Banning the kaffiyeh was the wrong call
The kaffiyeh remains under wraps in the Ontario legislature until further notice.
The traditional Arab headdress, popularized by the late Yasser Arafat during his struggle for a Palestinian homeland — and embraced by many protesters during the latest Gaza-Israel conflict — has been banned at Queen’s Park since last month. But the kerfuffle over the kaffiyeh keeps evolving day by day.
Now, freewheeling MPPs are tying themselves in knots over the scarf, redolent in symbolism.
It is a reflexive impulse among politicians to be all things to all people. But this square piece of cloth has become a Rorschach blotter test that means different things to different people(s) at different times.
Amid student-led protest on the University of Toronto campus, demarcated by tents and tumult, the tempest at neighbouring Queen’s Park has been largely overshadowed. Amid the pathos of student protesters, the posturing of politicians can seem anticlimactic.
Three weeks after imposing a ban throughout the legislative building (or precincts), Speaker Ted Arnott announced Monday that, upon reflection, he was narrowing — “clarifying” — the ban to the legislative chamber alone. Now, all are free to wear the kaffiyeh in offices and hallways, but MPPs cannot don them during debates on the floor of the house.
You could hear a pin drop after Arnott delivered his speech, every MPP hanging on his every word. But the compromise didn’t satisfy two New Democrats and an independent MPP, who pointedly revealed their scarves after Arnott’s ruling, daring him to act.
Two MPPs were promptly expelled (New Democrat Kristyn Wong-Tam, who sported a more modern interpretation of the traditional chequered kaffiyeh, went unnoticed but left unprompted). Whereupon all three unburdened themselves about the ban to the waiting media.
What does this all mean for Ontario?
Queen’s Park is a place of rituals and rules, traditions and trade-offs. Understandably, the Speaker’s rulings can be hard to understand when there’s a moving target. When is a scarf not a scarf?
It’s complicated. As Arnott struggled to explain, parliaments around the world have a long tradition of prohibiting protests and props (including flags or printed slogans) — because the rules specify that debates are meant to be verbal, not visual.
Just as you can’t wear a T-shirt demanding the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas (banned even at MLSE sporting events), you can’t wear a kaffiyeh that bespeaks solidarity with Palestinians. The Speaker stressed that he had researched his ruling carefully, and that precedent was on his side.
The NDP’s Marit Stiles, who is leader of the opposition, countered that “the kaffiyeh is a traditional clothing item that is significant not only to (Palestinians) but to many members of Arab and Muslim communities.” Not so simple.
Arnott pointed out that he’d permitted the kaffiyeh in the past, when few bothered to wear it. Now that so many were suddenly embracing the scarf in co-ordinated bursts, it had crossed the line into symbolic protests. Put another way, if it walks and talks like a political protest, it’s a protest. When so many people of all backgrounds suddenly don the Palestinian kaffiyeh, it’s no longer merely cultural or sartorial but political.
Yet even if the Speaker was speaking the truth — and Stiles was surely straining credulity by claiming the kaffiyeh isn’t political at this point — Arnott made the wrong call. Technically, he’s right, but practically his ruling was unenforceable and unsupportable.
Which is why no party leader supported him last month — not just Stiles but her Green, Liberal and Progressive Conservative counterparts asked him to reconsider. Yes, even Premier Doug Ford, mindful of a hard-fought byelection last week with many Muslim voters, echoed the NDP’s call.
The Speaker reminded them all that he is merely their servant, and that they are free to overrule him. But when MPPs were asked to give unanimous consent to permit the kaffiyeh, a number of Tories demurred, leading to the present standoff.
But the Tories, no longer worried about byelections (they won both last week), are belatedly rallying to the Speaker’s position. PC House Leader Paul Calandra said he is now onside with Arnott, and the premier — choosing his words carefully — implied Monday that he too supports the latest compromise.
At a time of increasingly poisonous partisan misconduct, where even the Speaker’s rulings are routinely ignored (not least by the three MPPs Monday), it is hard to believe that banning the kaffiyeh is required to protect the delicacy of parliamentary decorum. Men no longer need ties in the house, why make a fuss over the kaffiyeh?
After all, when Arafat spoke at the General Assembly of the United Nations — the ultimate parliamentary deliberative body — he wore his headdress. When several New Democrat MPs wore the scarf in the House of Commons earlier this year, the Speaker turned a blind eye.
And when an Israeli politician complained about a Palestinian-Israeli parliamentarian daring to don the kaffiyeh while addressing the Knesset a few years ago, the speaker shot it down, saying: “We wear yarmulkes, he can come with a kaffiyeh.”
Live and let live.