Worrier Nation: Quebec's Value Codes for Immigrants

Abstract

This article analyses the political and policy discourses of Quebec's integration toolkit for immigrants. With a focus on value codes for immigrants, I argue first, that recent debate on accommodation of immigrants and religious minorities resuscitates the dominant historical narrative of Quebec's fragility as a conquered settler colonial nation but where the major threat is defined as the cultural otherness of racialized immigrants and religious minorities. Second, such value codes instantiate a form of governmental strategy that combines neo-liberal and communitarian rationalities and insist on cultural assimilation as the price of entry into Quebec citizenship. Finally, the paper examines how Quebec's current national imaginary of the ‘worrier nation’ maps spatially onto the urban-rural divide.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the perceptive comments and helpful suggestions for revision of Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Jiyoung Leean, Chrisophe Sevigny, and two anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Voices of the North American Subaltern panel, Roots and Legacies, Sixth Annual Peace and Conflict Studies Conference, University of Toronto, January 29, 2012.

Notes

There is a slippage in the terms used to describe the dominant ethnocultural collectivity within the Quebec nation. The term ‘French-Canadian Quebecer’ seems to be favoured in English language debates, whereas terms such as ‘Eurodescendant francophones’ speak to the combination of whiteness, Eurocentrism and linguistic boundaries regarded as symbolically defining those at the top of the hierarchy of fitness for belonging to the Quebec nation. My usage of different terms is deliberate to signal the current ambivalence at play in debates about who constitutes the Quebec nation.

Quebec's government not only deploys discourse that affirms its own status as a state governing a nation (‘national assembly’, ‘national region’, ‘national parks’, etc.), but in many respects holds central state powers. Its powers over immigration, for instance, are sui generis in terms of their autonomy from the Canadian level of policy.

The Herouxville code, approved by the mayor and municipal council forbade carrying a weapon to school (even if symbolic), covering one's face, and indicated that accommodation of prayer in school will not be permitted. It also stated that stoning women or burning them alive is prohibited, as is female genital cutting (CBC News, February 1, 2007a).

The debate began with a series of incidents in the mid-2000s. ‘A Sikh student went to court and won the right to wear a kirpan at school. Some Hasidic Jews asked the YWCA to install tinted glass so women in shorts could not be seen exercising from outside the building. A Muslim girl was forbidden to wear a hijab or head scarf on the soccer field. A worker was asked not to eat his lunch containing a pork sandwich in the kosher cafeteria of a hospital. Some Muslims and Hasidic Jews objected to being interviewed by police personnel of the opposite gender or wanted driving instructors of the same gender. Some Hindu, Muslim and Jewish women asked to be seen only by a female doctor at medical clinics’ (Canadian Christianity, October 26, 2007).

Thus, in 2007, the Quebec Elections Act was amended to ensure that voters in Quebec elections show their faces to elections officials (i.e. no face-obscuring veil) (Barnett 2011, 5).

The formal title for the commission is the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences.

Indeed, one interpretation of the Herouxville code by a prominent Montreal journalist was that it was less a target on immigrants than a small town expression of revolt against the big city of Montreal, its lifestyle and passive acceptance of cultural diversity. ‘Hérouxville was angered by the tolerance of Montrealers, by their passivity towards the changes brought out by immigration, by their multi-ethnic culture, their rejection of religion, their 'gay village' and their arrogant elites. What happened in Hérouxville is the ultimate expression of the fracture between the metropolis and the regions’ (Alain Dubuc, quoted in Globe and Mail, February 26, 2007).

Taylor (2012, 417) suggests that the narrative of a national community under ‘powerful threat of assimilation’ has been assisted by the demography of Quebec where ‘upwards of 70 percent of the population is descended from the original francophone settlers’ who migrated from France in the seventeenth century (2012, 417). Provincially, Quebec claims a relatively ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population: ‘Quebecers of French-Canadian origin currently account for 78 percent of the population, 81.6 per cent of Quebecers speak French at home and 83 percent claim to be Catholic’ (Potvin 2010, 269). As far as language is concerned, writes Taylor ‘there is a triple threat: an anglo majority in Canada, and overwhelming domination of the English language in North America, and on top of that comes the fact that globalization speaks (a sort of) English’ (2012, 417).

‘First came the defeat of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, then the abandonment of New France by the motherland and its surrender to England in 1763. Next, the domination of the conqueror and the persistent threat of assimilation (of which the Durham Report and the act of Union (1841) were the most obvious instances) were followed by the hanging of Louis Riel and the crisis of conscription. Repeated failures of the re-founding of the country (1837–1838, 1867, 1980, 1995) culminated finally in the constitutional ‘humiliations’ suffered by Quebec in 1982 (the … patriation of the constitution [without Quebec's support]), 1990 (the failure of the Meech Lake Accord and 1999 (the Clarity Act)’ (Maclure 2004, 34–35).

Thus, between 2001 and 2006 Quebec's slice of the Canadian population reportedly fell by one half of one percentage point. According to the 2011 census data, in a span of 60 years Quebec's share of the total Canadian population dropped from nearly a third (28.9 in 1951) to less than a quarter (23.6% in 2011) (Huff Post Politics Canada, December 4, 2012).

All translations from French are my own, except where indicated otherwise.

As is the case of many of Canada's current cities, Gatineau is the result of an amalgamation. As part of the 2000–2006 municipal reorganization in Quebec, the new city of Quebec amalgamated five municipalities: Aylmer, Buckingham, Gatineau, Hull and Masson-Angers. As such, it is not one continuous, built-up urban area, but a ‘regional municipality’ that contains rural areas, a large park, suburban type housing as well as older small city landscapes as in the vieux secteur Hull.

In this declaration, immigrants have to accept the following seven ‘common values’ of Quebec society: Quebec is a free and democratic society; the state and religion are separate; Quebec is a pluralist society; Quebec society recognizes the supremacy of the law; women and men have equal rights; the exercise of human rights and freedoms that respects the rights and freedoms of others and general well-being; and French as the official and normal language of work, instruction, business and education (Québec, Immigration et Communautés Culturelles 2012).

As a Statistics Canada report on Family Violence in Canada demonstrates, in 2006, there were over 38,000 incidents of spousal violence (where victims were primarily women) reported to police across Canada, such that spousal violence made up 15% of all violent incidents. Moreover, as a proportion of all violent incidents, spousal violence was highest in Quebec and Nunavut (20%) (Statistics Canada 2011, 11).

In order to appropriate a hegemonic position as a universal and human rights value, western secularism engages in what Brown (2012) terms several ‘civilizational delusions’, inaugurating, for instance, a particular western and Protestant ‘social imaginary comprising a distinctive figuration and organization of the social, culture, religion, public and private’. Among the delusions harboured about western secularism that Brown fiercely dissects and demolishes are the assumptions that western secularism generates religious neutrality, is equally available to all religions, generates tolerance among religions, is culturally neutral, and produces gender freedom and equality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daiva Stasiulis

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.