Incoherence abounds in values charter positions

Bernard Drainville did have something of a point when he criticized the latest Liberal position on the government’s values charter as overly complicated and lacking coherence.

The minister in charge of pushing the charter maintained it is a model of clarity compared with the Liberal position, which now proposes to ban some forms of attire with religious connotations for public and para-public employees. These include the face-covering niqabs and burkas, as well as the chador, a garment covering all of a woman’s body except her face.

The Liberal rationale for objecting to these three garments is that they are all symbols of submission and oppression of Muslim women. However, the inclusion of the chador has caused some puzzlement since previously the Liberal benchmark for what should be allowed has simply been that garments must leave the face uncovered.

The Liberal position also holds that uniformed authority figures, including police officers and prison guards, must receive special permission to wear accoutrements not part of the standard uniform.

For this they would have to prove the necessity for them to wear the items, and to show they have made efforts to integrate into their workplace.

This forces one to ask who would determine whether such accommodation should be granted, and what criteria would apply.

The new Liberal position is a progression from previous stands, which at least had the advantage of greater clarity.

At first the party line was that the values-- charter limitations are unacceptable in their entirety. Then the Liberals briefly held to the recommendation of the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodation, advising that religious symbols be proscribed for judges, prosecutors and occupants of the National Assembly’s speaker’s chair, along with police and prison guards.

The Liberal rationale now is that outright bans for all of these would be unconstitutional, although the Quebec Bar Association has maintained that so would chador, burka and niqab interdictions.

But then Drainville calling the Liberals incoherent is just one more reminder of the in coherencies in the government’s own position. For example, the charter would allow some religious symbols, while banning only “ostentatious” ones. But nowhere is it spelled out what the measure of ostentatiousness would be, or who would do the measuring. Furthermore, the legislation proposes to forbid wearers of ostentatious symbols from public employment, but fails to specify what penalties would be applied.

An incoherence propagated by both sides in the charter debate, particularly in French, is the common reference to all Muslim headgear as le voile. The homogenization of terminology will make it difficult for the fine distinctions in the new Liberal position to translate well politically.

It seems the longer this wretched debate persists, the more incoherent the debate is destined to become. It hasn’t helped that a lot of the testimony at public hearings that began last week on Bill 60, the charter bill, has been veering off topic into unrelated areas. Fear and ignorance are emerging themes. The coming mid-winter weeks of testimony and debate could be very depressing indeed.