Minority leans on minorities
Francophones can justify things to themselves other majorities cannot
Even sovereigntists are starting to distance themselves from the Parti Québécois’s ill-starred Charter of Quebec Values. The proposed ban on the wearing of religious symbols in public institutions, in particular, has come under fire from none other than Josée Legault, the redoubtable columnist and sometime PQ strategist.
Admittedly her main point seemed to be the “spectacular inconsistency” of forbidding yarmulkes and hijabs even as a large crucifix remains pinned to the wall of the provincial legislature, but still — it rather undercuts the emerging Péquiste talking point, to the effect that the whole controversy was something got up by the English media (“these are just the sorts of accusations of intolerance we’ve come to expect from you people”).
On the other hand, well, it’s a bit late, isn’t it? Leave aside the fracas over banning turbans on the soccer field, which was supported with varying degrees of hysteria by a good number of sovereigntist thinkers. After the sign laws, after “money and the ethnic vote” and “we are the white race that has the fewest babies” and various other bonbons offered up over the years as tokens of the party’s goodwill to the province’s ethnic and linguistic minorities, is it to be imagined the party would draw the line at this particular bit of insensitivity?
It is not accidental that this issue keeps erupting in Quebec, in a way it does not elsewhere. No, it is not because Quebecers are more intolerant, as a people. But it is a hazard of nationalism, at least of the kind the PQ espouses, and Quebecers are drawn toward nationalism — with the result that the kinds of irredentist cranks who would elsewhere be marginalized can still get elected in Quebec. And then we are all supposed to be astonished when they say and do the things they promised to say and do when they were elected.
But intolerance of differences is not an aberration in identity-based movements, nor should we be surprised when it moves beyond the “acceptable” lines of language to embrace religious and other minority groups. This may seem ironic, given the nationalists’ prickly insistence on the primacy of Quebec’s “distinctiveness.” But this is the point. What defines identity politics — what is indeed its raison d’être — is not, as it pretends, a pluralistic concern for difference, but a monotonic insistence on uniformity. It is not the differences between groups that is its concern, so much as sameness within the group.
That, after all, is what “identity” means. Where identity — ethnic, cultural, or other — is the basis of affiliation in a group, it is necessarily about conformity. The group, in this case called a nation, is not something for its members to define collectively as they go along — the “referendum of all the people every day” to which Ernest Renan referred: it has already been defined for them. All that remains is to insist upon adherence to this prewritten script.
This is hardly unique to Quebec. You see, or at least saw, much the same tendencies in Canadian nationalists: so obsessed with what made Canadians different from Americans — our identity — that they treated every deviation from it as disloyal, a plot to introduce “American-style” this or that. Indeed, it can be observed in every identity group. Remember the debates over whether Barack Obama was “black” enough? Or consider the enduring appeal of “difference feminism” — it is hard to square its gross stereotyping of both sexes with a genuine appreciation of difference. For if it were really about difference, it would extend all the way to the uniqueness of each individual — which would be to deny its very, well, identity.
Mostly this is pretty harmless stuff. It is when identity politics finds expression through the state, with the power to enforce its dictates upon society at large, that it becomes potentially toxic. The temptation to majority tyranny is particularly apparent when, as in Quebec, the majority is itself a minority, as francophones are within Canada. For a majority that sees itself as a besieged minority can justify things to itself that other majorities cannot — in the name of defending itself from that larger majority.
The open contempt so many Quebec nationalists display towards multiculturalism does not merely reflect a fear that it is a plot to trivialize the — clearly more profound — distinctiveness of Quebec. It is seen as weakwilled, decadent, a sign of a culture so unsure of itself that it cannot assert its own primacy. This, even as they remain vigilant against the ever-present threat of “domineering federalism.”
Of course, actual instances of “domineering federalism” are in short supply. Notwithstanding the PQ’s efforts to turn “reasonable accommodation” (in reality, unreasonable non-accommodation) into a French-English thing, the majority outside Quebec shows no sign of rising to the defence of the province’s religious minorities, any more than they have when the issue was language.
But then, that is a rich tradition in this country. One of the purposes of the federal government, as the Fathers of Confederation conceived it, was to protect local minorities from the tyranny of local majorities. But that more or less died out when Laurier washed his hands of the Manitoba Schools Question.
Since then it has been left to the courts. Which is of course the great grievance of Quebec nationalists, the only living example of their oppression: the Canadian Charter of Rights, “imposed” on Quebec in 1982 with the consent of 72 of its 75 members of Parliament. And the chief objection to the Charter? That it constrains the francophone majority’s ability to enforce its will on its minorities. “Irony” does not begin to describe this, but “spectacular inconsistency” might.