Jean Charest has endured some of the harshest criticism of his career over his handling of the ongoing debate in Quebec over the limits of reasonable accommodation. The Premier managed to get his first round of positive press in a very long time last week when his government tabled a bill that would essentially ban the niqab, a veil over the face worn by some Muslim women, from public institutions. The aim of the bill is to “establish guidelines governing accommodation requests” in the province. In addition to more general assertions regarding the importance of gender equality and “religious neutrality of the State,” the bill specifically states that people delivering or receiving government services are expected to show their faces for reasons of “security, communication, or identification.”
Most francophone pundits welcomed the new bill. La Presse’s André Pratte called the new guidelines “reasonable” and opined that the “open secularism” the bill calls for is in line with Quebec’s history as a “fundamentally liberal society.”
Le Soleil editorialist Brigitte Breton agreed that the long-awaited bill proposed “realistic and reasonable” guidelines. For Ms. Breton, the bill was “open, moderate and respectful of the rights and liberties of all” and it served as proof that the Charest’s government had managed to “grasp the essence” of the recommendations made by the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in 2008. Ms. Breton praised the Liberal government for “avoiding the pitfalls of banning the niqab outright. It has laid out guidelines, but it has been careful not to try to use the law to impose a dress code for its citizens and employees.”
Michele Ouimet, a La Presse columnist who recently wrote about a day she spent navigating the streets of Montreal wearing a niqab, praised the Liberal government for injecting some “common sense” into the reasonable accommodation debate, but argued that the provisions in the bill do not go far enough. Ms. Ouimet was concerned that the bill failed to specifically ban government employees from wearing religious symbols. “The hijab, turban, cross, kippa […] nothing is prohibited,” she wrote. Ms. Ouimet concluded that, in its effort to avoid France’s rigid model of secularism, the government had opted for an “open secularism” that was “a little too open.”
Le Journal de Montreal’s Richard Martineau was characteristically less restrained in his criticism of the bill. Mr. Martineau accused Mr. Charest of using political slight of hand to distract Quebeckers from the real issue. “He raises his right hand and says, ‘Look, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to ban the niqab from the public service!’ […] And with his left hand he shoves the wearing of religious symbols,” he wrote. Although Mr. Martineau devoted the bulk of his column to railing against the bill for not going far enough, in the end he conceded that “it’s a step in the right direction, an extremely timid step.”
Blogue post of the week
Like many francophone pundits, Chantal Hébert was intrigued by an Angus Reid poll released last week that found the vast majority of Canadians outside of Quebec support the province’s proposed legislation to ban the niqab. “This is not an early April Fool’s prank,” Ms. Hébert assured readers of her blogue. The poll results are in contrast to the generally disapproving reactions to the proposed ban in the R.O.C press.
Ms. Hébert contended that this disparity “proves once again that the media elites are disconnected from the reality on the ground, notably but not exclusively for reasons of political correctness.”
