Politics in 2013

[Dkhorsand]

This law is clearly designed to oppress faithful members of the Klu Klux Klan who simply wish to provide honest services for your children. Those who want to express their dedication to Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity through their pointy, white hoods should be allowed to wear their garb to work even if they are history teachers or nurses. You are racist if you disagree.

>

 

[Fishbone Jones]

This law is clearly designed to oppress faithful members of the Klu Klux Klan who simply wish to provide honest services for your children. Those who want to express their dedication to Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity through their pointy, white hoods should be allowed to wear their garb to work even if they are history teachers or nurses. You are racist if you disagree.

:rofl:

You forgot your sarcasm smilies

 

[Dkhorsand]

Added one in for ya! Seriously though, I support this law. Freedom of religion asserts freedom FROM religion. Secular people should not be forced to deal with non-secular ideas in secular places. As per my previous example, any religion that someone may try to visually represent may offend people or even openly display their incompetence to perform their work. We should not be forced to respect values that are racist, sexist or homophobic. And don't kid yourself, all religions are, and those who need to wear their religious gear at all times definitely are.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Added one in for ya! Seriously though, I support this law. Freedom of religion asserts freedom FROM religion. Secular people should not be forced to deal with non-secular ideas in secular places. As per my previous example, any religion that someone may try to visually represent may offend people or even openly display their incompetence to perform their work. We should not be forced to respect values that are racist, sexist or homophobic. And don't kid yourself, all religions are, and those who need to wear their religious gear at all times definitely are.

And William Watson, in this opinion piece which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen offers you some support:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/Column+Quebec+values+hard+things+down/8839634/story.html

Quebec’s values are hard things to pin down

BY WILLIAM WATSON, OTTAWA CITIZEN

AUGUST 27, 2013

Before we all get as hysterical about Quebec’s “values charter” as some Quebecers seem to be about immigrants, be honest now: would you want your kid’s teacher to wear a burqa, the full-body declaration of modesty that reveals only her eyes? I don’t think I would. I want my kid to be able to see his teacher’s face. Face time is crucial in education, isn’t it? (As a university professor about to be hit by competition from computerized education, I sure hope so!)

Also, depending how old my kid was, I really wouldn’t want to have to get into a detailed discussion of the ins and outs of Islam, the pros and cons of wearing the burqa or whether his teacher was doing it freely or operating under either direct or implied compulsion. Nor would I want her taking up class time explaining such matters.

Now, statistically, the chance of a Quebec student running into a burqa-clad teacher is probably pretty close to zero. On the other hand, the way our society operates these days, sooner rather than later someone is bound to test the idea, if only for the sake of testing it.

I suspect many of us would have concerns about a burqa-clad teacher. By contrast, crosses, stars of David, yarmulkes, ringlet sideburns, ceremonial daggers (small ones!), turbans — have I left anything out? — are probably OK with most of us. I must admit part of my own Scots-Presbyterian upbringing was that people shouldn’t indulge in display of any kind, so I’d actually prefer as a general question of style that everybody keep their religious beliefs to themselves, including in their choice of jewelry and head gear. But it’s a free country. Or should be. So if people do want to declare their belief by wearing symbols, or if part of their belief is that they must declare their belief this way, then fine, by all means let them. If they can teach the prescribed curriculum, teach it well, and, apart from the wearing of a discreet symbol, leave their religious beliefs outside the classroom, more power to them.

By providing unobtrusive evidence of their belief they accomplish two very positive things: First, they help prepare students for life in a pluralist society. Metropolitan Quebec is not yet as multicultural as Toronto or Vancouver but it’s much more multicultural than it used to be. If we’re all going to live together, we need to get used to the idea that we are all different. Second, teachers who provide evidence of their differing beliefs are the embodiment and personification of freedom. That we are free and treasure our freedom is, or should be, the most important Canadian and Quebec value of all. Oh, and third, quiet and discreet expression of our beliefs helps our kids learn how to behave like Canadians.

