Raymond de Souza: The hole left by crucifix's removal says much about Quebec today

Perhaps it could be stored beside other relics of Quebec’s past, like religious liberty and a parliamentary tradition of moderation

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/raymond-de-souza-the-hole-left-by-crucifixs-removal-says-much-about-quebec-today

The crucifix that hung in the National Assembly of Quebec since 1936 was removed on Tuesday. Despite all-party support for the crucifix over the speaker’s chair in recent years, it became untenable in the face of the CAQ “secularism” law, which bans the wearing of religious garb by public sector workers.

Premier François Legault had attempted to have it both ways, arguing that the crucifix was not “religious” but rather a cultural or historical item. It could be religious and cultural and historical, but it was absurd to say it was not religious. Quebec’s Catholic bishops long ago said that the decision about what hung in the chamber was up to the National Assembly but, whatever the decision, the crucifix could not be reduced to a cultural vestige or historical souvenir.

I don’t lament the removal of the crucifix. The empty space above the speaker’s throne is a better representation of Quebec’s public culture today, and much of what transpires in the chamber is at odds with Quebec’s Catholic history in any case. Yet the confusions about the crucifix also illustrate why the Quebec government is floundering on its secularism law ...

The chief returning officer told a legislative committee that Bill 40 flies in the face of fundamental democratic and electoral principles.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/abolishing-school-boards-is-undemocratic-quebec-voting-chief-says?fbclid=IwAR0VWpAb1j4e-K7uF7DSAr1XDB1Ik40W7nC55THAWCcmKCyTNNVffVJOopE
A Legault government law that would abolish school boards and the elections that form them is undemocratic, the agency responsible for overseeing elections in Quebec told a legislative committee on Tuesday.

Pierre Reid, who is Quebec’s chief returning officer and who submitted the Directeur général des élections (DGE) brief to the committee, told the panel that Bill 40 flies in the face of fundamental democratic and electoral principles in the way it determines the composition of service centre boards and the criteria required to join them.

“The legislation on school elections should be maintained, be it for the anglophone milieu as well as for the francophone milieu. The (existing) legislation permits the assurance of integrity and fairness in the electoral process,” Reid said. “The exercise of a healthy democracy should be supported by clear rules and we believe that the (current) legislation offers these guarantees.”

Réforme du mode de scrutin :Legault respectera-t-il son engagement ?

https://www.lapresse.ca/debats/opinions/201907/04/01-5232701-reforme-du-mode-de-scrutin-legault-respectera-t-il-son-engagement-.php?fbclid=IwAR3tAGClXu5DiGoweuhkFg5aSUblvExeAURPkH_ozvZ2theCpTy5ifQjnw0

Dans une entrevue publiée dans Le Devoir vendredi dernier, le premier ministre François Legault déclare envisager la tenue d'un référendum sur la réforme du mode de scrutin « comme lui demandent plusieurs caquistes ».

« François Legault refuse aujourd'hui de promettre la main sur le coeur d'instaurer un mode de scrutin proportionnel mixte à temps pour les prochaines élections, prévues le 1^er octobre 2022. D'ailleurs, il dit ne s'être jamais engagé à accomplir une telle réforme dans un premier mandat », poursuit l'article du quotidien. Le premier ministre soutient maintenant ne s'être engagé qu'à déposer un projet de loi le 1^er octobre 2019.

Toutefois, si l'on se réfère au texte de l'engagement qu'il a signé au nom de la Coalition avenir Québec, le 9 mai 2018, conjointement avec Manon Massé de Québec solidaire, Jean-François Lisée du Parti québécois et Alex Tyrrell du Parti vert du Québec, M. Legault s'est bel en bien engagé à ce que « les députés de l'Assemblée nationale soient élus, à partir de la 43^e législature, selon un mode de scrutin semblable à celui étudié et avalisé par le Directeur général des élections du Québec (DGEQ) dans son avis de décembre 2007 ».

Re-election means never having to say you’re sorry

Paul Wells: The Trudeau Liberals return confirmed in their beliefs and comforted by big numbers in Central Canada. The introspection is over.

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/trudeau-re-election-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/?fbclid=IwAR0ptBDmxebcrJBVNgFKg7hil9RKVpBwhqM0MEY5RSRMfVTNuvQw1hZZ7F4

I’ve got a hunch that when the federal Liberal caucus meets, observers will be surprised, even taken aback, by the jovial tone among Liberals. And an emerging theme of federal politics in months to come will be the scale of Justin Trudeau’s electoral triumph.

