Photograph by Rebecca Cook/Reuters
Quebec’s move to nix the niqab continues to tie Canada’s commentariat in knots. The funniest column to date was by Haroon Siddiqui, “editorial page editor emeritus” of the Toronto Star. Mr. Siddiqui was not impressed by the arguments mounted against the head-to-toe body bag—for example, the notion that it is a “symbol of oppression”:
“Let’s assume that it is,” he wrote. “Whose business is it to end the practice—that of the state?”
That’s pretty cute coming from a guy who, during this magazine’s long battle with Canada’s “human rights” commissions, argued at length that it was most certainly the business of the state to end the practice of Maclean’s carrying Islamophobic Steyn columns. If the state can regulate what you write and say and think and even (as in the lesbian heckler case at the British Columbia Tribunal) what you quip, it can most certainly regulate what you wear. In Canada, it would be quicker to list what isn’t the business of the state. “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,” said Pierre Trudeau, unless, of course, you’re tucked up with a nice mug of cocoa reading an Islamophobic edition of Maclean’s. It was a classic bit of Trudeaupian legerdemain: if you’re allowed to roger anything that moves, or doesn’t, according to taste, you won’t notice all the other parts of your life the state has a place in. In Canada, it’s the state’s business when you get your hip operation, not yours: if the state has jurisdiction over your hip, why shouldn’t it also have jurisdiction over which garments the hip can be sheathed in? In Canada, a resident alien is not permitted to own a bookstore, on grounds of cultural protection. If “cultural protection” can prohibit a homosexual from San Francisco opening up a gay bookstore in Vancouver, why can’t it also extend to a Muslim woman’s dress?
And Quebec is Canada without even the residual restraints of the Britannic inheritance. In the interests of la collectivité, the province regulates not only the public usage of language but the very size of lettering in which your words can be displayed. If the state has power to set a maximum font on the ladies’ room door, why can’t it also set a limit on the yards of cloth you have to hoist up once you get in there?
Until Jean Charest decided to take the crimping shears to the niqab, Mr. Siddiqui had never met a statist initiative he wasn’t hot for. But statism is never about principle, only about power. Tyranny is always whimsical. If you’re an unemployed loser living in his parents’ basement in Dead Moose Junction and you put up a blog post saying Jews are vermin who should be kicked out of Canada, the Dominion’s heroic “human rights” champion Richard Warman will haul you up before the state commissars and destroy your life. But, if you’re Salman Hossain, alumnus of the universities of both Toronto and York, and you call Jews the “scum of the earth” and argue that “a genocide should be perpetrated against the Jewish populations of North America and Europe,” the valiant Prince Richard and the knights of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s round table are curiously reluctant to saddle up. If you’re the genial young lads caught on tape outside Palestine House in Mississauga the other day taunting Jews with threats of another Holocaust, not only does the Canadian state turn a blind eye, it actively subsidizes this genial contribution to “diversity” with your tax dollars.
Statism is muscle. In Trudeaupia, that muscle has usually been applied against the political right. During the Ann Coulter fiasco a week or two back, Michael Lefive wrote to explain to me that I had a defective understanding of Canadian “freedom”:
“I find it interesting how freedom of expression is so poorly understood. I feel just as free saying you do not know what you are talking about as I would saying you’re an ignorant f–k.
“The question revolves around simple civility and the freedom of expression provided by a language’s potential for alternatives. I have lived in both Canada and the U.S., and the Canadian approach revolves around civility and inclusion of human differences while providing as broad an arena for opinion as I have found in the U.S.
“Canadians freely expressed themselves. Ann Coulter is not welcomed. That IS freedom of expression! Hate-mongers need not apply.”
Putting aside the fact that the only fellow using the words “ignorant f–k” is the guy bragging about his “civility and inclusion of human differences,” note what M. Lefive’s “simple civility” boils down to—labelling me and Miss Coulter as “hate-mongers” who “do not know what you are talking about.” Gee, with that kind of simple civility, why don’t we just cut to the bar fight? Likewise, Haroon Siddiqui airily attributes the anti-niqab campaign to “an unholy alliance of leftist feminists, right-wing bigots and Quebec nationalists.” “Bigots,” huh? Even in an unholy alliance, some allies are less legitimate than others. Mr. Siddiqui’s friends in public universities, in state media, in government agencies, in taxpayer-funded agitprop groups and the rest of bien pensant Canada have no problem labelling people as beyond the pale. Siddiqui’s mistake was in assuming he and the state would always see eye to eye about whom it was okay to revile.
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