Bill 62 and Our Fear of Change

“Do you want to live in a Jewish ghetto? I certainly don’t want to live in a Jewish ghetto. … Look at the houses of the Jews. They don’t do proper maintenance.…I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for 43 years. I like it the way it is. I don’t want it to change. I want to walk down the street and greet people I know, people like me. But the Jews: you try and greet them; they look away.”

"I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for 43 years. I don’t want it to change." 

It is less than a week to Montreal’s local government elections, and as I walk into my apartment building with a bag of groceries I encounter a canvasser representing two of the candidates campaigning for election to the borough council of Outremont. I am startled by his unapologetic antisemitism. We engage in a rather long conversation, longer than I had anticipated – I am standing half-turned in the interior doorway of the building’s lobby for its duration, my bag of groceries getting heavier and heavier. Caught off guard, I don’t think of putting down the bags. And in the moment my revulsion at the blatant bigotry of my conversation partner prevents me from pausing and trying to connect with him as a complex human person. It is only much later, as I think back to the conversation, that I feel a little empathy with his fears and sorrows.

Not quite two weeks earlier I find myself a few blocks over, on Park Avenue, near the border between my borough of Outremont and the neighbouring Plateau, waiting for the early morning bus. I am surrounded by a small flash mob of my neighbours, convened by means of a Facebook event announcement. Similar groups are convening at several of the stops along this bus route. All of us have covered our faces with scarves in solidarity with those of our neighbours victimized by Bill 62, “An Act to foster adherence to State religious neutrality,” to which the National Assembly of Quebec gave final assent on October 18, 2017.

Bill 62 is most infamous for being a law that forbids people from covering their faces while using public services in Quebec.

While it also does other things, Bill 62 is most infamous for being a law that forbids people from covering their faces while using public services in Quebec. In particular, it forbids Muslim women from wearing face coverings like the niqab for purposes of modesty while accessing these public services like riding the bus, receiving health care, or borrowing a book from the library. In response to the public outcry over the legislation Quebec’s Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée issued a set of guidelines. In her accompanying remarks, Minister Vallée tried to explain away the religious bigotry of the legislation by insisting that it would be as illegal to wear dark sunglasses in the indicated public settings as it would be to wear a veil. “This law is no more defensible than a law saying the Amish can’t access public services unless they dress like Anglicans,” writes Dexter Xurukulasuriya, exposing the amalgam of absurdity and malice brought about by the provincial government of Quebec.

As best as I can tell, Bill 62 is a cynical effort on the part of the current government of Quebec to tap into the anti-Muslim (in particular) and anti-religious (in general) sentiments of some of the province’s voters. Part of what I find perplexing is that this is a government lead by Premier Philippe Couillard who, less than a year ago, after shootings at a Quebec City mosque resulted in the deaths of several worshippers, asked for respectful dialogue in this province, explaining that “words matter…words can hurt, words can be knives slashing at people's consciousness,” and urging media personalities, his fellow politicians, and the Quebec public to “think twice” about the “words we write, the words we utter.” How much more so, then, shall we think twice about the words that make up our provincial laws?

I have been working away on a much smaller scale, trying to make some kind of sense only of the bigotry I encounter in the few city blocks around my apartment.

Neither cynical political opportunism nor anti-Muslim bigotry is limited to the province of Quebec. For example, for several years Canada’s federal government banned face coverings at citizenship ceremonies for new Canadians, until this ban was overturned on constitutional grounds by Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal. But I have to admit that bigotry on a national or international scale has of late felt too big for me to get a handle on. And so, for the past year I have been working away on a much smaller scale, trying to make some kind of sense only of the bigotry I encounter in the few city blocks around my apartment, in my local borough of Outremont, mostly in conversations with my neighbours.

I wish for my Jew-fearing neighbour in Outremont to have an opportunity to really get to know some of our Jewish neighbours.

I don’t think people are evil for fearing the loss of the familiar. And I don’t think people are evil for loving the familiar. To fear change seems baked into our humanity, as does the love of the familiar and the love of kin (and by extension, love of those with whom we share a country, a culture, or a religion). But I do think that it is evil to exploit our fears and loves for short-term political advantage, and at the expense of our long-term common good. I wish for my Jew-fearing neighbour in Outremont to have an opportunity to really get to know some of our Jewish neighbours. I wish for my niqab-fearing neighbours in Quebec to have an opportunity to really get to know some of our Muslim neighbours. And I wish for the politicians of Outremont, Montreal, and Quebec to forge rules and laws that will make such opportunities more likely, rather than rules and laws that exploit and reinforce our fear of one another. And for those of us who are motivated in our pursuit of justice by the stories of the Bible, the hospitality of God towards us is our first reason for trying to nurture political hospitality, including hospitality towards those of our neighbours who are motivated by other stories. 

[Image: Flickr user michael_swan, under Creative Commons license]