Throwing stones in glass house of nationalism

Finance Minister Carlos Leitão’s description of the Coalition Avenir as a party promoting “ethnic-based nationalism” may seem inflammatory, but low-level ethnocentrism is certainly present at varying levels across the political spectrum in Quebec. It is a problem worth examining.

It might be uncomfortable to acknowledge, but all nationalism excludes, at least on occasion, even the Liberal Party’s nationalist-federalist hybrid governance. CAQ Leader François Legault is not a promoter of ethnic nationalism in the style of the supremacist political movements experiencing a resurgence in Europe and the U.S., if that’s what Leitão was suggesting.

But Legault and many Quebec politicians have promoted intolerably ethnocentric policies, those that disregard minority perspectives.

Evaluating levels of prejudice in a society is imprecise science. Because Quebec is so culturally unique in North America, there is an abundance of armchair sociology practised on oft-misunderstood Quebecers. But, as Don Macpherson noted recently, a widely accepted starting point would be that nationalism among Quebecers is typically “based on language and culture, rather than ethnicity.”

While language can be one of many indicators of ethnicity, language discrimination is not racism. In anger, plenty of Quebec anglophones have been known to describe themselves as victims of racism. It would be more precise and less politically charged to describe non-francophones as long-standing targets of institutional linguistic xenophobia.

But racism charges are to be expected when large swaths of minority citizens report experiencing discrimination.

The Liberal government’s support of a motion suggesting citizens quit greeting each other in languages other than French (the “Bonjour-Hi” affair) could leave the impression that Leitão is throwing stones in Quebec’s glass house of nationalism.

The philosophy behind language policing more broadly by institutions like the Office québécois de la langue française doesn’t seem racist in intent, but it is certainly an example of ethnocentric policy (or perhaps what the finance minister described as “ethnic-based.”)

Defending the CAQ’s policies in these pages, MNA and immigration critic Nathalie Roy said she expects immigrants to embrace “our values, our culture” — an inoffensive enough statement, if only there was consensus on what exactly those values are ( beyond 1975’s Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which outlines basic human rights).

But there has been no agreement on ethnic integration issues, as evidenced by more than a decade of mostly unproductive political debates on so-called “reasonable accommodations.” The values promoted in recent years by community leaders in Outremont, for example, differ from those in neighbouring Plateau-Mont-Royal, or Quebec City or Hérouxville.

And when the Parti Québécois attempted to further define Quebec values with its so-called Charter, discussions on cultural integration went completely off the rails.

The CAQ is still recycling a softer version of the PQ’s most offensive Charter proposal, originally a recommendation by the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation: to ban government workers in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols.

Variations on this type of policy are inherently ethnocentric. Bouchard and Taylor wrongly assumed the religiosity of ethnic Quebecers compelled by their faiths to wear “ostentatious” symbols would cause more inconvenience for the state than a Catholic civil servant whose faith does not prescribe accessories.

It’s worth reminding Roy that in 2016 she joined the irrational uproar over the burkini, and never apologized to Quebec Muslims (a burkini is merely a wet suit marketed toward religious Muslim women, making this, too, a clear example of ethnocentric policy-making).

While there doesn’t seem to be much evidence supporting the notion that Quebecers are more or less racist than other Canadians, its political establishment skews disproportionally nationalist. Even if Leitão’s accusation was motived by polls showing renewed interest in a third-party option, the pervasiveness of ethnocentric nationalism merits serious discussion. Fighting it will require more than finger-pointing from the party that’s mostly been in charge for the past two decades.