On the other hand, I certainly don’t want my kid’s teachers to proselytize for their religion. So I don’t want them wearing six-inch crosses or T-shirts saying Jesus loves you or Allahu akbar. (I hope Googling how to spell that doesn’t get me tagged by the U.S. spy system. Charles Moore’s new authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher tells how a lovely inscription she hung above her dining-room table when she was an MP, the gift of the Syrian ambassador, was emblazoned with the Arabic for “There is one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet” — which she didn’t realize until several years on a guest told her.)

If we do want people to be discreet, we may very well need rules or at least conventions against ostentatious religious display. The French commission that looked into these matters in the early 2000s — unfortunately named the Stasi commission, after its chair, not the East German secret police — argued against display that might be seen as an act of “pressure, provocation, proselytism or propaganda.” Legislating what is ostentatious and what is not would be tricky. But in Quebec we already have laws about the exact size of the English lettering on signs, so fine distinctions aren’t beyond us. Somehow, I suspect, burkas would always qualify as one of the four P’s.

In France, by the way, the debate on secularism, which is a founding principle of the French republic enshrined in the constitution, led in 2004 to legislation along the lines of what is proposed in Quebec, in large part at the insistence of feminists. One result, apparently, has been the establishment of more and more separate Islamic schools, which doesn’t seem a very good outcome.

The moderate party in Quebec, the non-separatist Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec, wants the law against religious symbols to apply only to figures of authority: police, judges, and teachers. When a person’s job has them incarnating the authority of the state — as cops and judges do, though not really teachers — there’s a respectable argument for insisting on a purely secular appearance. If I’m a Muslim accused, I’m not going to be very happy if the cop arresting me or the judge presiding over my trial is displaying a crucifix or star of David. On the other hand, if that means Sikh men or Muslim women can’t ever be cops or judges, well, we went through that argument in the 1980s over turbans in the Mounties and both the force and the country seemed to survive the introduction of tasteful tan turbans. Our judges used to wear ceremonial wigs. A head scarf really isn’t going to bother anyone, is it?

A society does need laws. Its values will be embodied in its laws and in the everyday lives and actions of its people. Beyond that, any attempt to write down these values, unless you can find a Jefferson to do it, is futile and superfluous.

All that said, my real fear about the “Quebec values” charter is that it will solemnly declare the essential Quebec value to be always having the highest tax rates and most intrusive government in North America.

William Watson teaches economics at McGill University.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Of course I cannot resist the temptation to proclaim, yet again, that the unwritten, Constitutional, rule of law by custom is far superior to all the written constitutions, including our (1982) muddle and the Americans' one, too.

But William Watson does zero in on QC's (and our) great weakness: statism, our blind, uninformed belief, with no evidence to support it, that governments are "good." They, and laws, may be essential but that doesn't make them desirable.

Our government, your government, every single government in the whole world is too big, too cumbersome, too hidebound, too corrupt, too mired in laws and regulations. All governments are in urgent need of an arbitrary 10% cut in income and employees. There is not a single government, anywhere in the world, that would not be better off with far fewer functionaries. But Quebec, like its model France, is worse than most in its blind, uninformed faith in statism.

 

[ModlrMike]

Added one in for ya! Seriously though, I support this law. Freedom of religion asserts freedom FROM religion. Secular people should not be forced to deal with non-secular ideas in secular places. As per my previous example, any religion that someone may try to visually represent may offend people or even openly display their incompetence to perform their work. We should not be forced to respect values that are racist, sexist or homophobic. And don't kid yourself, all religions are, and those who need to wear their religious gear at all times definitely are.

Pretty myopic and unsubstantiated opinion.

Freedom of religion asserts freedom FROM religion.

True, but we already have sufficient safeguards to ensure that.

As per my previous example, any religion that someone may try to visually represent may offend people or even openly display their incompetence to perform their work.

There is no right not to be offended, and your contention that someone is incompetent because they have religious conviction is an assumption and not based in fact - one does not equal the other.

We should not be forced to respect values that are racist, sexist or homophobic.

The only correct thing you've said so far.

...and those who need to wear their religious gear at all times definitely are.

Bullsh*t! I know lots of folks who wear religious symbols who are far more tolerant of others' beliefs than their secular peers.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

A
Our government, your government, every single government in the whole world is too big, too cumbersome, too hidebound, too corrupt, too mired in laws and regulations. All governments are in urgent need of an arbitrary 10% cut in income and employees. There is not a single government, anywhere in the world, that would not be better off with far fewer functionaries. But Quebec, like its model France, is worse than most in its blind, uninformed faith in statism.

