Reading the Racial Subtext of the Québécois Accommodation Controversy: An Analytics of Racialized Governmentality

Abstract

This article takes issue with the elision of race from the type of governmentality engaged in the Québécois reasonable accommodation controversy and develops an analytics of racialized governmentality to look at the racial dynamics embedded in a ‘crisis’ dominantly understood as being about suitable (reasonable) limits to be set to religions in the public sphere. The deployment of this analytics relocates the focus of inquiry from whether minority religious practices should be accommodated or not, which ones, why and to what extent, to the ways in which this debate constructs the proper subjects of the national belonging, those who legitimately inhabit the national will and body, following a racialized line.

Notes

At least in what is called English Canada or the Rest of Canada (ROC): In 1985, multiculturalism ranked 10th on the list of what made Canadians most proud of their country, two decades later, it climbed to the second place. Yet, public support for multiculturalism comes with, since the 1970s, a widely shared expectation that immigrants ‘blend into the national mainstream’, as confirmed in a 2010 Environics survey. Despite customary opposition between multiculturalism and assimilation, most Canadians consider them compatible, as they approve multiculturalism, while agreeing (80%) with the statement ‘ethnic groups should try as much as possible to blend into Canadian society and not form a separate community’; higher support in Quebec (90.4%) than in the ROC (76.6%) (Reitz 2011, 15).

This refers to a period of heated public and political debates and media-induced moral panic over allegedly excessive claims of religious minorities, roughly delineated between March 2006 (Supreme Court's decision on Multani allowing the wearing of kirpan under strict conditions by baptized Sikh men and women in Quebec's public schools) and December 2007 (the end of public hearings of the Bouchard–Taylor Commission).

While a juridical term referring to a legal obligation to accommodate created by the courts' interpretation of the right to equality protected by the Canadian and the Quebec Charters of Rights banning direct and indirect discrimination (Woehrling 1998), reasonable accommodation has undergone, throughout the crisis, a semantic closure and come to signify in media and public discourses only religious accommodation, excluding other prohibited grounds of discrimination like disability, pregnancy, etc. from its signification field (Bilge 2010).

Following Hesse (2007, 660 n2), I define analytics as ‘an approach to study, research, reading or writing […] a way of analysing the how (the arising and deployment) and why (the rationale and logic) of particular phenomena’.

http://www.cbc.ca/archives/categories/politics/federal-politics/separation-anxiety-the-1995-quebec-referendum/money-and-the-ethnic-vote.html (Accessed September 28, 2012).

The shifting onto the terrain of language is not unproblematic, as rearticulating nation-building and belonging around language leaves unattended white-settler hegemony and discards racial and ethnic exclusions (Haque 2012, 5). While through the RA controversy, the focus in the definition of the desirability/civilizational index of immigrants shifted, competency in French losing ascendancy in the face of ‘common values’ wherein secularism and gender/sexual modernity are pivotal, these new-found ‘core’ values did not make language obsolete, but were perceived at least as pressing than the alleged decline of French in Montreal (Bilge 2012). Recently, the PQ seems to have found a trick to merge them: favouring immigrants speaking French as their mother tongue over those who speak it as second language. Jean-François Lisée, current Minister of International Relations, declared (while candidate) that immigrants from Bordeaux were preferable to those from Shanghais speaking French as second language—a seemingly linguistic argument barely hiding its racial undertone (http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/08/29/the-pq-better-french-than-chinese/). This brings to the fore a key issue, though beyond this article's scope: how language and linguistic survival function as a rationality of migration governmentality that effectively conceals its racialized technology.

Dumont's role in the making of the RA crisis might be even bigger if recent allegations of André Boisclair, then leader of PQ, prove to be true. Boisclair accused Dumont and ADQ of having engineered and sponsored the highly controversial Hérouxville Code of Conduct, which fuelled the RA debate into a full-blown crisis, leading the government to launch the Bouchard–Taylor Commission (‘L'ADQ a payé la charte de Hérouxville, affirme André Boisclair’, La Presse, 26 September 2012). Hérouxville Code of Conduct is a five-page resolution passed by the municipal government of a rural town of some 1300 residents situated at 165 km northeast of Montreal. The Code garnered worldwide media attention in late January 2007 for warning prospective immigrants that in this town it is forbidden to stone women in public, that women can drive cars, vote, sign cheques and dance, that residents listen to music, drink alcohol and decorate their Christmas trees with balls and that ‘the only time you may mask or cover your face is during Halloween’. Preventively adopted in case immigrants would settle in this ethnically homogenous remote town, the Code, despite being ridiculed, also received national and international support. When several other Quebec towns started to adopt similar codes, the Liberal Premier Jean Charest, in an effort to curb Dumont's increasing popularity in view of upcoming elections and reorient growing public discontent with RA, launched on February 2007 the Bouchard–Taylor Commission. Co-chaired by renowned philosopher Charles Taylor and sociologist Gérard Bouchard, the Commission conducted province-wide hearings between September and December 2007 and submitted its report on May 2008.

