{"id":2322,"date":"2020-06-27T14:52:38","date_gmt":"2020-06-27T14:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/?p=2322"},"modified":"2020-06-27T14:52:38","modified_gmt":"2020-06-27T14:52:38","slug":"on-racism-and-the-bloc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/2020\/06\/27\/on-racism-and-the-bloc\/","title":{"rendered":"On Racism and the Bloc"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may be a stretch to call it \u201cthe boot heard round the world.\u201d But Jagmeet Singh attracted international attention with his ejection from the House of Commons last week for calling another member racist. The incident caught the attention of \u00a0both the BBC and National Public Radio in the U.S. and, according to iPolitics<\/em>, assorted other international media outlets.<\/p>\n

As has been widely reported, the racist epithet was hung on Bloc Quebecois MP Alain Therrien who denied unanimous consent for debate on the NDP leader\u2019s motion to recognize systemic racism in the RCMP and review the Mounties\u2019 budget, its use of force and its accountability to the public.<\/p>\n

According to Singh, the Bloc member accompanied his voiced denial of unanimous consent with a dismissive wave of the hand, which prompted the racism allegation. Neither the hand gesture or Singh\u2019s response were caught by Hansard.<\/p>\n

But when the Bloc complained NDP MP Carol Hughes, who as assistant deputy speaker was chairing the committee meeting, asked Singh to apologize. On the record this time, he refused and repeated the accusation. Hughes referred the problem to the boss speaker, Liberal Anthony Rota, who returned to the chair and told the NDP leader to take the rest of the day off.<\/p>\n

I will leave to others who\u2019ve experienced it to decide whether Therrien\u2019s allegedly callous dismissal of the NDP motion makes him a racist. Similarly, Ottawa political insiders can mull over the irony of a party leader getting thrown out of the House for refusing to follow direction from a member of his own caucus, acting in her capacity as assistant deputy speaker. There may also be a few tongues wagging over the reaction of Jagmeet Singh\u2019s predecessor, Tom Mulcair. Now a pundit for CTV, he jumped immediately to Therrien\u2019s defense, saying Singh should apologize.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re using racism because you don\u2019t like somebody\u2019s hand gestures, you have no other information about that person\u2019s core beliefs, they\u2019ve never said or done anything that anybody would identify as being racist, it\u2019s not that you\u2019re making them uncomfortable, you\u2019re using a very serious term and you better have something to back it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Either Mulcair forgot about, or was unconcerned with, the fact that as a provincial MNA, Alain Therrien revealed himself as a conspiracy-minded<\/a> <\/strong>Islamophobe who used his official Facebook page to promote the views of a controversial anti-Muslim academic.<\/p>\n

To me, the most intriguing aspect of the story is the Bloc\u2019s over-reaction and what that says about how identity politics have played out federally in Quebec since the amazing Orange Wave of 2011 handed 59 seats to the NDP and practically wiped out the Bloc, the nominally separatist party that had been a fixture in the House of Commons for almost 20 years.<\/p>\n

Protest excessive<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing to consider is that if it had not been raised by the Bloc, Singh\u2019s initial comments may have floated off into the clouds with countless other bits of across-the-aisle banter and insult that over the years have gone unrecorded and unreported. But not only did the Bloc make an issue of Singh\u2019s accusation, they complained that the one-day suspension was not punishment enough, promising to raise the matter again when the House comes back next month.<\/p>\n

The morning after the headline-making banishment, Bloc Leader Yves Blanchet vehemently denied the allegation, telling reporters that \u201cAlain Therrien is anything but a racist person, and the Bloc Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois are anything but racist people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blanchet claimed the Bloc denied consent to debate Singh\u2019s motion only because systemic racism in policing was already scheduled to be discussed by a House committee. A day or two later the former long-time Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe weighed in, trying to frame the affair as an attack on Quebec. In an interview on Global\u2019s The West Block<\/a><\/em> <\/strong>he accused Singh of crying racism to win votes in the rest of Canada. Duceppe acknowledged there is systemic racism in Quebec, just as there is elsewhere in the country. \u201cThere is systematic racism in Quebec but we certainly don\u2019t have to take lessons from the rest of Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bloc backlash brings to mind the words of Shakespeare, as uttered by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet<\/em>: \u201cthe lady (gentlemen) doth protest too much, methinks.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The fierce denials suggest an effort to obscure the truth. Bloc members may insist they\u00a0are not racist, but they can\u2019t deny they have been among the most fervent supporters of measures advanced by successive Quebec governments, policies that have been denounced as racist. And the record bears out that the Bloc has benefitted politically from that support, mostly at the expense of the NDP.<\/p>\n

