for then the PQ could run in the next election on its need for a majority mandate to pass it.

But if most of the PQ char- ter is passed thanks to the Coalition, then the PQ would have to share any credit for what would be the CAQ’s charter as much as its own.

As popular as the PQ’s proposal is, however, support for it falls short of the “consensus” that Premier Pauline Marois predicted last Sunday.

It’s not surprising that the Léger firm, in its Internet poll last Friday and Saturday for the QMI news agency, found less support for an anti-minority PQ proposal in non-francophones, and in the Montreal region where they are concentrated. What may be more significant is that pollster Jean-Marc Léger reported in Le Journal de Montréal last week that younger Quebecers are also likelier to oppose the PQ proposal.

Also, commentary on the proposal in the French-lan- guage media has been mostly negative. Even the columnists in the minority-baiting Journal de Montréal are divided.

In one especially stinging editorial, André Pratte of La Presse compared the PQ charter to the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the mid-20th century in Quebec by the conservative, nationalist Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis.

(It was also Duplessis who had the crucifix placed in the Assembly in 1936 to represent an alliance between the Catholic Church and the state.)

And although the PQ claims to be acting in the name of women’s rights, several prominent female commentators have criticized its charter: Lise Ravary and Denise Bombardier in Le Journal de Montréal, sovereignist Josée Legault on L’actualité maga- zine’s website, and feminist Francine Pelletier in Le Devoir.

So while the PQ may get most of its “charter of values,” it will be at the cost of Union Nationale-izing itself, from whatever is left of a progressive party, to one representing an old Quebec.