Now there’s a word you don’t hear often. Triumph. It’s not one that came automatically to any observer on Oct. 21. It sure isn’t how the results looked to me, at first.

You know the results as well as I do: The Liberals won 20 fewer seats than in 2015, falling from 177 to 157, losing their majority in the House of Commons. They lost a million of their 2015 votes. They lost the popular vote to Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives and it wasn’t close: the Conservatives’ edge was nearly a quarter of a million votes. The Liberals were shut out in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Their share of the popular vote, at 33.07 per cent, is the lowest ever for a governing party in Canada. The Bloc Québécois is resurgent, there’ve been Western separatist meetings, it’s all pretty chastening.

Twitter fury after Quebec education minister posts photo with Malala Yousafzai

"Nice meeting with @Malala Yousafzai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to discuss access to education."

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/twitter-fury-after-quebec-education-minister-posts-photo-with-malala-yousafzai?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter&fbclid=IwAR2yf8DUmm8S4HzWr6z5vvqh57vFqHmwpUk9A0OSndvohd9UyqGdDQGhGM8
 
Quebec Education Minister Jean-François Roberge tweeted a photograph of himself and Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai on Friday.

“Nice meeting with @Malala Yousafzai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to discuss access to education and international development,” tweeted Roberge, who is in Paris, taking part in planning meetings to discuss education during the G7 in France in August
.
Social media lashed out at Roberge for posting the photo, with many mentioning her activism and Quebec’s Bill 21, which prohibits some public employees from wearing the kind of headcovering that Yousafzai wears.

From icy sidewalks to Mount Royal, opposition slams Plante's record

Opposition councillors accused the Plante administration of failing to deliver on its promises to improve mobility and help merchants losing business because of construction.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/from-icy-sidewalks-to-camillien-houde-opposition-slams-plante-administration?fbclid=IwAR3fDU309hikxaVdrWUbGlsmJBlVVJC5d8q6xfE1WOg518R7yYodLI2pghs
Mayor Valérie Plante is long on lofty ideals but short on clearing snow, attacking racial profiling and solving the traffic mess, the opposition Ensemble Montréal charged Monday.

At a press conference on Plante’s first two years in power, three opposition councillors accused her administration of failing to deliver on its promises to improve mobility and help merchants losing business because of construction.

Projet de loi sur la laïcité: arbitraire | AGNÈS GRUDA | Agnès Gruda

https://www.lapresse.ca/debats/editoriaux/agnes-gruda/201906/12/01-5229939-projet-de-loi-sur-la-laicite-arbitraire.php?fbclid=IwAR1CHzNH2KqTxyVEKfAp_hOVIsh0DFU9Gmuzh_DK1P8fPM0mOfx98g7yzXk

Un jonc de mariage constitue-t-il un signe religieux ?

Cette question a été posée hier à François Legault dans la foulée de l'amendement censé définir les signes religieux ciblés par le projet de loi 21 sur la laïcité de l'État.

En apparence, la question est simple. Mais le premier ministre n'a pas été en mesure d'y répondre ...

Rest of Canada problems: Why don’t cheese curds squeak in Toronto?

Think of the nightmare lived by a man scouring a city for chips that crunch but finding each bag stale. I am him

https://montrealgazette.com/news/toronto/why-the-cheese-curds-in-toronto-dont-squeak-a-national-post-investigation/wcm/7a497873-1be0-440f-b53c-6e829dad913b?fbclid=IwAR2BCsQzZ2_p3V8W1y0dwOOwcRTJgH-nYg1_a72gDyg3JSRyBh_bLYJ5IQQ

Some time ago, I realized that in Toronto, the cheese curds do not squeak. And cheese curds that do not squeak are a dangerous thing. They can trick you into thinking that cheese curds are just chopped-up cheese. The whole idea, to those unlucky enough to have never had a good one, must seem absurd: Eating cheese by itself, piece by piece in the same compulsive way that someone eats more chips than they need.

Think of the nightmare lived by a man scouring a city for chips that crunch but finding each bag stale. I am him.

As food-obsessed as it is, Toronto is living a cheese curd lie. It’s not always a popular assessment, though. One local cheesemonger took it rather badly.

