Does the Pope Know About This? Quebec Legislature Says Crucifix Not a Religious Symbol

According to MNAs up is down, right is left, and multiculturalism is dead.

The Montreal Gazette’s Don MacPherson is disgusted at watching Quebec’s MNA’s turn themselves into rhetorical contortionists in an attempt to justify a bill officially banning the kirpan from the National Assembly. MacPherson systematically demolishes all of the arguments they offered; one MNA said that all religious symbols must be banned from the legislature while simultaneously (and laughably) defending the crucifix prominently displayed in the hall as a historical, rather than religious symbol; none of the supposedly security-conscious politicians raised a concern about the sharp steel knives available in the legislature’s dining room; and “if the security service had banned the kirpan to apply ‘the principle of the neutrality of the state,’ it would have exceeded its authority,” judges MacPherson. He can only conclude that “the motion and the debate weren't really about neutrality, or even security. They were really about putting a pushy minority in its place.”

The National Post’s Graeme Hamilton concurs with MacPherson that “kirpan initiative was politics of the basest kind,” and offers some pretty startling evidence as to the attitudes towards minorities in Quebec. Citing a poll published in La Presse today that asked 800 Quebeckers what was to blame for the deterioration of the French language in the province, he writes that incredibly, respondents “judged the greatest threat to French to come not from English Canada, not from the United States but from ‘multiculturalism in Quebec.’ In other words, immigrants. Multiculturalism was judged a threat by 60% of respondents.”

The debate on multiculturalism has been tearing up the op-ed pages recently, with many columnists labeling the concept dangerous and dead in Canada. The extent to which the kirpan issue has become a pressing existential question about the way our society is governed is perhaps summed up in this sombre editorial in the Gazette condemning the passing of the kirpan ban, which won a unanimous vote from 113 MNAs: “It may be that a majority of their constituents approves, and in democracy majority rules, but that doesn't make it right,” says the Gazette. “Indulging intolerance, it would seem … is a Quebec value.”