A cut in income and employees prior to the cut of Acts, regulations and policies, generally makes life more difficult than less. Our clientele i finding that the hard way since my program took a 40% cut in anticipation of a saving due to a change in regs due sometime next year, except the cuts have been made recently and despite a grace period, those people are leaving for secure jobs elsewhere now, yet the workload remains and the proponents suffer, as do the remaining staff.
Cutting regulations is always applauded, until it's your sacred cow on the block. When I tell people that what X is doing is not breaking any laws, they are mystified. They are outraged by X, therefore X must be breaking a law, somewhere, somehow. I don't see average Canadians being very comfortable with the reality of their desires.

 

[Dkhorsand]

Good article. While government and laws are an unfortunate reality, we need them because of our own moral ineptitude. Laws that are designed to protect the rights of women, such as that employed by France, are to be admired. As Christopher Hitchens put it in his essay, In Your Face:

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burka-whether the garment covers "only" the face or the entire female body-are often described as seeking to impose a "ban". To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and-no less important-equal in the face of one another.

Some of you may be surprised by this because of my stance on the topic at hand, but my father is from Iran and I grew up around many of his countrymen and their families. Most of my dad's friends could hardly be called Muslims, and some simply weren't, but there were two men in particular (the most pious of the bunch) who founded my resentment of religion as a child.

One of the men had a wife and two children (a boy and a girl) and the other had just had a wife. While both men seemed pleasant enough at parties and picnics, both had their own ways of forcing the women in their lives to cover their hair with a scarf. One threatened his wife and daughter that they would move back to Iran if they did not oblige, and the other threatened his wife with violence. What made this even more outrageous was that both wives were tremendously intelligent and outspoken, and longed to fully embrace the lifestyle of their newly adopted home. I remember one conversation in particular between one of the wives and my mom, where the woman joked that one day she would find a Canadian husband and go to Wasaga beach in a bikini. You can imagine the courage of these women to even talk about these issues with their friends.

This courage is not lost among women who are stuck living in countries ruled by Islamic law. It's quite easy to find recent articles on women who have been beaten, lashed, stoned, hanged or attacked with acid for standing up for their rights. You may remember a story from Tunisia about Amina Tyler, who was jailed, lashed, disowned by her family, and sent to a mental institution for doing a topless protest.

What disturbs me the most is that under the wrong circumstances, life for a woman or girl in Canada may be no better than life in Tunisia or Iran. We are supposed to be a country of personal freedoms and equality, yet we offer no protection to wives and and daughters who are forced to submit to sexism and child abuse in the name of religion.

If we were to remove religious garments from public view, religious oppressors would lose their power. If you do not like this idea, I challenge you to think of a realistic alternative that would ensure all women power over their own dress. If there is a good alternative, I will definitely support it.

By the way, I'd like an answer to this: Are you okay with a KKK member teaching your kids or acting as your nurse in their hooded attire?

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Boy, you're really fixated on the KKK aren't you?

Besides it's not a religion so your insistence on constantly using them, to advance your point of view, is moot.

 

[Dkhorsand]

True, but we already have sufficient safeguards to ensure that.

Actually, we don't.

There is no right not to be offended, and your contention that someone is incompetent because they have religious conviction is an assumption and not based in fact - one does not equal the other.

There is no right not to be offended by someone teaching your kids wearing a KKK outfit? And there are plenty of situations where religious convictions would cause incompetence at work. Could you trust a Mormon to teach black history? How could a Muslim woman working at a bank, donning a burka, verify my ID when I need a new debit card?

Bullsh*t! I know lots of folks who wear religious symbols who are far more tolerant of others' beliefs than their secular peers.

And I have not met a single one who believes that women and homosexuals deserve equal rights.

 

[Dkhorsand]

Boy, you're really fixated on the KKK aren't you?

Besides it's not a religion so your insistence on constantly using them, to advance your point of view, is moot.

The KKK are a sect of Protestant Christianity.

 

[JesseWZ]

Could you trust a Mormon to teach black history?

