[LINK] "The kirpan and Canada’s French-English divide"

[rfmcdonald]

John Ibbitson's note in the Globe and Mail is about as good a summation of the differences between English and French Canada re: multiculturalism as I can think of. In the aftermath of some Sikh men's ejection from Québec's National Assembly for wearing their kirpans--ceremonial daggers--clear thinking's important.

“Religious freedom exists but there are other values,” said Louise Beaudoin, the PQ’s designated critic for secularism. “For instance, multiculturalism is not a Quebec value. It may be a Canadian one but it is not a Quebec one.”

That there exists such a position as secularism critic boggles an English-Canadian mind. But it’s true that the two cultures often have a difficult time understanding each other.

Try spending a day at Harbord Collegiate. For almost 120 years, Harbord has graduated the brightest and best of each generation of Toronto students. Today, its halls teem with infectiously happy and ferociously bright teenagers of Chinese, Filipino, South Asian, Latino and African background. Half the student body belongs to a visible minority, except they aren’t the minority any more, at least not at Harbord.

Toronto and the other large cities of English Canada don’t think too much about reasonable accommodation. The opposition parties have no critic for secularism. Partly that’s because Quebec is a nation – a community bound by language, history and culture – while the rest of Canada is something that could best be described as postnational, worried less about protecting and more about encompassing.

Partly that’s because English and French Canadians sometimes employ different approaches when considering social challenges. As Robert and Isabelle Tombs observed in That Sweet Enemy, their fine history of Anglo-French rivalry, the French are inclined to look at the big picture. Here is a problem; what does it say about the system in which it is embedded? What changes should we make to the system to eliminate the problem? The English tradition favours ad hoc fixes, while avoiding grand designs. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses; each can seem perverse to the other side.

That two such disparate world views can live in the same political space remains a miracle. We should remember that on weeks like this, when everybody is yelling at everybody else.

Go, read.