Montreal City Weblog

Kate 17:09 on 2019-06-18 Permalink Reply  

• Brett 20:13 on 2019-06-18 Permalink

  So it seems Bill 21 applies to religious symbols worn as clothing items – religious symbols that appear on objects or buildings as historical relics or otherwise should be beyond the scope of this law. Kind of like the daily griping about the secularism bill should be beyond the scope of this blog.

• dhomas 20:22 on 2019-06-18 Permalink

  @Brett Seems to me like the scope of this blog is at the discretion of the person running the blog. Also, Bill 21 is definitely within the scope of a Montreal blog as it disproportionately affects the population of Montreal, as opposed to the rest of the province. It’s almost as if the current government was targeting Montreal…

  As to the “exceptions” you’ve mentioned, they are further evidence that the law is not at all secular as much as it is an attack on non-white Catholics (though primarily Muslims).

• Kate 20:53 on 2019-06-18 Permalink

  Thank you, dhomas.

  Brett, I’d feel like a stooge with this going on if I only put up little links about potholes and stuff. This is the big story and, as dhomas says, it affects Montreal more than the rest of Quebec, therefore it is a Montreal story. I don’t feel constrained to only look at stories at the municipal level if this city is being drawn into the whirlwind by other levels of government.

  So, if someone wears the Quebec flag on a t-shirt or a pin, isn’t that wearing a cross?

• steph 21:24 on 2019-06-18 Permalink

  Wedding rings exchanged in a house of god are religious symbols. Everyone better take those off asap!

• Kate 21:44 on 2019-06-18 Permalink

  If you take off the rings and rinse them in Labatt 50, that washes off the religion and you can put them back on.

• Mr.Chinaski 23:03 on 2019-06-18 Permalink

  Kate, keep this as a Montreal city web blog please.

• Tim S. 23:05 on 2019-06-18 Permalink

  Kate, please keep posting about whatever you feel like.

• dhomas 00:15 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Re-reading my comment, the last sentence makes it sound like I was saying the law is attacking Catholics who are not white. I meant to say it is attacking those who are not white and not Catholic.

• Kate 07:15 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Day to day I use my judgement about what’s happening that affects people living in Montreal. This has worked for 17 years and it will continue to work. Some people griped, to use Brett’s word, when I covered the protests in 2012, and some may gripe now. Too bad.

  The CAQ is trying to remake everything in Quebec in the image of a simpler time when you could live your whole life without encountering anyone who looked, spoke, believed or dressed much differently from you. Those days are over, not just here but all over the globe. Instead of entering the debate with spirit, Legault is trying to shut it down. His comment Tuesday that this law could have gone further is a warning. But he still has most of a term to continue to try to direct Quebec into the past, and as Montrealers, we’re going to bear the brunt of it.

  Yes, I will post about it. If you prefer, skip those entries and read the ones about traffic blockages, nonfatal stabbings and potholes, which I will also continue to do.

• Michael Black 08:53 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  It matters because it’s not about “them”, it’s about “us”. What works do we want? I want to see diversity, not just white men in power.

  Michael

• Bill Binns 09:13 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  @Kate – Look at the vote. It wasn’t even close. The vast majority of people in Quebec clearly want this type of legislation. You can demonize the politicians if you want but this is coming from the people. It’s good old democracy.

  When close to two thirds of a population is demanding something, one party or another will rise up to give it to them. You can get it from a somewhat problematic center-right party or wait a few years and get it from a real right wing party along with a bunch of other stuff you will like even less. Look at what’s happening in Europe at the moment.

• dwgs 09:17 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Am I the only one who sees the irony in people commenting on what is inappropriate for someone else to cover in their own personal blog?

• Bill Binns 09:21 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  @dwgs – Nope. I never understood this complaint. Just read what interests you and skip the rest. Every “local” newspaper I have ever read has some news about the larger world.

• Chris 09:45 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Well, at least they are getting rid of two “thumping great crosses”: in the Nation Assembly and City Hall.

• Blork 09:54 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Bill Binns said “When close to two thirds of a population is demanding something…” and I read that seconds after I read “areas with higher education are more prone to buying ill‑founded, unscientific anti‑vaccine notions” farther up. My conclusion is that this demonstrates a fundamental flaw with raw democracy.

