Tory niqab stance strictly business
The Conservative Party of Canada, xenophobic? Balderdash. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a series of coincidences and accommodations by necessity. What the prosecution terms “evidence” is mere supposition. At worst, these are slanders against the good name of a venerable institution.
Let us consider the history, distant and more recent. This is the party of Sir John A. Macdonald, who in the late 1800s somehow bound together disparate nations of refugees from the old world, French and English, Irish and Scots, Yankees fleeing the violence to the south, Fenians and Orangemen, and aboriginal peoples, under the grand, unifying roof of the Parliament of Canada. Sir John’s great work created, in effect, the world’s first truly pluralist, multi-lingual federation.
(Yes, there was that business with Riel, unfortunate to be sure, but treason is as treason does. Had the upstart been a dual citizen, exile might have spared him the end of a rope. This not having been an option at the time, the government did its unpalatable duty.)
Half a century later there was the great populist John G. Diefenbaker, whose name we know well from its having been embossed on various federal projects and buildings this past decade. Prime Minister Diefenbaker is not, as base rumour would have it, best remembered for killing the Avro Arrow and having all prototypes of this revolutionary aircraft chopped up and dumped into Lake Ontario.
Quite the contrary, Diefenbaker was an early and great champion of civil liberties. In a climate of national self-examination over the forced internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, he introduced the Canadian Bill of Rights of 1960, which reads, in part: “It is hereby recognized and declared that in Canada there have existed and shall continue to exist without discrimination by reason of race, national origin, colour, religion or sex, the following human rights and fundamental freedoms, namely: a. the right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment of property, and the right not be deprived thereof except by due process of law; b. the right of the individual to equality before the law and the protection of the law; c. freedom of religion; d. freedom of speech; e. freedom of assembly and association; f. freedom of the press.”
Can anyone fail to see here the provenance of Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Trudeau the Elder simply completed a task begun by his Tory predecessor.
Now let us leap forward again, to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who in some respects led the most enlightened Canadian administration since Wilfrid Laurier, advocating both commercial liberalism and racial and linguistic harmony.
But the most telling argument of all, my friends, lies in the record of this current Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper. Much has been made of the Tories’ recent conflation of Islamist fundamentalism with the rule against wearing of the niqab, or veil, at Canadian citizenship ceremonies. A “tip-line” for the denunciation of “barbaric cultural practices,” by one’s neighbours, has been proposed. Evil-doers, should they be found guilty of treasonous acts and be unlucky enough to possess dual citizenship, will be defenestrated from the Canadian family.
But would there even have been a Harper majority in 2011, had it not been for the votes of recent immigrants, hailing from countries the world over? Levels of immigration have never been more robust than they are today. The Conservative leader himself, in an interview last September with the editorin-chief of the Wall Street Journal, attributed his party’s electoral success to newfound support among “cultural communities.” Jason Kenney was not dubbed the “Minister for Curry in a Hurry,” for nothing. It was the Liberal party that took support among new Canadians for granted for decades, following Trudeau pere’s unfair hoarding of the limelight for his Charter.
Therefore, honourable jurors, it’s quite obvious there can be no deeply-felt anti-immigrant ideology behind the Conservatives’ elevation of the niqab (the wearing of which was an issue for two of the 680,000 women who’ve taken the oath of citizenship in the four years since the rule was imposed) into a galvanizing crisis of nationhood.
It’s just politics; a bet, based on exhaustive scientific polling, that reflexive antipathy for the burqa, the full-body-and-face covering worn by a tiny minority of ultra-orthodox Muslim women in Canada, will translate into a wave of quiet support for Conservative candidates.
“It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business,” said Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Now there was a man who understood.
It’s just politics; a bet, based on
exhaustive scientific polling