NEWS Cartoon draws misguided response from Couillard
It’s not particularly clever, it plays on lame stereotypes and it’s based on old news.
But is editorial cartoonist Jean-Marc Phaneuf’s depiction of Premier Philippe Couillard stoning former Liberal MNA Fatima Houda-Pepin on International Women’s Day fit to print in a regional weekly newspaper? Absolutely.
Is Couillard justified in complaining about it to the point that Le Courrier du Sud proprietor Transcontinental removed the offending cartoon from its website?
Absolutely not.
The premier is showing himself to be unusually thin-skinned by this caricature, suggesting, as he did to reporters, that it depicts murder. Hardly. This seems to be a parody of the debate in Quebec about reasonable accommodation of minority rights rather than an attack on any cultural or religious minority. But feel free to disagree with me.
Some may certainly find it in poor taste, as many editorial cartoons are. Some Muslims may be uncomfortable with the depiction of a barbaric practice often unfairly associated with their religion. And the narrative seems rather gratuitous. Houda-Pepin, a Muslim herself, left politics two years ago due to irreconcilable differences with Couillard over his hands-off approach to accommodating minority rights. She has been writing a newspaper column since then, and has challenged Couillard on these same issues. But she has a right to her views. Just as Phaneuf has the right to his interpretation and Couillard has the right to dislike both Houda-Pepin’s commentary and Phaneuf’s portrayal.
What he should not have the right to do is to censor it. For the record, Couillard’s office insists a call was placed to express displeasure, not to have the cartoon spiked. But with a bill on cutting the publication of government notices threatening the future of community newspapers, the power of such a message carries a certain weight. The consequences of this objection speak for themselves.
Couillard’s heart may be in the right place. Since the massacre of six worshippers at a Quebec City mosque in late January, the premier has admirably gone to great lengths to show his support for the Muslim community, denounce Islamophobia and turn down the tone of political discourse in the province a few notches. These are important objectives and Couillard has shown tremendous leadership in trying to rise above the fray of identity politics.
But this is not hateful. There have been more abhorrent portrayals of Islam, Muslims and other minority groups in Quebec media as well as international publications, including Charlie Hebdo. Insulting portrayals of the prophet Muhammad were behind a terrorist attack on the Paris-based satirical magazine in 2015 that prompted ordinary citizens and world leaders, Couillard among them, to declare “Je suis Charlie” to demonstrate their steadfast support for free speech.
Of course the limit on freedom of expression is the proscription on hate speech. It can be difficult at times to make the distinction, but one rule of thumb is distinguishing the truly dangerous from the merely outrageous. And there seems to be little risk here of Couillard actually picking up a rock and lobbing it at Houda-Pepin.
Editorial cartooning is by its very nature offensive. It sets out to poke, prod and provoke. The best of it is biting social criticism that makes us guffaw; the worst is clumsy and puzzling. But in a democratic society satire is one of the highest forms of free expression. The tolerance of those it vexes is one measure of the strength of our democratic values.
We need look no further than the chilling war on the news media being waged by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to see how swiftly and easily these sacrosanct principles can be eroded. Couillard’s transgression is a far cry from Trump’s Twitter tirades against Alec Baldwin’s spoofing of him on Saturday Night Live. But it should nevertheless be a gentle reminder about how such humourlessness comes across.
If the premier was so bothered by the lampoon, the response to it has backfired. The cartoon has now been circulated much more widely compared to what it would have been if Couillard had just held his tongue. And it has sparked enough controversy to generate headlines, questions (and columns like this one) for days.
In his eagerness to show Quebec is an open society and celebrate diversity — all laudable goals — Couillard may have veered too far in this case to the opposite extreme. Suffocating political correctness and heavyhanded overreactions are a slippery slope to censorship. And those are not values consistent with either a healthy democracy or a tolerant Quebec.
The cartoon has now been circulated much more widely compared to what it would have been if Couillard had just held his tongue.