‘We cannot tear ourselves apart’
DEEP DIVISIONS IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY are surfacing, as Marois digs in her heels on the need for the debate over the PQ’S proposed Charter of Quebec Values to proceed as planned, even as the chorus of opposition continues to grow.
One of the reputed architects of the proposed Charter of Quebec Values explained Tuesday how the Parti Québécois government came to include a five-year opting-out clause for municipalities and certain institutions.
What inspired the government, said Jean-François Lisée, minister responsible for the Montreal region, were the Jewish community of Côte-St-Luc and the Jewish General Hospital.
“The decision to propose an opting-out by municipalities started with Côte-St-Luc,” Lisée said in his first extended comments since the charter was unveiled last week.
“What should we do in the case of municipalities where historically, there is a strong religious community — a Jewish community?” he asked.
“Should there not be a longer transition period?”
Under the charter, all public-sector employees would be prohibited during work hours from wearing religious headgear like the kippah for Jews, the hijab for Muslim women and the turban for Sikhs. However, the charter would give the right of municipalities and certain institutions to opt out for a renewable period of five years.
Anthony Housefather, mayor of Côte-St-Luc, told The Gazette Tuesday that “it doesn’t impress me” that his municipality would be allowed to opt out.
“It’s a charter that the citizens of Côte-St-Luc — whatever their religion — are against,” said Housefather, who condemned the proposal in a lengthy opinion piece published in Monday’s National Post.
“Does this mean the menorah would be banned, even though the Jewish community has been here since 1760?” Housefather asked rhetorically in his op-ed piece.
Lisée, author of a 2007 book, Nous, about the Québécois majority and minorities, explained to journalists the rationale behind permitting the crucifix in the National Assembly. In 1936, Maurice Duplessis, Quebec’s premier at the time, had the crucifix installed to symbolize an alliance between the Catholic Church and the government, in sharp contrast with the PQ charter’s stated intent of keeping the state secular and religiously neutral.
“We decided to propose keeping the crucifix in the National Assembly out of respect for the history of Christianity in Quebec,” he said. “It’s part of our history.”
Facing growing opposition, Lisée said his government was open to making changes to the charter, especially on the question of the opting-out clause, but he declined to provide any details.
At one point in his lengthy defence of the charter, Lisée equated religious beliefs with environmental convictions, even vegetarianism.
“The individual freedom to tell people that they are a pacifist, or an ecologist or vegetarian, or in favour of the tarsands, stops at the door of the public sector,” he said. “We are now in a situation where the only convictions that we can exhibit today are religious ones. And we know that there are people who have social convictions, environmental convictions, that are extremely important in their lives, more than some people who have religious convictions.”
He suggested that the debate surrounding the values charter was similar to the one in 1977 involving Bill 101, the French Language Charter.
“I was the first out of the gate in saying that there would be a storm,” he said of the widespread oppos- ition to the values charter, even among hardline separatists, “and that we would stand in the storm, because we’ve seen storms before. Because the comparison is Bill 101, where most of the actors who were opposed to Bill 101 are opposed to the charter, saying it would exclude, saying it was a regression, saying everything we hear today.
“And thank God that (then-premier) René Lévesque and Camille Laurin (the minister in charge of Bill 101) and the Parti Québécois at the time stood tall because it was the right thing to do, and in the end it would bring more harmony, more plurality and more diversity to Quebec, which it did.”