Yep. Mormonism was (as were many other groups) a reflection of American Society at the height of the jim crow era. Also, there are many African American Mormons. If it furthers your point (though it shouldn't), I'm not a Mormon.

How could a Muslim woman working at a bank, donning a burka, verify my ID when I need a new debit card?

By carefully scrutinizing your ID picture with your face and validating your identity. Why does the teller need their identity validated? They aren't the ones who are undergoing ID checks to withdraw money.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

The KKK are a sect of Protestant Christianity.

The KKK is still not a religion, no matter who their membership is comprised of.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>The normally garrulous Conservative minister turned bashful all of a sudden.

Avoid the unnecessary battle.  No point in setting out to silence the horse until it proves it can sing.  No point in pig wrestling until the pig shows up.  Etc.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Brian Gable gets it exactly right in this, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/xxxxx/article14052163/#dashboard/follows/

All hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas.

The question is: how gullible are most Canadians? My fear is that enough (20% who would vote Liberal if Vladimir Putin was the leader + 20% who are, simply, "star struck") vote for him then he will form a majority government ~ still devoid of policy and burdened with, mostly, a weak front bench. My guess is that the Liberal brain trust is gun shy on the policy front: Messers Martin, Dion and Ignatieff had, arguably, too much policy and too little charisma, so they will go the people with M. Trudeau's sex appeal ... which may be enough.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Quote from: E.R. Campbell on 2013-06-08, 07:39:00
The Good Grey Globe's charter member of the Laurentian elite and head cheerleader for the Laurentian Consensus chimes in, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, on the Conservative base and demonstrates, yet again, that he, like most of the Laurentian elite just don't "get" 21st century Canada:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/dont-forget-the-base-you-can-bet-harper-wont/article12426834/#dashboard/follows/

What Simpson doesn't "get" (and what Bricker and Ibbitson do) is that there is not one, big, Western, rural, gun-toting, religious Conservative base. There are, at least, three:

    1. The Western, rural base Simpson describes;

    2. The Western urban base that represents all of Calgary, Lethbridge and Red Deer and most of Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg; and

    3. The BC and Ontario suburban and small town base.

Simpson gives of a list of the attributes of his base:

    1. A high degree of religiosity;

    2. A moralistic view of foreign policy;

    3. A populist dislike of government;

    4. A loathing of the media (except Sun News Network, Sun newspapers and a few very right-wing columnists);

    5. A distaste of anything that smacks of high culture;

    6. A reverence for the military;

    7. An abhorrence of abortion;

    8. A suspicion of “intellectuals” and their reasoning;

    9. A belief (against all evidence) that crime is out of control; and

    10. A generalized sense that honest, God-fearing people like themselves have been marginalized and patronized by secular “elites.”

Of course, few members of any of the three bases share all or even most of those attributes; but they are the opposite of the core values of the Laurentian elite which is, broadly: irreligious, wedded to an amoral neutralist foreign policy, supportive of big government, "informed" by the CBC/TORSTAR/Le Devoir view of Canada, cultural nationalistic, anti-military, pro-abortion, suspicious of any "intellectuals" who do not share its beliefs, anti-police, and patronizing of the emerging, broad, anti-Laurentian consensus.

There is a divide in Canada:

    1. Most of "Old Canada,"* - everything East of the Ottawa River - is, if not supportive of the Laurentian view of Canada, suspicious of the "New Canadian" view; and

    2. "New Canada" - everything West of the Ottawa River - is divided -

        a. Large parts of it, in most rural, Western urban and most suburban areas is Conservative, while

        b. Many urban areas, especially in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa, are split between the Liberals and NDP.


_____
* I don't recall, exactly where I found the "old Canada"/"New Canada" idea, it's not original; I think I read it first in an article by Michael Bliss but Google doesn't help me to find it

And speaking of the Laurentian consensus and its cheerleaders, the Laurentian elites, here is another voice from the loony left, Linda McQuaig, explaining Stephen Harper's hidden agenda ® in a column which is reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Toronto Star:

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/05/07/harper_stokes_resentments_in_discreet_class_war_mcquaig.html
Quote

Harper stokes resentments in discreet class war: McQuaig
Thatcher-style attempt to crush unions would leave Canadian workers powerless.