To minorities worried about religious symbols law, Quebec premier says he 'could have gone further'

New law responds to desires of long-spurned majority, François Legault says in interview

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-religious-symbols-law-legault-interview-1.5180353?fbclid=IwAR0sYWfXwjQGnsPvDuboPA7g0Kf8Jg4wR_vYeJCa7ZRwM5BZJE3Q60MUlh4

Quebec Premier François Legault had a blunt message Tuesday for minorities worried about his government's new religious symbols law: the legislation, he said, "could have gone further."
The law, which was passed late Sunday, bars civil servants in positions of authority — including public school teachers, government lawyers and police officers — from wearing religious symbols while at work.

It's been roundly denounced by minority groups in the province that warn it will institutionalize discrimination by limiting employment opportunities for people who wear such commonplace religious garments as the hijab, turban or kippa ...

Johnson: Rectifying the misrepresentation of Alliance Quebec

http://www.thesuburban.com/opinion/op_ed/rectifying-the-misrepresentation-of-alliance-quebec/article_e15688a2-3fb8-5cbe-8ab3-db6c33b9bcc9.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=user-share&fbclid=IwAR2w-UHv9iHvOxJMHqY0vy3fmSKy4T7F8OIPH2o16K0JqeNUD5jW68GCI00

Once again, the English-speaking people of Quebec are divided on how to defend their vital interests against aggressive restrictive nationalism. Eight organizations, former members of the Quebec Community Groups Network, recently signed an open letter explaining “Why we left QCGN.”

I’ll not express an opinion on the validity of their disagreement with the QCGN. But I do want to correct the historical record about this statement from their open letter:

The QCGN was founded nearly 25 years ago, in part to fill a void left by Alliance Quebec (AQ), which, as the largest and most prominent organization representing English-speaking communities at the time, had lost the confidence of its members.

Andrew Coyne: Will leaders tolerate religious segregation just because it's Quebec?

If Bill 21 had been tried in any other province, the feds, media and the rest of the great and the good would descend on the offending province full of fiery denunciations

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-will-leaders-tolerate-religious-segregation-just-because-its-quebec?fbclid=IwAR1otlifRxuyl7VZu68xsCMCc40sxAh8NIkbs65Gf3PZSG4nQlq4jspcjgU

According to the premier of Quebec, it’s all about pride. Quebecers, Francois Legault claims, are forever stopping him in the street to tell him “‘Mr. Legault we are happy.’ I say why and they say ‘it’s because we are proud.’… To feel this regained pride among our people, who are standing up, advancing, makes me the happiest man in the world to be their premier.”

And what is this miraculous thing that has restored Quebecers’ sense of pride to them? What has prompted ordinary Quebecers to buttonhole the premier to tell him how happy — and proud — they are? A bill that prohibits those in “positions of authority” in the civil service, including not only judges and police officers but teachers, from wearing religious symbols on the job.
Which is to say, that prohibits those whose faith obliges them to wear such symbols from working in those positions. Or if we are really being frank, that bars them to observant Muslims — also Sikhs and some Jews, but really Muslims ...

Quebec's rural-urban split in the federal election was normal, Legault says

"In addition, in Montreal, there are more anglophones and allophones, so you have to take that into account."

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/quebecs-rural-urban-split-in-the-federal-election-was-normal-legault-says?fbclid=IwAR3c5YyOS5Tp1I23INKkx-4RdNcRViOElH5tFUEmJsqVCSYQjTbEk_2_RZQ

QUEBEC — The province’s rural-urban split once again revealed in Monday’s federal election is normal, Premier François Legault said Thursday.

“It exists all over the world,” Legault told reporters arriving for question period at the legislature. “There is a difference between cities and the rural world. So we are not different in Quebec from elsewhere in the world.

Martin Patriquin: Quebecers' double standard on women and their bodies

Quebecers back a woman’s right to have an embryo removed from her own body, but not to choose whether to wear a piece of fabric on her head.

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/martin-patriquin-quebecers-double-standard-on-women-and-their-bodies?fbclid=IwAR2BgoU6Q90vA3WEu1kCxEojBQLPnSNZftCP8Iw0FbBJX2HBY7wTImwMS9g
 
Richard Martineau, as Richard Martineau wants you to know, is pro-choice. “I am an atheist and I support access to abortion,” the Journal de Montréal columnist wrote a couple of years ago. The same goes for fellow columnist Sophie Durocher, who happens to be Martineau’s wife. “Abortion isn’t a sin. It’s a fundamental right,” as Durocher wrote in 2015. Her reasoning is, dare I say it, remarkably sensible: women have authority over their own bodies.