Reasonable accommodation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Identity politics in Quebec has surfaced mainly around the issue of reasonable accommodation of minorities, specifically the right to display religious symbols while providing or receiving public services. As a political problem it dates back to at least 2002 when the Supreme Court of Canada over-ruled a local school board and allowed a young Sikh man to wear a ceremonial dagger to school, under strict conditions. In 2006 the tabloids and some politicians became riled up at a successful effort by Hasidic Jews in Outremont to get tinted windows installed at the local YMCA swimming pool to block the sight of women in bathing suits.<\/p>\n

The worldwide outburst of Islamophobia following 9-11 also resonated in Quebec, so much so that controversy over reasonable accommodation of Islam has become the dominant issue. The controversy reached a bizarre peak in 2007 when the rural village of H\u00e9rouxville found it necessary to create a code of conduct lest any Muslims chose to settle there. The code prohibited, among other things, stoning and female genital mutilation, but it attracted wide media attention and was treated seriously by some politicians as a heartfelt cry. As a result, the Liberal government of Jean Charest set up an inquiry commission co-chaired by sociologist Gerard Bouchard\u00a0and philosopher\u00a0Charles Taylor. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia:<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though the Bouchard-Taylor Commission concluded that there was no problem with the practice of accommodation – what was reported in the media differed from what was happening \u201con the ground\u201d – the commission uncovered considerable fear among the Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois that immigration and accommodations were infringing on their values.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever fear Quebeckers were feeling about immigration or accommodation does not seem to have been a factor in the 2011 federal election campaign when a sudden infatuation with the Jack Layton and the NDP produced the Orange Wave. But fear would soon be stoked with a return to power, after a nine-year hiatus, of the Parti Quebecois.<\/p>\n

In 2013 the PQ government brought in the Charter of Quebec Values. To its supporters, it was affirmation of a secular society, free from religious influence on government. Others saw chauvinism in its provisions, including one banning public sector employees from wearing or displaying conspicuous religious symbols. During demonstrations against the charter, protesters chanted \u201cvaleurs p\u00e9quiste, valeurs racistes”(PQ values, racist values).<\/p>\n

In Ottawa, the remnants of the Bloc showed support for the initiative by kicking out one if its four surviving members -veteran MP Maria Mourani \u00a0who called the Quebec values charter a triumph of political opportunism over human rights.<\/p>\n

Niqab controversy<\/strong><\/p>\n

The PQ government and its charter were gone by the time of the 2015 federal election, defeated by the Liberals, who would wait until 2017 before venturing into the minefield of religious symbol suppression. But the issue surfaced anyway, thanks to the Harper government\u2019s embrace of Islamophobia. The Conservative policy requiring Muslim women taking the oath of citizenship to remove their face coverings – the niqab – during public ceremonies was struck down in court a month before the election. Although the plaintiff in the case was from the Toronto area, the ruling had a big impact in Quebec.<\/p>\n

The Conservatives vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court, a course opposed by both the NDP and the Liberals. But the NDP had the most to lose in Quebec \u2013 and lose they did. A week after the court ruling, Thomas Mulcair re-iterated the NDP position. As the Canadian Federal Election of 2015<\/em> put it:<\/p>\n

\u201cThough the party knew all too well that its position on the issue was playing badly in Quebec, in the first French-language leaders\u2019 debate, on September 24, Mulcair took a principled stand. Support for the NDP in Quebec never recovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the NDP began to fall behind the Liberals in Quebec, the party\u2019s support in the rest of the country followed suit as voters moved to the Liberals as the better choice for defeating the Conservatives. And in Quebec, the decline of the NDP also revived the Bloc. The separatists came into the election with only two seats but came out with 10, flipping seven NDP seats with the help of a racist attack ad<\/a> <\/strong>depicting oil spilled from a proposed Energy East pipeline morphing into a woman in a niqab.<\/p>\n

The NDP managed to retain 16 Quebec seats but its post-election standing in Quebec continued to decline after Mulcair lost a convention confidence vote in the spring of 2016 and fell further when Singh won the leadership 18 months later. In what could be construed as tacit acceptance of systemic racism in our politics, it was widely assumed that wearing a turban – which would disqualify Singh from working in the Quebec public service – would also doom the NDP\u2019s prospects in Quebec in the 2019 federal election.<\/p>\n

That prophecy was strengthened by a new development in the reasonable accommodations debate – the election in 2018 of the nationalist Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) government under Francois Legault. CAQ promised its version of a religious symbols ban, to be enforced by using the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter of Rights. The new law, \u00a0Bill 21, \u00a0was passed in the spring of 2019, just in time to be an issue in the federal election campaign.<\/p>\n

The 2019 election<\/strong><\/p>\n

Absent hard evidence of why Quebec voters voted the way they did in the 2019, we are left to consider some relevant facts.<\/p>\n