By: Linda McQuaig, Columnist

Published on Tue May 07 2013

The willingness of much of the Canadian media to go along with the Conservative narrative about Stephen Harper’s “moderation” has allowed the prime minister to wage a discreet class war against working people without attracting too much attention.

Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers, thereby suppressing Canadian wages in the interests of helping corporations.

Apart from this clumsy fiasco, the Harperites have been adroit at keeping their anti-worker bias under the radar. Instead, they’ve directed their attacks against unions, portraying them as undemocratic organizations run by “union bosses” who ignore the interests of ordinary workers.

It’s revealing that this harsh critique of unions largely comes from business think-tanks and conservative politicians — folks who aren’t generally known for championing workers’ rights but who apparently can’t sleep at night at the thought workers aren’t being well represented by the people they elect to run their unions.

Of course, the real reason Harper attacks unions is because they’ve been effective in promoting the interests of working people over the past century. By establishing norms for higher wages and benefits in the workplace, and by pushing governments to implement universal social programs, unions are largely the reason we have a middle class in this country.

But Harper has long aspired to crush union power — as his hero Margaret Thatcher did in Britain. Thatcher’s legacy is severe inequality in Britain, just as Ronald Reagan’s anti-unionism promoted extreme inequality in the U.S. Canada is rapidly catching up to both.

Since winning his majority, the prime minister has increasingly given vent to his anti-union venom. Last fall, he brought in a bill placing an onerous and unnecessary financial reporting burden on unions, while sparing professional and business associations a similar burden.

Breaking the back of public sector unions is key to any plan to smash labour power in Canada, since the public sector is much more unionized — 75 per cent, compared to just 16 per cent of the private sector — and therefore better equipped to withstand attacks.

So Harper’s latest salvo — legislation enabling the cabinet to intervene in collective bargaining at Crown corporations — is aimed at revving up his campaign against public sector unions.
Business think-tanks, like the Fraser Institute, are helping out by generating papers showing that pay is higher in the public sector.

That’s true; that’s what collective action achieves. But the difference is not dramatic, and is mostly due to higher public sector wages for women and minorities in low-paid jobs. This is offset by generally lower pay for public sector professionals and managers, compared with their private sector counterparts, notes Andrew Jackson, senior policy adviser to the Broadbent Institute.

But harping on the allegedly overpaid public sector allows the Harper team to do what it does best: drive a wedge between people. Harper hopes to stoke resentments in struggling private sector workers, duping them into thinking the big rewards have gone to public sector workers rather than to where they’ve actually gone — into corporate coffers and CEO pay.

There are raw emotions at play here. Knocking down public sector workers a peg or two might provide satisfaction to private sector workers who’ve seen their own wages and benefits eroded, and yet have to pay taxes that fund public sector salaries.

The problem is that once the powerful public sector unions are gutted, there won’t be much left of the Canadian labour movement, leaving workers not much better protected than their predecessors in the early industrial era who risked their lives battling for the right to unionize.

Of course, without unions, working people will be able to rely on new tools like . . . well . . . social media.

As Harper draws on the full resources of the state to ramp up his class war, workers can count on tweeting any of their concerns or sharing Facebook photos of their friends working longer hours for less.

Linda McQuaig's column appears monthly. lmcquaig@sympatico.ca

One hardly knows where to begin, but ... a significant minority of Canadians, probably 25% to 40% of them, will believe every word Ms McQuaig writes.

And still more from another voice of the Laurentian consensus, this time Heather Mallick whose column is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Toronto Star:

The new Canadian passport is pure Harperlandia: Mallick
The new Canadian passport is a nightmarish tribute to a stultifying past.

By: Heather Mallick Columnist, Published on Mon Sep 09 2013

Canada is increasingly becoming unrecognizable to me. I don’t mean this just in an abstract sense, when I read about shameful things like Ottawa trying to avoid taking in refugees who have been tortured, because they require extra medical care. Foreigners who wake up weeping, with bone chips floating around their spinal cords, I hear you, Stephen Harper, these people are costly.

No, I mean Canada is literally foreign. Alert reader Martin Foster had emailed me about the details of our new passport, and I hadn’t believed him. But he is right.

