‘Values’ must not trump rights:
THE PARTI QUÉBÉCOIS is playing the race card with its unconstitutional Charter of Quebec Values
Sovereignty
can’t be sold, and the language issue evidently doesn’t move the numbers for the Parti Québécois, so the Marois government has decided to play the identity card instead, with its proposed Charter of Quebec Values.
Maybe it’s time to call it what it is: the race card.
Banning headgear and the wearing of religious symbols by government employees is conformist, discriminatory and intolerant. Not to mention that it’s racial profiling.
All of this in the name of promoting a secular state, while leaving the crucifix in the National Assembly because, after all, it’s part of our cultural heritage. Enough already! That the proposed Quebec charter is unconstitutional is an open-and-shut case. It clearly violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that is part of the 1982 Constitution Act, as well as the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms of 1975. In fact, on fundamental freedoms, the two charters are virtually wordfor-word identical.
Article 2 of the federal charter stipulates: “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: freedom of conscience and religion; freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression; freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of association.”
The same words appear in Article 3 of the Quebec charter, enacted by the Bourassa government in 1975 in the wake of a bitter language debate.
Moreover, the proposed Charter of Quebec Values offends Canadian constitutional convention going all the way back to the Quebec Act of 1774. The Quebec Act guaranteed Quebecers the freedom to practise the Catholic religion, and restored French civil law alongside British common law. It also allowed Catholics to hold public office and removed a reference to the Protestant denomination in office-holders’ oath of allegiance to the Crown.
The Quebec Act later served as the model for asymmetrical federalism in the British North America Act, now styled the Constitution Act of 1867.
Section 93 of the Constitution Act specifically entrenched the right to denominational education in Quebec. It stated that nothing in the provincial jurisdiction of education “shall prejudicially affect the right and privilege to denominational schools” for Protestants and Catholics. It required nothing less than a constitutional amendment between the federal Chrétien and provincial Bouchard governments to change Quebec’s school boards from denominational to linguistic-based.
Section 133 of the Constitution Act entrenched both French and English as the recognized languages of the legislature and courts of Quebec, a provision that prevails to this day.
The constitutional heritage of Sections 93 and 133 is one of a tolerant society that protected both its religious and linguistic-minority communities. Along with the division of powers, they were dealmakers in the bargain of Confederation.
And the federal Charter of Rights explicitly entrenches the fundamental freedoms of conscience and religion.
So Pauline Marois thinks her bill will pass constitutional muster? Any firstyear law student could tell her otherwise. She does have the constitutional override of the notwithstanding clause in the federal charter, which would allow her to set it aside for five years, but she’s already said she wouldn’t do that.
Instead of proposing a generous society, open to the world, this is how Marois sees a sovereign Quebec. Her national project is narrow, parochial and bigoted.
The charter also exposes Quebec to derision and ridicule on the national and world stage. Naheed Nenshi, the popular Muslim mayor of Calgary, has invited anyone who has an issue with the Charter of Quebec Values to move there. A hospital in Oshawa, Ont., recruiting McGill med students, put up an ad featuring a young doctor wearing a head scarf, saying it wanted what was in her head, not what was on it. In Britain, The Guardian website ran the Quebec government’s pictographs of what was acceptable to wear to work and what was not.
If this weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious.
Previously, Marois proposed Bill 14, amending Bill 101 to, among other things, end the bilingual status of municipalities whose nonfrancophone population fell below 50 per cent.
Marois evidently realized that she didn’t have the votes to pass the bill in the minority legislature, with both the Liberals and Coalition Avenir Québec opposed to it. She may not have the votes for the charter either, but maybe what she wants is an election on it.
She’s doing identity politics, which apparently plays well outside the Montreal region, as it did for Mario Dumont’s Action démocratique du Québec in the 2007 election, and for the CAQ in the 2012 campaign. It isn’t governing; it’s playing to the crowd.
This is shameless and immoral. Fortunately for us all, it’s also totally unconstitutional. lianmacdonald@policymagazine.ca