Term borrowed from Hage (2000).

Bonilla-Silva brings a welcomed racial inflection to Bourdieusian habitus, socially acquired tendencies and predispositions serving as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions that orient individuals towards certain worldviews.

I translate ‘les Québécois’ as Québécois rather than Quebec(k)ers, for Dumont clearly uses the term in reference to ethnic French-Canadians.

The Reform Party (RP) on its early days is another example. Its 1988 platform defended restricting immigration to economic purposes and foreign sponsorships to immediate families. A party report authored by Stephen Harper, current Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Conservative Party, who was then a founding member of the RP, reads: ‘Immigration should not be based on race or creed, as it has in the past; nor should it be explicitly designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada, as it increasingly seems to be’ (www.ctvnews.ca/dion-uses-reform-document-to-criticize-harper-1.286548 (22 September 2012)).

Less than 2 years after its outstanding breakthrough, ADQ's seats dropped from 41 to 7 in the 2008 provincial election (16.8% of the vote), which led its long-time leader, Mario Dumont, to retire from political life, but not from the spotlight as he hosts a daily television talk-show.

A case to the point is the leader of the British Labour Party Ed Miliband's recent speech outlining his party's new approach to immigration. Confessing his party's ‘past mistakes’ by being ‘too quick to dismiss the concerns of ordinary people as prejudice’, Miliband affirms: ‘worrying about immigration, talking about immigration, thinking about immigration, does not make them bigots. Not in any way. They are anxious about the future’ (http://www.ippr.org/research-project/44/7675/progressive-migration?showupdates=1&layout_type=updates#update9312; cf. ‘Ed Miliband says voters worried about immigration “are not bigots”’, Guardian, June 22, 2012).

Literally translated as ‘lying-flat-on-your-bellyism’, aplatventrisme is not entirely new in Québec's populist lexicon, but gained unprecedented currency after Dumont's repetitive uses.

[15] Consider the following points in PQ's 2012 platform recycling ADQ's 2007 platform: developing a Quebec Secularism Charter; establishing Quebec citizenship; adopting a Quebec Constitution to assert and establish the legal core values of Quebec as a nation, such as the predominance of the French language, equality between men and women and the secularity of public institutions; strengthening teaching and research in history, from elementary schools to university, with a focus on the national history of Quebec and its institutions (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebecvotes2012/story/2012/08/16/quebec-votes-platform-comparison-parti-quebecois.html (accessed September 22, 2012)).

Despite his relative pluralism and procedural approach to belonging mostly defined through the respect of Quebec's Charter of Rights, Boisclair did not fail to borrow from the register of racial historicism during elections (Wong 2009).

‘The Bill sets forth measures to enable the Québec nation to express its identity’, provides for the drafting of a Québec Constitution and establishes Québec citizenship. ‘It stipulates that, in the interpretation and application of fundamental human rights and freedoms, due regard should be paid to the historical heritage of the Québec nation and to its fundamental values’. It contains provisions aimed at ‘ensuring the predominance of the French language in Québec’, promoting understanding of Québec's national history, mastery of written and spoken French and ‘appreciation of Québec culture’, and ‘helping foreign nationals integrate into Québec society’ (Québec, National Assembly 2007, Bill 195: Québec Identity Act).

According to the Bill, to become a Quebec citizen, one needs to be a Canadian citizen for at least 3 months, be domiciled in Quebec and have an ‘appropriate knowledge of the French language’ and an ‘appropriate knowledge of Québec and of the responsibilities and advantages of citizenship’ (Québec, National Assembly 2007, 3, http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/projets-loi/projet-loi-195-38-1.html).

Although unconstitutional, such a rank-ordering of fundamental rights meets popular support, as evidenced by Fournier who reports that both Québécois (75%) and ROC Canadians (65%) wish to amend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so that gender equality outweighs religious freedom (2009, 192 n17).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sirma Bilge

Department of Sociology, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Qué, Canada.