The passport, good for 10 years and packed with security features so novel they’ll be useless by 2015, is now being mailed out. But which nation issued it? It is a distant country of which I know little. It is Harperlandia.

The passport contains 22 visual watermarks portraying the essence, the uniqueness of Harperlandia. There are, by my count, 98 images of males, six of females. There are various landscapes, from the north, the Prairies and Newfoundland, plus Niagara Falls. There are football players and hockey players, a warship, three war memorials, the RCMP and a soldier. But there is no image of Toronto or Vancouver and no aboriginal Canadian. Apparently only one Canadian verging on our lifetime (Terry Fox) has ever distinguished himself.

According to the government, we are white guys, rural, warlike and sporty, but not literate. Our landscapes are bleak, our buildings drab, our statuary undistinguished. These are not propellant images. In most, we are either stationary or plodding.

Worse, not a single Canadian face is shown cracking a smile.

All the historical maps are blank, apparently sans Inuit or First Nations, and there are no modern maps including the border cities we favour. All the images of places where people arrived in Harperland, ready to be enthralled by this mighty terrain, are empty platforms, rocky outcroppings and featureless plains.

The late W.G. Sebald wrote about landscapes like this. A more depressing writer you could not find. I do love my Sebald but I could not live in the land he walks, and I believe I do not. My passport disputes this.

This morbid passport shoots out one message: what does anyone see in us? We are boring. Also we won’t be around long. With 16 men to every woman, our birth rate is deep in the negatives, which is understandable. I wouldn’t sleep with a Harperlandian. We are inert, actively and aggressively not ert.

This is Harper’s Canada, including the brutal and the banal, excluding the urban, the wild and the free. It is Canada put through Dull-Check,™ a policeman I fight daily.

Atwood has described this olden Canada: “a world of frozen corpses, dead gophers, snow, dead children, and the ever-present feeling of menace, not from an enemy set over against you but from everything surrounding you.”

Much of our literature, she says, “is a diagram of what is not desired.” She wrote this in 1972, 40 years before Harper produced a passport exemplifying precisely this.
My modern Canadian passport would look very different, as would yours. It would be as red as our flag, instead of metallic navy. It would include Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal, the cities I and most
Canadians happily live in. It would be emotionally expressive.

Oh, we have so many images that sing out “Canada:” the Toronto skyline, the ROM, Sarah Polley in Avonlea, Alice Munro, Louis Riel, a Lawren Harris iceberg, a Joyce Wieland, the CBC logo, Vancouver’s harbour lights, Mount Royal, a Canada Goose parka, Banting, Gretzky, Roots boots, a backyard ice rink/perfectly shovelled driveway, a flock of glass condo towers, a wild snowboarder, Alligator Pie, a traffic jam, a Bloody Caesar, a lacerated refugee getting a flu shot.

I’d choose the Arrivals level at Pearson’s Terminal 1. I have spent so many hours in that huge hall, finding the carousel, waiting for bags, getting ankled by the carts we pay for (nice touch), bickering, loudly losing heart in a passive-aggressive way to which staff remain indifferent. Oh what terrible times have I endured in that hellishly familiar room, all the while thinking, “And yet I am so very happy to be home.”

hmallick@thestar.ca

No comment; the Laurentian elites speak for themselves.

 

[Journeyman]

Obviously a slow no news day.  :boring:

 

[pbi]

Added one in for ya! Seriously though, I support this law. Freedom of religion asserts freedom FROM religion. Secular people should not be forced to deal with non-secular ideas in secular places. As per my previous example, any religion that someone may try to visually represent may offend people or even openly display their incompetence to perform their work. We should not be forced to respect values that are racist, sexist or homophobic. And don't kid yourself, all religions are, and those who need to wear their religious gear at all times definitely are.

Except that it isn't quite as logical and simple as you've depicted. The Charte will leave a large Christian crucifix displayed on the wall inside the National Assembly, apparently because this "respects Quebec's heritage", or something. So, while a Jewish public servant can't wear a yarmulke because it might offend some people, it is quite alright for the widely-recognized symbol of one particular religion to dominate Quebec's parliamentarians as they go about their work?

