Legault appears tolerant of intolerance

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” — attributed to Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a leader of the February Revolution of 1848 in France.

Sometimes, the present premier of Quebec exercises the moral leadership expected of a holder of high office without being prompted.

When hockey fans in the lower Laurentian city of Saint-Jérôme racially taunted a visiting black player and verbally and even physically harassed his family, François Legault responded spontaneously.

He raised the incident himself with reporters, without waiting to be asked about it, condemning the fans’ actions in both French and English.

But that was easy for Legault, since nobody was suggesting he bore any responsibility for the incident. It’s different when his government’s Bill 21 is blamed for reports of Islamophobic incidents.

Last Saturday, outside a Quebec City mosque, a man is alleged to have directed Islamophobic and anti-immigrant remarks at people before striking one of them. That’s the very mosque where two years ago, six worshippers were killed in a mass shooting.

Asked by reporters for comment, Legault condemned the alleged incident as “clearly unacceptable,” relatively mild language compared to his remark a few days later that video lottery terminals are “something I hate.”

And he and some of his Coalition Avenir Québec ministers were quick to dismiss it as an isolated incident, and deny any connection with the debate over Bill 21. That’s the government’s proposed legislation, clearly aimed at Muslim women who wear the hijab, that would forbid teachers and some other government employees from wearing religious symbols while on duty.

The minister of immigration, diversity and inclusiveness, Simon Jolin-Barrette, went so far as to declare flatly that “there is no tension and there is no division,” despite the considerable evidence to the contrary.

For by then, the media had already reported several allegations of verbal and physical assault against women wearing the hijab or facial veils associated with Islam since Jolin-Barrette presented the legislation in late March.

A women’s support group reported in midMay that it had received more than 40 calls from women who said that since the presentation of Bill 21, they had been harassed for wearing the hijab. That was to be expected, based on anecdotal evidence from previous debates on the accommodation of minority religions in Quebec.

In the past month, the media have also reported an academic study based on data collected during those controversies warning that the Bill 21 debate might result in increases in discriminatory behaviour.

In another research project, based on interviews with Montreal Muslims, two McGill University sociologists concluded that laws such as Bill 21 “embolden those who harbour deep-seated xenophobia — specifically Islamophobia — and they therefore intensify minorities’ encounters of hostility and mistreatment.”

After the alleged latest incident at the Quebec City mosque, local Muslims told Radio-Canada they thought the presentation of Bill 21 had made Islamophobia socially acceptable.

And the alleged assault victim, a taxi driver, told La Presse that “in my taxi, I get called a ‘sand eater’ almost every day.”

All that, however, matters less to the populist Legault than the opinion of his French-speaking electoral base, among which Bill 21 is overwhelmingly popular.

Results of a recent Léger poll commissioned by the Association for Canadian Studies suggest that the main reason for that popularity is what the association’s president, Jack Jedwab, calls “negative sentiment toward Islam, Muslims and hijabs.”

And Legault was embarrassed when La Meute (the Pack), the Quebec City-based anti-immigrant fringe group with the wolf’s-pawprint insignia on its biker-style colours, expressed approval of Bill 21, and Legault’s message that “in Quebec, that’s how we live.”

What matters most to him, however, is that CAQ members of the National Assembly report their constituents spontaneously congratulating them for Bill 21, and urging them on.

And Legault doesn’t try to lead the opinion of his people, he follows it. That’s why he’s their leader.