Speculation that the deaths of three Montreal-area sisters and their female caregiver could have been a so-called honour killing has rekindled the reasonable accommodation debate in the Quebec press.
Le Devoir columnist Jean-Claude Leclerc called the tragedy, which took place in Kingston, “the pretext for another dispute over tolerance in Canada.” Mr. Leclerc observed that “even though the hard facts have yet to be established,” the police have already suggested that this could be a case of “the breaking of Canadian law by foreigners and the importation of social mores that are incompatible with those of our society.”
Le Journal de Montreal's Richard Martineau didn't waste any time adding his two cents of unbridled outrage to the discussion. In a missive riddled with his trademark all-cap exclamations, Mr. Martineau declared the killings a result of a “barbaric” extremist ideology that “SYSTEMATICALLY promotes the hatred and mistreatment of women.” Mr. Martineau went on to question “why Canada has agreed to welcome people who espouse values that oppose the ones we defend?” and concluded by quoting French President Nicolas Sarkozy's statement regarding the banning of the burka in France: “We should not be ashamed of our values, we should not be afraid to defend them.”
In his Saturday column in La Presse, Patrick Lagacé reserved some of his outrage for the police officers involved in last week's press conference. Mr. Lagacé was particularly upset by the fact Kingston's police chief made a point of stating that the three sisters “all shared the rights within our great country to live without fear, to enjoy safety and security, and to exercise freedom of choice and expression.” Mr Lagacé argued that the chief would never have felt the need to “underline the obvious” or “explain how the Earth is round” if the suspects had not been from Afghanistan. He went on to suggest that “the fact that the chief of a police force in a Canadian city felt the need to remind us of this kind of thing is a concession to those extremists […] whose lives are ruled by retrograde superstitions.” Mr. Lagacé labelled the police chief's choice of words a “dazzling symbol” of the “very Canadian” tendency to avoiding criticizing ethnicity or risk being labelled a racist. “It is not racist to say that there are some ‘new Canadians' who come from reactionary cultures. It is not racist to say that Sharia is heresey,” Mr. Lagacé declared.
An article on Rue Frontenac – the news site staffed by striking Journal de Montreal employees – quoted Djemila Benhabib, an anti-Islamist and feminist author, who in reaction to news of the killings said that some people who are new to Canada act “as if they were still living in their village” and “maintain the values of their home country and consider them more important than those of Canada.” Ms. Benhabib went on to say that Canadians and their governments must do more to protect the rights of Muslim women and declared that, “When we normalize the veil, when we cry Islamophobia as soon as we want to discuss things, we abort the debate.”
Blogue post of the week
In her last blog post before her summer vacation, Josée Legault offered up her second annual Petit lexique québécois. It's a dictionary-style list of words that are part of the Québécois “socio-culturo-politico ” vocabulary. Highlights include a nod to a Jean Charest catch-phrase of the year: “To have ‘two hands on the wheel' - win back your majority while leaving the population without a seat-belt.” A timely observation related to the past week's headlines also made the cut: “Burka - a fabric cage in which we enclose women to better isolate them from the world, but which our prime ministers refuse to condemn.”