While mere lowly public servants will not be allowed to wear their nasty, disruptive and threatening religious symbols while at work, elected members of the National Assembly will, apparently, be exempted from this restriction. How does this make any logical sense? The elected representatives of the people (who are the source of power and authority for these same public servants) are somehow immune from the evil effects of these overt religious signs?  Quebecers don't want to see clerks with crucifixes, but an elected member wearing one is OK?  What?

Secular people should not be forced to deal with non-secular ideas in secular places.

Do you cover your eyes when you walk by a church or synagogue, to avoid being "forced to deal with non-secular ideas"? The public street is provided by the government through the public purse, so it should be a secular place, right? Please! What sort of a life do you think you are going to lead if you believe you can isolate yourself from anything that might challenge or offend your own personal beliefs?  A hermit? The response to ideas that  challenge your thinking isn't to ban them: it's to reason with them. You are in danger of falling into philosophical league with the book burners.

As per my previous example, any religion that someone may try to visually represent may offend people or even openly display their incompetence to perform their work.

I'm sorry: your leap of logic left me way behind. You reached these conclusions how, again? As already pointed out, the fact that an idea or an expression of an idea  might offend or challenge you is not sufficient basis for anything except a good argument, never mind for a silly law like this one. If we follow your logic to its ultimate conclusion, there will be no free expression at all, period. Even Canada's hate speech laws don't encompass this.

We should not be forced to respect values that are racist, sexist or homophobic. And don't kid yourself, all religions are, and those who need to wear their religious gear at all times definitely are.

Wow.........(gob-smacked)....any other sweeping unsubstantiated generalizations you'd like to unload?

 

[Brad Sallows]

>We should not be forced to respect values that are racist, sexist or homophobic.

Please don't abuse the proper meanings of "respect", "tolerate" (and "celebrate", of which the politically correct lemmings are particularly fond).

Canada is full of people who don't pull their weight, are irrationally prejudiced, spend entirely too much time poking their nose into others' business (in my view).  I celebrate none of them.  I respect few of them.  I tolerate all of them.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I remain convinced that we, those of us in English Canada who are upset with Mme Marois' tactics, are actually playing into her hands. We need to understand that la charte des valeurs québécoises has a strategic objective: to secure, for the Parti québécois back to back to back majority governments from 1914 to 1925 2014-2025 and beyond, enough time, Premier Marois hopes, to finally get enough French speaking Quebecers to vote Oui and provide a real, legally "clear" majority for sovereignty. One of her allies, she believes (and so do I), is voluble English Canadian hostility to what many, many (most?) French Quebecers believe.

It appears, to me, that a solid majority of French Quebecers, especially those living outside Montreal, believe in laïcité ~ a concept denoting the absence of religious involvement in public life: in schools, in courts, in government offices, and so on. In Québec, I think, this goes beyond just the public sector, some (many? most?) French Quebecers are unwilling to "accommodate" or even "tolerate" les autres.

Thus, in my opinion Canadian opinion leaders (politicians, editorialists, public intellectuals, etc) should calm down and let Quebecers decide for themselves ~ through their own democratic political and legal processes ~ what it is they want in their own nation. It is my belief that:

    1. The PQ will have broad public support for passing this legislation; but

    2. Québec's courts will disallow much of it if it passes as currently proposed.

The real problem, in my opinion, has nothing to do with valeurs québécoises, it has everything to do with inept political and economic management in Québec, by the Parti québécois and the Parti libéral du Québec equally. See this, for example. The real problem is that the statist Québec Model doesn't work; it never worked, it was a dumb idea in the 1950s and it is a silly idea now, but Québec's chapter of the Laurentian elite is wedded to both the model, itself, and to Québec's right to manage its way into economic ruin and the consequential social despair.



Edit: to correct a bit of "time travelling"  :-[

 

[Edward Campbell]

And, by the way, it's not only Québec; see this, from England. The issue of "accommodation" is difficult and, as Brad mentioned we need to understand what we mean by words like tolerate. The fact that we, as a society, tolerate something does not mean we agree with it or respect it; tolerate means that we allow something to exist because the societal "cost" of banning it is too high.

And by the way, despite my defences of Islam in these fora, I overflow with cultural biases, just as much as any redneck anywhere.