I highlight the tempestuous twosome’s abortion pensées not to give them more attention (they don’t need it). Rather, it’s to point out a dominant hypocrisy when it comes to women’s rights in this province, of which Martineau and Durocher are arguably the most conspicuous offenders.
In short: Quebecers are overwhelmingly supportive of a woman’s right to have an embryo removed from her own body. Yet if that same woman chooses to wear a piece of fabric on her head in the name of her religion, those same people suddenly become armchair mullahs, convinced they have the right and duty to coax it off. The resulting ire directed toward certain women, including observant Muslims, would make a happy man out of the average misogynist.

Andrew Coyne: Our winner-take-all system turns too many voters into losers and leaders into gamblers

If we were trying to come up with a way to divide and destroy the country, we could hardly do a better job of it than the first past the post system

 https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/andrew-coyne-our-winner-take-all-system-turns-too-many-voters-into-losers-and-leaders-into-gamblers?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter&fbclid=IwAR11ZPfcNiDN-3kpg2cVbaYN0v8YtGq__Ixi9xkgObwsovn972MmXi9jtH4

You’d have thought he’d just won another majority. There was Justin Trudeau on election night, boasting of the “clear mandate” he had just been given. No mention that his party had been reduced to a minority, or that it had won a million fewer votes than it did the previous election — a quarter million fewer, in fact, than the Conservatives.

At 33 per cent of the votes cast, it is, in fact, the weakest mandate any Canadian government has received in any election since Confederation. It is only because of the accidents of first past the post — how the vote divides between different parties in different ridings; whether a party’s vote is spread evenly or happens to bunch in the right places — that the Liberals remain in power. With less than a third of the vote, a shade more than the Conservatives received in losing in 2015, they won nearly half the seats — 36 more than the Tories.

Martin Patriquin: Here come Quebec's secularism enforcers

Some may find comparison with the Saudi mutaween excessive, but fundamentally, what the enforcers will be doing is not so different.

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/martin-patriquin-here-come-quebecs-secularism-enforcers?fbclid=IwAR3oviOqXdZ7nlXQ-KujRmdc8RKXh2gZ3hGCuX7MuZ3wFV-4NODqsZtPFeY
 
In Saudi Arabia, there is a group of righteous men whose job is to enforce the country’s strict laws regarding dress and gender segregation. Practically speaking, the mutaween, as these men are known, spend much of their time haranguing people for all sorts of alleged crimes, but mostly women for things like visible hair, uncovered faces, unconcealed skin, and painted fingernails and eyelids. Saudi Arabia’s frankly terrifying obsession with how women dress has long been bureaucratized; the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, for whom the mutaween toil, employs some 6,000 people.

As of Sunday, thanks to a series of last-minute amendments shovelled into the already-onerous “laicity law,” Quebec now has its own version of the mutaween. To be sure, the province’s forthcoming secularism enforcers won’t be patrolling Quebec’s streets, beaches and malls, as their focus will be government workplaces, not the public square. And due to the government’s studied opacity on the issue, we aren’t yet sure who they will be. As it stands under the law, affected government ministers can appoint “a person” to verify whether all is kosher in the proverbial ministerial kitchens. Assuming the process is complaints-based, these may well be very busy people indeed.

Some may find comparison with the Saudi mutaween excessive, but fundamentally, what the enforcers will be doing is not so different: policing what people, mostly women, wear on their bodies, with the imprimatur of the government behind them. The potential consequences of this are alarming. Any government worker with “power of authority” — a category into which the government has shoehorned teachers — who refuses to doff religious items can lose their job. Thanks to a grandfather clause, those already wearing these religious objects will be spared, but only if they remain in the same position. A transfer, demotion or promotion means they can no longer display their religiosity. (Inexplicably, they can get a visible tattoo, shave their heads or grow a long beard in accordance with their religion — all still permissible under the law.)

Loi sur la laïcité: une deuxième contestation en Cour

C'est la Commission scolaire English Montreal qui va au front, soutenant notamment que la loi contrevient à l'égalité des sexes.

https://bit.ly/2JzB1kP

MONTRÉAL — Une seconde contestation judiciaire a été déposée en Cour supérieure contre la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État, anciennement connue sous le nom de “projet de loi 21”. C’est la Commission scolaire English Montreal qui va au front cette fois-ci, soutenant notamment que la loi contrevient à l’égalité des sexes.

La commission scolaire avait déjà annoncé son intention de saisir les tribunaux, et c’est maintenant chose faite.

Elle allègue entre autres que l’interdiction de port de signes religieux viole l’égalité des sexes, car elle cible principalement les femmes musulmanes.