Saint-Jerome, Canada - A former Conservative MP is urging Quebec to ban all religious clothing in public places, such as the face-covering niqab, a public hearing was told yesterday.
Lise Bourgault, now mayor of Brownsburg-Chatham, northwest of Montreal, delivered that message to the commission looking into the so-called reasonable accommodation of immigrants.
"We're going to have to stand up and prohibit the wearing of all religious clothing in public places," said Ms. Bourgault, who served as MP in Argenteuil-Papineau in southwestern Quebec between 1984 and 1993.
"It's time to reopen the Charters," she said, referring to the provincial and federal Charters of Rights and Freedoms.
Ms. Bourgault touched on a theme the commission has heard many times since it began public hearings in September - a distaste for public displays of religion and concern about how it can undermine equality between men and women.
She used the example of the niqab, worn by a small minority of Muslim women in Canada, as a display of religion in public. She also mentioned "submissive women who are behind their husbands."
The commission also heard that a made-in-Quebec constitution would help immigrants adapt to the French-speaking province.
Line Chaloux of the organization Le Coffret, which works with immigrants, said a constitution that includes equality between men and women and promotes secularism would help them adapt.
"With a constitution, we could develop in a much more definite way family rights, [and] equality between men and women, which is fundamental," she said.
"When we work with people who have a problem with integration, it's because they don't understand the values we have are non-negotiable."
Ms. Chaloux said Quebec's values regarding the place of women and their power to make decisions within their relationships - for themselves and their children - must be defended and not weakened.
A nationalist group also told the hearings that any accommodation for immigrants must help them integrate into Quebec and not isolate them.
"Accommodation has to be a way to help people participate in their civic duties, said Réjean Arsenault of la Société Nationale des Québécois des Laurentides. "Accommodation must never permit a group to be separate from the rest of Quebec."
However, Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday offered quite a different interpretation of what Canada's approach to reasonable accommodation should be during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
"Getting the majority to understand that accommodation of the minority and of the minority's needs and of the difficult position of being a minority is critical to the overall health of the body politic in the long term. It can't ever be simply a matter of the majority defined in an ethnic sense imposing its will on the rest of the country.
"And if you look at Canadian history, I don't just think English-French, but I think of way back, Catholic-Protestant or East versus West. Whenever we have had an incident where one section of our country, either defined regionally or ethnically or linguistically, has imposed something on the other against its will, we have lived with the consequences of that for decades and that must be avoided at all costs."
The Quebec hearings are being held throughout the province by Gérard Bouchard, the brother of former premier Lucien Bouchard, and by philosopher Charles Taylor.
Premier Jean Charest announced the hearings last winter after a lengthy and occasionally bitter public debate on the integration of immigrants.