The Quebec Charter of Values: Education, diversity and intolerance
For more than eighteen years our organization, ENSEMBLE pour le respect de la diversité, has
been working with students throughout Quebec – talking with them, listening to them, learning
from them. Through our interactive workshops on diversity and bullying, we reach over 25,000
young Quebecers every year in every region of the province. It is from this perspective that I
want to share our profound unease with the proposed Charter of Quebec Values and the
discourse that has resulted from it.
Learning to live together in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic Quebec is not easy. Our
prejudices and stereotypes about those who are different from us – and we all have such
prejudices and stereotypes – are often deeply ingrained, the product of what we absorbed in
our families, what we see and hear through the media, and what we learn and share with our
peers. Too often these attitudes are a product of a lack of exposure to “the other” and
ignorance about their culture and way of life.
Students in Quebec reflect the attitudes and values of the day. A number of organizations have
pointed out the rise in incidents of harassment and violence towards members of religious
minorities. It is happening on our streets, in our shopping centres, on our buses and it is
starting to reach our schools. From our perspective, we currently are witnessing a rise in
attitudes of intolerance and prejudice towards those who express their difference through the
wearing of religious symbols, notably the hijab. Students now seem less hesitant to express
their prejudices against “the other”. It strains credulity beyond reason to assert that this is
unconnected to the debate about the proposed Charter and the legitimacy it seems to have
given to expressions of intolerance.
This is not surprising. We saw a similar uptick in such attitudes during the lead-up to and during
the hearings of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission six years ago. The common thread is easy to
discern. The public debate, magnified through the media, legitimizes a way of separating
Quebecers between us and them. By identifying those who wear religious symbols as a
problem for the values we hold dear – the equality of women and men, the neutrality of the
state, to name but these – how can we pretend that this will remain confined to the not-sonarrow category of those who work for state-funded and regulated institutions? To sincerely
believe that this project will unite Quebecers is to dream in Technicolor.
In 2007 our organization appeared before the Bouchard-Taylor commission to express support
for a model of securalism (laicité) that was open and respectful of the rights of Quebecers. Our
brief included the following passage that goes to the heart of what we believe is right for
Quebec.
L’obligation de neutralité religieuse (ou laïcité) qui s’impose aux autorités et institutions publiques ne
peut s’imposer aux individus. Nous devrions soutenir un modèle de laïcité propre au Québec, qui prenne
en compte à la fois l’histoire singulière du pays, tout en répondant aux besoins et aux aspirations
légitimes de sa population de plus en plus diverse. … C’est un modèle qui respecte les traditions
religieuses québécoises ou canadiennes tout en réservant un espace suffisant à l’expression d’autres
traditions culturelles et religieuses plus ou moins récentes.
Nothing in the intervening years or in the heated debate of the last few months has given us
any reason to change our position.
Marc Gold
Chairman of the Board
ENSEMBLE pour le respect de la diversité
For more information, please contact:
Marie-France Legault, Executive Director,
ENSEMBLE pour le respect de la diversité
180, boul. René-Lévesque Est, bureau 420
Montréal, Québec
H2X 1N6
Téléphone : (514) 842-4848
Télécopieur : (514) 842-7557
Courriel : info@ensemble-rd.com