Here’s a measure of how little we are doing in the nation’s capital to rebuild better: MPs from different parties and perspectives are having an interesting conversation on important issues. But it’s completely off the books. It is spontaneous, the leaders of the various parties did not ask for it and it is quite clear that they desperately wish it were not happening. In Ottawa, speaking your mind is an act of rebellion.
The theme of the week is, of course, Quebec Bill 21, which prohibits the hiring of public servants, including teachers, who dress incorrectly (“The persons listed in Annex II are prohibited from using religious symbols in the exercise of their functions”). The bill was presented in March 2019 and sanctioned shortly thereafter. Federal party leaders answered questions about it in debates during the 2019 and 2021 elections. Each time, Quebec Prime Minister François Legault got angry at the people who asked the questions. So did federal party leaders, who pay ever-increasing hordes of stupid employees to tell them how to move and talk and who cannot for the life of their lives understand that the rest of us are not also recruits in that endeavor.
READ: The battle against Quebec’s 21 bill
The inevitable happened anyway. This week it emerged that a third grade teacher in the bucolic Quebec city of Chelsea, a stone’s throw from Ottawa, was pulled out of class for wearing a hijab. This is how he played in an early history: unnamed teacher reassigned to “another role” outside the class, school officials did not discuss the details, the shocked community hung up green ties.
There was a chain reaction. Kyle Seeback, a Conservative MP from Brampton, started it with tweeting“I cannot, in conscience, keep silent about this anymore … We must oppose Bill 21. In the courts, in the commons’ house and in the streets.” Jamie Schmale, Chris Warkentin and Mark Strahl tweeted their agreement.
Seeback’s conscience seems to have gnawed at him after he retweeted a Thursday night tweet from the Balloon Robyn Urback wonder why Catherine McKenna, the former liberal environment minister, now considers the application of Law 21 to be “appalling” but, at the time, it did not contradict the softer language of Justin Trudeau in the 2019 and 21 campaigns. Good by Seeback, actually, for amplifying a bit of sarcasm directed at a liberal and then realizing it applied to him, too. Soon McKenna and the Conservative MPs had company among the Liberals who were still in the caucus: Alexandra Mendes, Salma Zahid, Iqra Khalid, Marc Garneau. Finally, an acting cabinet minister, Marc Miller, called “cowardly” law enforcement. There is also a clip of Chrystia Freeland, the Federal Minister of Take Care What You Wish, saying as close to anything I can say, a recurring highlight of many recent debates.
READ: ‘A sadness you cannot describe’: The high price of Quebec’s Bill 21
I also don’t like Bill 21. It is based on silly reasoning: “the state” should have no religion, so no one who plays because the state can be considered to have any religion. This is like saying that the state does not have a particular height, so public servants must be required to remain suspended above the ground. Somewhere around here is an old column I patiently wrote explaining this logic and its heritage in the receding role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society, a column that some of my Toronto colleagues still enjoy poking fun at, but there is a difference. between understanding the argument and believing it. . In a list of the first, say, a thousand problems facing modern Quebec, the “masters with headscarves” would not appear. And one of the most obvious things we can say about this law is that the costs it imposes – in personal freedom, economic opportunity, social ostracism – are essentially never borne by people named Tremblay or Côté or Wells. Somehow the burden seems to reliably fall on the people named, well in the current case, about Fatemeh Anvari. About who else in a moment.
Nor have I ever felt that Bill 21 reveals some universal “Quebec” moral flaw. All the criticisms that I can make against this law have been made, many times, for Quebecers, including several of the liberal deputies who yesterday ran out of patience; the Quebec Liberal and Québec Solidaire parties, which between them obtained more votes than Legault’s party in 2018; an impressive selection of politicians and municipal commentators in, mainly, Montreal; Y Judge Marc-André Blanchard of the Superior Court of Quebec, whose ruling overturned parts of Bill 21 and exclaimed his powerlessness over the rest: he clearly doesn’t like it, but Legault’s use of the “notwithstanding” clause in the constitution protects most of the law from challenge or judicial invalidations. Solid majorities in Quebec have supported the law in polls, but I’m not sure how long it will last, and since the charter provisions of the Bill of Law must be renewed every five years in the National Assembly, I’m not sure about the law. per se. it won’t last long either. I reject the notion that only Quebecers can have an opinion on things, because of course everyone can have an opinion on anything. But the conversation among Quebecers is already multifaceted enough.
Some context points. First, the provisions of the law, as they apply to the Western Quebec School Board employing Fatemeh Anvari, have already been shot down. However, minority language education rights are on trial, and Judge Blanchard did with the provisions for English school boards what he clearly wanted to do with the entire law. The Legault government appealed the ruling and, under Quebec law, the provisions remain in effect pending appeal, but Legault will lose the appeal and, by next year, there may be no barrier left for teachers in hijab teach in Quebec’s English language schools. This does not help the rest of the province, at least not immediately, but it does establish two cases that parents will be able to observe and compare. That it is a ball that can bounce in many different ways over time.
Second, in the interviews, Anvari is clearly disturbed by a situation that she shouldn’t be in. But she is neither fired nor banished to the farthest reaches of her school’s steam pipe trunks distribution site. As the Lowdown’s Excellent history notes, he has been assigned “a literacy project for all students [that] will aim for inclusion and awareness of diversity. ”This is not as good as simply letting her teach the curriculum would have been, but it does show some ingenuity. Again, in a complex society, citizens respond in ways that governments to They often do not intend and would not prefer.Governments often do not take that news well.
Third: those who ask governments do something, which now includes members of the federal government group, sometimes have no ideas about what to do, precisely. Federal attorneys in a court challenge were unable to present any arguments that have not already been presented and, to a large extent, rejected by the frustrated Judge Blanchard. Aside from reviving the outdated reserve and rejection powers, a step that even Pierre Trudeau refused to take even against Bill 101, there is not much that federal intervention can add.
So doesn’t it make sense to just speak up or just send federal attorneys out to say what attorneys for civil society groups have already said? No, I think there is a point, where it brings the actions of the government closer to what obviously are the opinions of the people who make up the government. (Note that there is not a single Liberal MP who tweets: “Guys, Bill 21 is great!”). A reduction in the amount of hypocrisy in a system is always welcome and lately it’s long overdue. But how practical matter, the feds can’t do much to change the situation.
Last but not least but still noteworthy: When four Tory MPs tweeted within minutes about their renewed love of freedom, it was hard to escape the suspicion that something else was going on. Perhaps this: Those Tories are not, by and large, conspicuous fans of Erin O’Toole, and many hail from districts where much of the Tory voter base is spitting angrily at O’Toole for perceiving the softness on vaccine mandates. When Seeback talks about opposing Bill 21 “on the street,” it sure sounds like an echo of the way many people opposed the vaccine mandates. MPs who can’t give their voters much satisfaction with the second are likely to be grateful for the opportunity to vent on the first. That is not to rule out or refute Bill 21 Freedom Four; it’s just to keep in mind that motifs are often mixed up or added together.
Here’s the thing: in a liberal democracy you can’t keep a cork in everyone’s mouth forever. You shouldn’t try. It’s been fun watching the leaders of three federal political parties try to deny simple human feelings on an inherently emotional issue. But the fun is over. Now citizens are going to act like citizens. It is always a scary time for communication professionals.
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