  Just because a majority of people think they want something (or think they are right) doesn’t mean the thing they want is right or that other people opposed shouldn’t complain about it or try to expose the flaws in that majority thinking. We (should have) learned this from history, but if I get too specific some idiot will shout “Godwin!” and I’ll just be too annoyed to even come back here for a few days.

• Chris 10:14 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Blork, yes, it’s a flaw of democracy. But, it’s still the least bad system. Certainly less bad than minority rule.

• Kate 11:06 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Couple of things, Bill Binns:

  The CAQ won a majority of seats with 37.42% of the votes. That’s only a majority if your electoral rules are stuck in the 19th-century system of first past the post. If we had a more equitable system there’s no way the CAQ could have railroaded this law through. Legault keeps talking about the majority to try to flimflam away that he got just over a third of the popular vote.

  We don’t have what Blork calls raw democracy for good reasons. We have elections and we choose representatives we hope have better education and higher ideals than the average. In Canada this has meant, for example, that we don’t have capital punishment, even if at times it looks like a majority of people would choose it. It means we decriminalized abortion even if major parties or percentages of the population would not have done so. We’re still teetering on guns and on environmental decisions.

  As a species, as a nation and as a people we create and ordain bills of human rights, because we know trends come and go and that people can, when the shit hits the fan, make claims and demands that would rob others of their rights, and we stand on those rights because they’re the highest ideals we’ve got. The whole point of them is not to cherrypick them and make exceptions when politically convenient – which Legault has just done.

• jeather 11:10 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  FPTP pretty much leads to minority rule. The last election where a party won a majority of VOTES was 1985 in Quebec, and 1984 in Canada. Some of the elections since have been minority governments — but a lot haven’t.

• Kevin 11:24 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  “The vast majority of people in Quebec clearly want this type of legislation. You can demonize the politicians if you want but this is coming from the people. It’s good old democracy.”

  The vast majority is often wrong.
  Death penalty. Homosexuality. Abortion. Human rights. Climate change.

  The vast majority never supports anything that they think will change their lives.

  Leadership is convincing and cajoling the masses to do the right thing, not kowtowing to their baser instincts.

• Blork 11:52 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Surely democracy can be more sophisticated than “majority rule” or as I like to call it, “mob rule.”

  And it can be. There are checks and balances. What we have is way more sophisticated than “majority rule,” although it does need work. (It’s a work in progress.)

• Bill Binns 13:21 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  @Kate – Yep the CAQ was elected with 37% of the vote. You may as well give them the PQ’s 17% as well. The PQ’s hat law was much stronger than the CAQ’s. >50% of Quebec voted for a hat-limiting party in 2018.

  Regardless, poll after poll shows strong support in Quebec for government secularism.
  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/public-religious-symbols-quebec-poll-1.4919997

  Just as in 2012, poll after poll showed the vast majority of Quebec thought the student protesters were a bunch of entitled crybabies.

  Democracy itself and FPTP specifically are far from perfect but as Chris says above they are “the least bad system”.

  Anything other than FPTP is a recipe to hand the looney fringe parties from both sides of the political spectrum power completely out of proportion to their membership. Look at the full 2018 election results and the names of the parties in the bottom third of the list. Quebec has enough problems without QS forming a coalition government out of communists and anarchists.

  @Blork – The majority is “the mob” when we disagree but “the voice of the people” when we agree, right?

• Blork 15:16 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  “Regardless, poll after poll shows strong support in Quebec for government secularism.”

  Sure! Me too! I’m all for government secularism. I don’t want any religious overtones in the legislation that I live under. I’m fully behind that.

  But Bill 21 isn’t secular, which (at least to me) means neutral. Bill 21 is explicitly anti-religion. More specifically, it is anti-religious PEOPLE. That’s the part I cannot agree with. I cannot agree with the government targeting specific types of people as being undesirable or unworthy. A truly “secular” government wouldn’t give AF what hat you wear or if you don’t wear a hat at all.

  Bill 21 is the equivalent of saying the government is gender-neutral by insisting all people be male, and if you’re not male then you can’t be in the government, therefore, since the government is 100% male, it is gender neutral.

