secularism

Saturday September 21, 2019

September 21, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday September 21, 2019

In Quebec, Trudeau’s opponents and supporters shrug off blackface controversy

September 17, 2019

Quebec had been the epicentre of debates about identity politics so far in the federal election campaign, with party leaders forced to confront to the popularity of a new law on religious symbols.

But the campaign shifted focus abruptly on Thursday, after photos and video emerged of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau wearing racist makeup. The desire to talk identity politics in the province evaporated just as quickly.

Even though Trudeau’s criticism of Quebec’s secularism law has been controversial in the province, none of his usual opponents on the issue were itching to rake him over the coals.

July 19, 2019

“I can understand that some people were hurt by these pictures. But Mr. Trudeau said that he was sorry. I think we have to talk about something else,” said Premier François Legault, who has clashed with Trudeau over the law, also known as Bill 21.

The leader of the sovereignist Parti Québécois, Pascal Bérubé, went so far as to play down the condemnations issued by Trudeau’s federal rivals.

“It’s a political campaign. They want to make sure that Mr. Trudeau pays for that,” Bérubé told reporters in Quebec City. “You can disagree with him on many issues, that’s my case, but he’s not a racist.”

September 14, 2013

The French media in Quebec also shrugged off Wednesday night’s revelations that Trudeau had dressed in blackface once in high school and again in 2001 while a teacher at a private school in British Columbia. A third image of him in blackface surfaced in video form Thursday.

Unlike in English Canada, few French newspapers gave prominent coverage to the images.

In Quebec City, Wednesday’s Céline Dion concert was featured more prominently on the Thursday front pages of the local papers.

The main political story on the front page of Montreal’s Le Devoir was about Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s proposal to build an oil pipeline through the province, and the possibility he could ignore Quebec’s objections to such a project.

One Journal de Montreal columnist, Richard Martineau, did put the screws to Trudeau. But Martineau, who is often critical of multiculturalism and dismissive of minority groups, seemed mainly interested in accusing Trudeau of hypocrisy, not racism. (CBC) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-reaction-trudeau-brownface-1.5289508

Quebec, Canada, #elxn2019, blackface, Justin Trudeau, minorities, religious rights, Bill 21, secularism

Tuesday September 17, 2019

September 17, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday September 17, 2019

‘We like to fall in love’: Which federal party will win over the fickle Quebec voter?

As the federal election campaign began last week, Canada’s main political parties couldn’t escape Quebec’s internal politics and a renewed nationalism championed by the provincial government.

July 12, 2019

The Coalition Avenir Quebec government continues to enjoy broad support among Quebec’s francophone majority, as do the government’s recent moves to cut immigration and limit the rights of religious minorities in the name of protecting Quebecers’ language, culture and identity.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet are targeting these nationalist voters, and both promise their members would defend the Coalition party’s policies in Ottawa.

And yet it’s the Liberal party, led by the unabashedly pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism Justin Trudeau, that sits atop the polls in the province — by a large margin. However, analysts say that Liberal support is fragile, because Quebec voters are notoriously fickle when it comes to federal politics.

October 10, 2015

Trudeau’s been here before.

In the 2015 election, both he and then-NDP leader Tom Mulcair came out against former Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s election promise to ban the face-covering Islamic niqab during citizenship ceremonies. Francophone Quebecers largely supported Harper’s position.

The fight for Quebec’s coveted 78 seats will turn on whether Trudeau’s personal popularity can stop voters from switching to the two parties trying hardest to tap into the nationalist sentiment that propelled the Coalition to power, pollster Jean-Marc Leger said.

The Bloc and the Tories have repeatedly stated over the past week they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize Quebec’s secularism law, known as Bill 21. The law prohibits some public sector workers, including teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols at work.

July 19, 2019

They took turns hammering Trudeau for not pledging to do the same. The Liberal leader was dogged by questions about whether his party, if re-elected, would participate in a judicial challenge to the law.

Trudeau said his government might intervene, but at the moment such a move would be “counter-productive.” But it was the other part of his answer that reflected his party’s bet that Quebec voters know him, like him and will overlook his stance against the secularism legislation.

On Sunday, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was in Sherbrooke, Que., promising new powers and funding for Quebec — and dangling the possibility of constitutional reform — in a bid to revive the so-called orange wave of 2011. But with a Leger poll putting the party at six per cent in Quebec on the eve of the election, he has a steep climb ahead of him. (CP/Yahoo News) 

Canada’s federal leaders pander for Quebec votes from r/canadapoliticshumour


 

Friday July 19, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday July 19, 2019

Chastising Trump isn’t Justin Trudeau’s job. Leave that to the American voters

In his strangely phrased denunciation of the Nixonian “America: Love it or Leave It” vulgarity that U.S. President Donald Trump customized last Sunday in the style of a racist jibe, it would be unfair to say that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was dangerously foolish, or ill-advised, or even that he made a deliberate decision to strike out into the howling wilderness of American politics on Monday.

A kind of etiquette is involved in this, and there is a heightened expectation that one should express one’s disgust with the boorish American president, particularly, at any time that an occasion to do so presents itself. So it was a banality that Trudeau was questioned on the subject, and after all, it was only in response to a reporter’s question that Trudeau addressed the matter in the first place.

June 22, 2018

And even then, Trudeau did so with a 10-foot pole, but not before expressing confidence that the entire world should be sufficiently familiar by now with the purity of his state of mind that what he thought should go without saying. “Canadians, and indeed people around the world, know exactly what I think about those particular comments,” Trudeau said. Well, okay then. “That is not how we do things in Canada. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and the diversity of our country is actually one of our greatest strengths and a source of tremendous resilience and pride for Canadians and we will continue to defend that.”

