Short Guide to the PQ's Charter of Values

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The so-called “Quebec Charter of Values” unveiled by the governing Parti Québécois has, predictably, been met with almost universal condemnation in the rest of Canada, as well as by most non-francophones in Quebec itself. However, a significant percentage of Québécois francophones are in support, according to polls.

The charter would forbid all public employees from wearing “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols and headgear, including Muslim face veils, Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, or large crucifixes. “This restriction would reflect the state’s neutrality,” the proposal for the charter states.

The regulations would apply only to publicly-paid employees. These include police officers, prosecutors, doctors, teachers, daycare workers and other government workers.

The PQ considers itself a left-of-centre party, yet to many advocates of multiculturalism in the country, this seems to place them in the same category as those xenophobes, and even racists, who oppose diversity.

To understand where this charter is, so to speak, coming from, it’s necessary to view the context in which it is being proposed. We have to examine the different historical circumstances that are behind it. This is not to condone it, but to understand its ideological roots.

I have identified four important issues:

First, Quebec is a French Canadian “homeland” nation, like Serbia or Sweden. It’s not just a “Nebraska” or “Saskatchewan,” places that don't “belong” to a specific ethnic group. In those places, no other community can be seen as a “threat” to the “nation.” The rest of Canada actually accepts this definition – the province is considered a “distinct society,” after all.

Secondly comes the fact that this people was conquered, in the 18^th century, by others who didn’t accommodate themselves to the majority culture. The British Protestants who took over after 1759 didn’t become French-speaking Catholics. And the immigrants that followed, especially non-Catholics, moved into the anglophone sphere, humiliating the majority population as a conquered people without control over their own “homeland.”

So for decades, the accommodation ran the other way – only with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s did French Quebeckers become “maîtres chez nous” (“masters in our own house”). And so there is a fear, however unfounded, that a new wave of immigrants, even if speaking French, will also not become part of “la patrie.”

Third, in Quebec there is a strong strain of anti-clericalism, one that has followed centuries of what many consider cultural and religious oppression by a hegemonic Roman Catholic Church. The secularization of French Canadian society only began in the 1960s, and so many see all religion as repressive.

Pre-1960s Quebec is now viewed by those on the left as “la grande noirceur” (“the great darkness”), an era when so many Québécois were uneducated and under the supposed thumb of priests and nuns, and it makes many in the province wary of any religious presence. There was no equivalent to this in the pluralistic, largely Protestant, English Canada, where separation of church and state does not involve removing religion from the public square.

Finally, many strands of Quebec feminism, unlike the multicultural version prevalent elsewhere, consider all religious garb as inherently oppressive to women and forced on them by males.

If the charter ever manages to be passed into law by Quebec’s National Assembly, most of it will probably be struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada. The separatists will then claim that this demonstrates the need for Quebec to become a sovereign nation.