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1:25 PM
And on a related note...

Someone I know well (if you're reading this, you know who you are) often likes to say that to illustrate that democracy is flawed, all you'd have to do is call a vote in Quebec asking people if they believed that the Jews should pay twice the amount of tax as everyone else.

That vote, he claims, would pass in a landslide... and therein lies the problem with democracy: The people, quite often, are stupid.

Well, this isn't quite the same thing... but it's close:

Marois's proposed Quebec Identity Act, with its loyalty oaths and French tests for office seekers, is cynically demagogic as well as discriminatory and demeaning. It has little chance of being adopted, and would probably be found unconstitutional if it were.

[. . . ]

And as with Bill 101 30 years ago, it seems everybody opposes the identity bill but the people.

Results of the latest monthly CROP-La Presse poll, published last week, suggest that the PQ has pulled into first place in popularity among the parties, with the ADQ slipping farther back into third.

And another poll commissioned by the strategist behind Marois's bill, Jean-François Lisée, indicates overwhelming support for the bill.

In fact, it seems that most Quebecers would be willing to go even farther. Lisée tested the idea of requiring a "minimal knowledge" of French not only to run for office, but even to vote.

Seventy-two per cent of Quebecers were in favour of the requirement for future immigrants, and 65 per cent for people from other Canadian provinces moving to Quebec.

Yes, and in a lifeboat, two drowning people may vote to throw the third one overboard. That doesn't make it right.

If the reasonable accommodation debate has only served to expose the deep-rooted xenophobia and racism of the vast majority of Quebec's populaton, the proper response isn't to cater to it, or to pass laws to enshrine it.

No, the proper response is to start working to change those attitudes. It won't happen overnight. But at least it would be going in the right direction - something we don't seem to be doing much of, lately.

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12:39 PM
Quebec's unions display their warm, fuzzy side

What do you get when you mix two of my pet peeves: Quebec unions, and the "healthy" reasonable accommodation hearings? Plenty of religious intolerance to go around:

No public servant - including Muslim teachers and judges - should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec's two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants union told the Bouchard-Taylor commission yesterday.

"We think that teachers shouldn't wear any religious symbols - same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the

National Assembly, or a policeman - certainly not," said René Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour.

"The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service ... in order to ensure the secular character of the state," said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Syndicat de la fonction publique du Québec.

Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new "charter of secularism" - akin to the Charter of the French Language - that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau, president of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux.

Such a charter is needed "to avoid anarchy, to avoid treating (reasonable-accommodation) cases one by one," Carbonneau said yesterday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation's 300,000 members at the commission's hearing at the Palais des congrès.

Same point of view at the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Québec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.

Quebec needs a "fundamental law" akin to the Charter of Rights that sets out clearly that public institutions, laws and the state are all neutral when it comes to religion, said Centrale president Réjean Parent. The new law would also "define (people's) rights and duties ... in other words, the rules of living together."

Nobody should be too surprised that our unions would like to see us turn into... well, France. And by dressing it up as an anti-Muslim initiative, playing into people's hatreds and stereotypes, they may just succeed in drumming up enough support for this asinine idea.

The "reasonable accommodation" hearings really ought to have been renamed long ago. My vote is for "Forum to allow all pissed-off, intolerant, inbred and otherwise racist idiots to vent their stereotypes and prejudices in public". Okay, maybe it doesn't quite have that nice ring to it. But it's a lot more accurate.

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