  (You can apply the same faux neutrality argument to race; if everyone is white then white is “normal” and if everyone is “normal” then the government is race-neutral.)

• Bill Binns 16:01 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  “Bill 21 is the equivalent of saying the government is gender-neutral by insisting all people be male”

  As much as people are trying to prove the contrary, having a preferred hat is not the same as being brown or being male or female. It’s a choice that is made every day when one gets dressed. I know a guy who has worn a Red Sox hat just about every day of his life. They didn’t let him wear it at work so he chose to leave his hat at home and keep his job. I know another guy who at some point made a vow to the universe that he would never in his life under any circumstances wear a tie. He takes that vow pretty seriously and he walked away from a supervisor job at Boeing over it. People are fired or denied jobs everyday over tattoos or piercings or hairstyles. All of those things are choices. In my job, I will be fired on the spot for being at certain locations without wearing a high vis orange vest. I don’t get to wear exactly what I want to wear at work. Boo hoo. I have survived.

  The idea that a hijab or any other bit of religious kit is an inseparable part of the anatomy of certain people is an entirely 21st century Western invention. There are hundreds of millions of Muslim women in the world who do not wear a hijab or wear them sometimes. They don’t burst into flames.

  If the government wanted to pass a law that said “Employers are not allowed to tell employees what to wear under any circumstances”, I’d be mostly fine with it. Like so many things, what bugs me is the god people being exempted from rules the rest of us are subject to. The idea that religion trumps absolutely all other concerns (even safety as with special exemptions for Sikh men regarding motorcycle helmets or construction hard hats) is pure insanity to me.

• Blork 16:29 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  “…what bugs me is the god people being exempted from rules the rest of us are subject to.” I get that. But this isn’t about hats, it’s about people’s beliefs and identities. Your example would be more legit if it really were about headgear and all people were forbidden from wearing it. But it’s not.

  Under Bill 21 you can be a teacher who wears a scarf on your head because you are cold, but you can’t wear a scarf if you identify as Muslim. So it’s not about the scarf; it’s about the person.

  Similarly, you can be a cop and have a Swiss Army Knife tucked into your sock but you can’t be a cop and have a kirpan tucked into your sock. So it’s not about the blade, it’s about the person.

  So in a sense, it’s the non-religious people who are getting exceptional treatment.

  You can argue that being religious is a “choice” but it’s way more than that. Many religious people are born into it and for whatever reason strongly identify that as part of who they are. It’s not just a choice like the choice to not wear a tie or to support the Red Sox. (I’m saying this as an atheist, BTW.)

• Blork 16:31 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  (Yes, I know that Sikhs don’t generally put their kirpans in their socks. Shaddap, it’s not about socks!)

• JaneyB 17:32 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  I really dislike this new law. I also don’t think it will be enforced for very long. As soon as some yahoos beat up someone wearing a hijab and use this law as their justification, I think people will reassess the need to assert their umm..’post-Catholic-ness’. Quebeckers undoubtedly dislike mostly the hijab/niqab but they really don’t want to see their young men beating women up when they’re walking in public. I predict support will gradually erode. It will be impossible to propose getting rid of it, of course, but it can join the limbo of other laws that get sidelined by convention.

• Kevin 18:06 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  @Bill Binns
  You and the majority of Quebecers seem to be missing a crucial point: Dress codes don’t need to invoke the notwithstanding clause.

  Bill 21 violates the second clause of the Charter of Rights. That’s all there is to it.

  As a country, we’ve decided that people are allowed to have whatever religion they want and express it however they want. Including having NO religion.

  But as much as I think everyone who has a religion is insane, I don’t get to force them not to believe or not to worship. It’s the whole ‘I can swing my fist as long as I don’t hit your nose”

  Personally, I think actions speak louder than words, so if I was running a secular government I’d ensure that my employees’ actions, no matter their beliefs, did not impose their own particular religious beliefs. But of course Bill 21 does no such thing: employees could still end every conversation telling people to go to church, crucifixes are still allowed in schools and other places, and you know that not a single officer in the province will write a parking ticket anywhere near a church on Dec. 24 even if people block a street.