Expect a dial-back in the rhetoric over culture
Is it too soon to declare the culture wars over? Sure it is. This is too flammable an issue, and the sides are too far apart, for the controversy to simply fade. Stephen Harper’s government will continue to hold that the niqab should be banned in the specific instance of a public interaction between an individual and the state. The Opposition will continue to accuse the Tories of intolerance and fearmongering in this regard.
But it is safe to assume that the cabinet, led by Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney and a few others of like mind, will now do their level best to squeeze this genie partially back into the bottle, to the extent they can, before it does them any further harm. The reason is its very combustibility, made manifest in the past week. This debate does not lend itself to easy management or control, even in the hands of the prime minister. Indeed Harper may have been the worst offender.
It has been remarkable, in the wake of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s “liberty” speech Monday in Toronto — during which he accused the Conservatives of deliberately stoking anti-Muslim paranoia and drew parallels between this and bigotry towards Jewish, Italian and Japanese Canadians in the 1930s and ’40s, among other comparisons — to watch Kenney strike back.
Tuesday he posted a series of Tweets detailing his party’s history of pluralism. These include fielding the first Canadian Muslim MP, first Sunni Muslim senator, first non-caucasian MP, and “1st Parliamentarians of Chinese African, Hindu, Japanese, Korean original, et al,” Kenney wrote. He called it “obscene” for Trudeau to have compared the anti-Semitic policies of the Mackenzie King government in the 1930s to Canadian official treatment of Muslims today, noting that immigration levels, including of Muslims, have increased under the Conservatives.
Kenney then ventured a Q&A with Maclean’s magazine’s John Geddes, in which he provided the first thoughtful defence, that I am aware of, of his banning the niqab from citizenship ceremonies.
“Something politically correct Liberals don’t understand, which I do rather profoundly,” Kenney told Maclean’s, “is that the vast majority of new Canadians, including new Canadians of the Muslim faith, believe that there are certain important hallmarks of integration. They don’t believe that multiculturalism should be misconstrued as cultural relativism. They believe that multiculturalism should mean a positive regard for what’s best about people’s cultural and religious antecedents. But it should not mean a completely unquestioning acceptance of every cultural practice, especially those of an abhorrent nature.”
Kenney continued: “I can tell you that the vast majority of Muslims that I’ve spoken with strongly supported my decision in 2010 to state what I thought was axiomatic that a public citizenship ceremony had to be performed publicly.”
So there you have it; the crux, about which reasonable people may disagree. Absent from Kenney’s construction was the overreach — whether it be Prime Minister Stephen Harper thundering that Islamic culture is “anti-women,” to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander’s earlier conflation of the niqab and the hijab or head scarf — that have opened the Conservatives up anew to the hoary old charge that they are antiimmigrant.
And this gets us to why even Kenney’s approach, though notable for its clarity, is fraught with peril. The debate over religious symbols is too nuanced, and too open to misspeaking, misinterpretation and abrupt, disastrous derailment, to bring anything but grief to any Canadian political party that pursues it. That’s especially true now, with the country embroiled in a shooting war with an apocalyptic, fascistic sect of Islam, embodied in the Islamic State extremist group. The government can argue that the war and the niqab policy are not in any way connected. Few will believe that.
It may be that Harper meant only to say that the most reactionary strains of Islam, those that insist female adherents wear the niqab in public, are “antiwomen.” But as he actually uttered the words, they were easily interpreted as a broader slam against all Islamic culture. How then does he feel about moderate Islam? Is that also “antiwomen?” Harper and his representatives will continue to argue that he embraces mainstream Muslim culture. Again, the question is whether that will now be believed.
The trouble, in a nutshell, is that people mess up, and few areas are more prone to error than debates over religion and ethnicity, which overheat in a heartbeat. In the coming federal election the number of Conservatives who can make mistakes is 338, multiplied by the number of their staffers. Does the Conservative party really want to shoulder such risk, particularly with the Liberals now opening up pluralism as a new front?
The smart money says no. Which is why the Conservatives can be expected to speak less, not more, about culture in the weeks ahead, now that Kenney has offered his rebuttals.