Photograph by Mario Beauregard/CP
Floundering for an argument, he demands to know why, if the rationale is the secular nature of Quebec society, the government doesn’t also defund the Jewish General Hospital and tear down the crucifix at the national assembly. Oh, c’mon, is that the best you can do? That’s like saying, if Chief Commissar Jennifer Lynch’s rationale for the CHRC’s censorship powers is that history shows us powerful words can lead to dark deeds, why does she go after basement Nazis but not the tenured Marxists at every Canadian university in the name of whose political creed untold millions have died?
Why? Because, like I say, statism is arbitrary.
Perhaps Haroon Siddiqui will have better luck waging his campaign against state power than I’ve had with mine. He, after all, is not a “right-wing bigot,” but an exemplary pillar of the Canadian establishment. Why, I see he is a Member of the Order of Canada, which is not something I’m in any danger of this side of an alternative universe. Yet, even so, I would doubt he can win this one.
Almost as hilarious as English Canada’s anguished columnists, Lucien Bouchard cautions the Parti Québécois not to get mixed up with “identity politics.” What a card! Identity politics is, of course, the PQ’s raison d’être. Quebec nationalism came into being to protect Quebec’s “cultural identity.” Once upon a time, that didn’t need explaining: “La langue est gardienne de la foi,” Henri Bourassa said a century ago. The French language protects the Catholic faith. But the faith is long gone, and the churches are empty, and Quebec’s shrivelled, post-Catholic fertility rate combined with a constitutionally dubious, provincially controlled immigration policy has resulted in a recently arrived and ever swelling population from “French” (please, no tittering) North Africa and the Middle East.
Is that all that’s left of Quebec’s “cultural identity”? The lingo? Or to put it another way: suppose, in a few years’ time, the last elderly Anglos who still refer to Trois-Rivières as “Three Rivers” have died off and instead the streets of the province’s cities are clogged with niqab-clad francophones. Would Quebec feel it had won its battle to preserve its “cultural identity”?
Obviously not. Which is why 95 per cent of Quebecers favour the government’s niqab ban. Even in the ROC, support is running at about 80 per cent. Most of the social engineering and the remorseless dismantling of pre-Trudeaupian Canada takes place incrementally, under cover of darkness. The noxious brainwashing of our youth at Canadian universities is mostly concerned with theoreticals and abstractions. But the niqab and the burka are not abstract: they’re the starkest emblem of the gulf between one culture and another, and when they’re shuffling toward you down the sidewalk they’re telling you something about where your society’s headed. In that sense, they’re the most provocatively absurd of multiculturalism’s fatuities. Naema Ahmed’s lack of a face is, paradoxically, in your face—in a way that many of the multiculti delusions never quite are. It is also a reminder of our likely fate—that Western civilization will not be succeeded by a rainbow-hued utopia but by fractious and mutually hostile barbarisms.
At a certain level, the niqab wars are pathetic. They’re proxy battles for the real issues—on immigration, assimilation, and much else. But the niqab is blazingly vivid in a way that the big abstract nouns aren’t. And, whatever anglophone progressives may think, Jean Charest’s heavy-handed opportunism is in the grand tradition of Canadian statism.
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