On niqabs and ‘Canadian values’
If one were hoping to find a Quebec politician with socially liberal views, one would logically start with the mayor of Montreal — both in general, inasmuch as it’s one of Canada’s most cosmopolitan multicultural cities, and in the specific, inasmuch as current Mayor Denis Coderre was a longtime Liberal MP who firmly opposed the Parti Québécois’ so-called “values charter” during last year’s ghastly provincial election campaign.
On the social question du jour, however — niqabs at citizenship ceremonies — Coderre is very much not among the Rest-of-Canada biens-pensants. NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair has been accused of waffling on the issue, but when he emerged last week from a meeting with Coderre, his position became clearly permissive by comparison.
“You’re becoming a citizen, so you must show your face,” said Coderre, axiomatically. Adopting a very common position, he added that niqabs were “not a matter of religion,” but “clearly a question of culture” — and thus, implicitly, not something we need to worry about when it comes to infringing upon religious freedoms.
To this, as always, the biens-pensants rolled their eyes and declared that the Supreme Court long ago settled this matter: a protected religious belief is any that the holder feels strongly about. The biens-pensants are correct in law, and the Supreme Court justices were correct in prin- ciple: agents of a free state shouldn’t be combing through religious texts in search of justifications for people’s crosses, hijabs, turbans, kippas or bindis.
The problem, and it’s a big one, is that only a very small percentage of Canadians agree with that principle when it comes to religious practices that offend them, whether honestly or as a proxy for their general dislike of the people practising them.
A poll commissioned by the Privy Council Office found that 82 per cent of Canadians nationwide, and 93 per cent of Quebecers, supported the “ban” on oathing-while-veiled. Not only that, when Léger Marketing presented Canadians with eight current issues — from tax credits to the Mike Duffy trial — eight per cent chose “wearing a niqab at citizenship ceremonies” as having “had the most influence on (their) voting intentions.” In Quebec the number was 18 per cent. Among voters intending to vote Bloc Québécois, the number was an astonishing 32 per cent. That’s far more people than prioritized Quebec’s “values charter.”
A significant number say they support the ban on the grounds that people need to be identified — which they must be, as it stands, in advance of taking the oath. Some might be persuaded to abandon their objections. But that leaves a solid majority of people who think it’s a question of Canadian “values.”
We’ve heard a lot about those values lately — not least during Monday night’s foreign policy debate. We heard all about how Canada has supposedly lost its place in the world. When the photograph of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach splashed across the news, the self-styled guardians of Canadian values suddenly declared it was our duty to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees — and the media declared it a crisis for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Then the pollsters talked to Canadians, and … it wasn’t. Canadians weren’t much interested in resettling tens of thousands of Syrians; Canadians think convicted terrorists and traitors should lose their citizenship; and Canadians think you should take that thing off your head when swearing the citizenship oath.
Canadian values aren’t chiselled into a tablet somewhere. They live in those Canadians. And if 82 per cent of Canadians think A, B or C are bad ideas, then A, B and C aren’t Canadian values, full stop. It’s not enough to wave the Charter of Rights in people’s faces, or say “it’s up to the courts.” “You can’t emancipate women by telling them what not to wear” strikes me as a pretty good argument, but it’s clearly not holding water.
These people don’t need lectures, in short. They need to be convinced of what I and my bien-pensant friends think are some basic values of a free and grown-up society. Politicians and pundits clearly aren’t up to the job. Is anyone?
Those who think face coverings should be banned at citizenship ceremonies don’t need lectures. They need to be convinced of what I think are some basic values of a free and grown-up society