It does Trump no harm to have somebody like Trudeau coming out of nowhere to weigh in on behalf of the four Congresswomen, or at least to give that impression. The same goes for the similarly pro-multiculturalism New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who also expressed revulsion with Trump’s utterances. The criticisms Trump’s tweeting elicited from outgoing British Prime Minister Theresa May, and from the clownish Boris Johnson, who is a hair’s breadth away from replacing May as Conservative Party leader, are just as unhelpful. Trumpism bears little resemblance to traditional Republican conservatism. That legacy is all but spent, so who cares what British Tories think?

October 18, 2016

To understand what Trump said, which was to the effect that certain novice Congress Democrats who are neither white nor male should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” it is necessary to know something about who his remarks were directed at. They are the pugnacious and notably leftish rising stars Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. All but Omar, who arrived in the United States as a child refugee from Somalia, are American-born. But that’s almost beside the point.

July 12, 2019

But just as Omar’s virtues may not be quite as impeccable as they appear, Trudeau’s virtues don’t always hold up under close scrutiny, either. Responding to Trump’s cunningly devised attack on the Squad by claiming it’s “not how we do things in Canada,” and that a “Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian,” is hard to square with Trudeau’s near silence on the recently-adopted Quebec law, aimed almost entirely at Muslim women who wear hijabs and niqabs. Because she covers her head as her religious piety requires, Ilhan Omar would be prohibited from teaching public school in Quebec. So that, too, is “how we do things in Canada.”

January 16, 2019

Trudeau is already too susceptible to basking in the flattery that well-to-do American liberals like to shower upon him, and the liberal American style has become so prevalent in Canada that it’s becoming commonplace to imagine that Trudeau is somehow obliged to “speak out” about the gross excesses of the American right at every opportunity.

But that’s not his job. It is up to Americans to get Trump sorted. The United States is a democracy, and on Tuesday, for the first time in a century, the U.S Congress voted an official rebuke of President Trump’s ugly commentary.

For now, that will have to do. (National Post)

A Canadian is a Canadian is a… from r/canadapoliticshumour


 

Friday July 12, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday July 12, 2019

Legault backs Education Minister’s comment, says Malala Yousafzai ‘couldn’t teach’ in Quebec with head scarf

Quebec Premier François Legault says Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and renowned advocate for girls’ education, would not be allowed to teach in his province unless she removed her head scarf, saying his Education Minister did not make a mistake when he made that assertion.

Jean-François Roberge, Quebec’s Education Minister, faced a barrage of criticism over the weekend that made headlines as far as Britain and the Middle East, after tweeting a picture of himself with Ms. Yousafzai after they met in France, saying that they discussed education and international development.

Mr. Roberge was asked in a Twitter exchange with a journalist named Salim Nadim Valji whether Ms. Yousafzai, who wears an Islamic head scarf, could teach in his province, which has banned religious symbols in the public sector. Mr. Roberge said it would be an honour for Quebec to have Ms. Yousafzai teach, but that in Quebec, “as in France … as well as in other open and tolerant countries, teachers can’t wear religious signs while performing their duties.”

Quebec’s legislature adopted Bill 21 last month, which bans public sector workers – whether they are teachers, judges or police officers – from being able to work if they wear a religious symbol, such as a turban, a head scarf, or a kippa. The Canadian Human Rights Commission said months before the bill became law that it targets people for their religious beliefs and would limit people’s opportunities to participate in society.

October 11, 2014

Ms. Yousafzai was born in the Swat region of Pakistan, where she became an advocate for girls’ education. She was shot in the head by the Taliban at the age of 15 while she was on the bus home from school. She survived the attack and, in 2014, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in supporting young girls’ right to education.

The activist, now 21, runs the Malala Fund, which raises money to help girls around the world access education. Since 2018, she has been studying philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford.

Mr. Roberge’s response prompted outrage on social media. Liberal MP Omar Alghabra tweeted that, “No government should ever tell a woman how to dress.”

Speaking with reporters in Quebec on Monday, Mr. Legault was asked whether Mr. Roberge made a mistake and the Quebec Premier made it clear that he does not believe he did. (Globe & Mail) 

 

Wednesday September 11, 2013

Wednesday September 11, 2013

 

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday September 11, 2013

Charter of Quebec values would ban religious symbols for public workers

Public employees would not be allowed to wear overt religious symbols at work under the proposed charter of Quebec values, released by the Parti Québécois today.

The minister in charge of the charter, Bernard Drainville, announced at the national assembly that, if adopted by the legislature, the wearing of kippas, turbans, burkas, hijabs and “large” crosses would be banned for civil servants while they are on the job.

The plan would apply to judges, police, prosecutors, public daycare workers, teachers, school employees, hospital workers and municipal personnel.

Drainville said some institutions and public organizations might be able to opt out of the ban for a five-year period.

However, he said, daycare workers, elementary school teachers and early-care providers would not be eligible for the opt-out.

The charter would also require that anyone who received or administers services from the state would have to uncover their face.

“People have to be identifiable, mainly for security purposes,” said Drainville.

The charter would include five proposals:

Amend the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

Establish a duty of neutrality and reserve for all state personnel.

Limit the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols.

Make it mandatory to have one’s face uncovered when providing or receiving a state service.

Establish an implementation policy for state organizations. (Source: CBC News)