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Irwin Cotler and Why I Almost Agree with Him…

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A lot of news has surfaced recently about the charter of Quebec values. I wrote a post about it days before it was “leaked” to the Journal de Montreal. If you aren’t familiar, the main talking points are that it will ban the wearing of religious garments/headwear in public institutions. While this is clearly a breach of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so far the damage is limited to public workers.

Now, if there’s anything I dislike as much as the Quebec government encroaching on my (and my fellow citizen’s) rights, it’s people who spew false rhetoric because they refuse to argue the facts; which leads me to the blog post by Irwin Cotler in the Huffington Post: “The PQ Wants to Force Religious Quebecers Into the Closet”.

After a second read-through, I’m having trouble denouncing the blog. I agree with Cotler on many issues. When he says:

However, the so-called “charter of values” reportedly being contemplated by our provincial government would make a mockery of the free and open society that many of Quebec’s nationalist leaders have been promoting for decades.

I tend to agree with him. We’ve had nationalism for 35 years, but it has never been so vitriolic at the government level. Yes, the FQL was a terrorist organization and can loosely be referred to as a “political movement”, but they were not a democratically elected party.

Cotler also got it right when he described what a true secular society is: one with no religious litmus-test for those aspiring to public office. In short, Cotler got a lot of stuff right! And then he made this straw-man of an argument:

This would create immediate, practical problems. For instance, would an elderly Jewish man be required to discard the kippa he has worn all his life in order to receive palliative care? Would ambulance workers at the scene of a car accident have to remove the patka of the Sikh boy in the back seat before administering CPR?

I don’t know if he was catering to a particular audience, dubiously attacking our emotional cortex, or if he simply misread the aspects of the charter that have been leaked so far, but his examples are moot points at best. Unfortunately for Cotler, “Public Office” and “the general public” are not synonymous. The articles of the charter we’ve seen so far have not mentioned anything about limiting the religious freedoms of individual members of society (those articles are found in Bill 14. Zing!). So what is he talking about? Well, I think he is probably just giving the PQ too much credit.

You see, they have a way of writing laws that – at first glance – seem “reasonable” (I use that term loosely). So instead of saying “Public Workers will no longer be allowed to wear/sport religious symbols,”, they would phrase it as “Religious Symbols will no longer be worn in public institutions,”. Did you catch the nuance? The second one means any person entering a public institution; not simply the workers. This is why I believe Cotler mentioned the need to remove the patka of the Sikh boy before performing CPR… Irwin’s pullin’ on muh heart strings!

While the PQ would definitely go the route of trying to hide their discriminatory laws inside language nuance (they have before – earlier this year), I truly don’t think we have enough evidence to condemn them for it yet. And before we do, saying so is just a witch hunt.

With that said, Cotler’s blog post is mostly good. He’s on the right side of the argument. And frankly, it’s easy for me to get behind him because the opposition are (openly) racist pricks. However, what’s it all worth if our side uses fear-mongering to get our point across? That’s the job of the PQ.

And a big Hat Tip to Joey, the CanadianAtheist.com reader who asked for a post on this article.

I should note that in the event it turns out Cotler was right all along, I’ll write him an apology. The truth is, the PQ would happily write this if they had the majority vote. Hell, even I feel that if we give Marois long enough… I may have to concede to Cotler’s impressive foresight.


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