Chris Selley: Latest outrages over Muslims give a preview of Quebec’s next referendum

Canada needn’t fear a third Quebec referendum — or at least, not for the reasons we feared the first two. Leger’s latest poll, in August, found just 35 per cent support among decided separatists and separatism-leaning voters, and 54 per cent against. But Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon promises to hold that third referendum should he become premier. At the moment, he’s comfortably ahead of Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec in the polls.

We’re currently getting a preview, I suspect, of what that referendum campaign would look like. It’s ugly.

Anglophone media have reported on the suspension of 11 teachers from Bedford elementary school, in the very multicultural and immigrant-rich Montreal neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges. This came after the Ministry of Education found a “toxic environment” at the francophone school.

But anglo media either soft-pedalled or (in CBC’s case, amazingly) completely ignored what has made the story so politically relevant: The allegedly “toxic” teachers were apparently Arab Muslims.

According to a 90-page report from the ministry’s investigations department, witnesses reported “a strong influence on the community environment” exercised by teachers who “reportedly frequent a community centre and a mosque located in the neighbourhood.” It said that members of the mosque sometimes intervened on occasion to ensure the school’s education model was in line with their preferred “cultural model.”

“Members of the (community) centre created a Facebook page … on which they denigrated the teaching at Bedford School,” the report found. Community centre members also once “allegedly burst into the school, yelling at the teacher and then heading to the office,” where staff “had to call 911.”

The investigation mentions in particular stories that “many teachers at Bedford School … speak Arabic among themselves.” (This affair activates Quebec nationalists’ concerns about Islam and languages other than French in almost equal measure.)

“According to the witnesses, it is difficult to integrate into the (Arabic-speaking) group, particularly because it is impossible to understand conversations between some members of staff,” the report found.

The report accuses teachers in the school’s “dominant clan” of serial dishonesty. “Protecting their honour is a priority and is done to the detriment of honesty,” it finds. “Investigators were able to observe on several occasions that some teachers use lies to get out of embarrassing situations, even in situations where the lie is blatant.”

Witnesses spoke in particular of “lies” deployed “during interventions on the language spoken in the school. Teachers deny having spoken Arabic or Kabyle (a Berber-Algerian language) when they are caught in the act.”

From the students’ perspective, features of this toxic environment allegedly include severe neglect of special-needs pupils, what you might call old-school teaching methods (belittling and yelling at kids, slamming rulers on desks, etc.) and just a crummy overall experience, at best.

This all backs up reams of reporting by Montreal radio station 98.5 FM, which broke the story back in 2022. Why it took so long for everyone from the school board to the minister to respond is one of the key questions in play. Whatever was happening at that school — and other schools are now implicated in similar fashion — the “toxic environment” allegations have been more than borne out.

Many Quebec nationalists see a far bigger issue here than a few Montreal schools, however.

“We see here the effects of the mass immigration that we have been experiencing for at least 30 years,” highly influential commentator Mathieu Bock-Côté wrote in Le Journal de Montréal. “We should have realized this in (the separation referendum of) 1995, when the monolithic vote of immigrant communities aligned with the English-speaking community led to the defeat of the Yes camp by a few thousand votes.”

“We need to talk about the Islamization of Quebec,” Bock-Côté concluded, before moving on to a much less serious issue — but one that’s perhaps even more disturbing.

He applauded St-Pierre Plamondon for speaking out this week against an advertisement from a Montreal public library for a story-time event for children aged three to six. The offence: The photo in the ad featured a little girl wearing a hijab.

St-Pierre Plamondon had asked: “Do you really think that this girl is making a free and informed choice, with full knowledge of the facts, to be subjected to a religious symbol?”

One might ask him the same about all manner of other religious rites parents impose upon their children, and one might even get a consistent answer. Quebec feminist icon Louise Mailloux once equated baptism and circumcision with rape. When Mailloux ran for the PQ in 2014, then leader Pauline Marois said she “respect(ed) the fact that she has that point of view.”

St-Pierre Plamondon complained, too, about a sign welcoming people to Montreal’s City Hall that features a woman wearing the hijab. “Clearly the issue of religious invasion of public space does not stop at Bedford School,” he wrote.

So, yet again, the goalposts have shifted. The old deal was if you speak French and integrate into society, you’re welcome to practice any religion you like. The more recent deal, under 2019’s Bill 21, is that if you want to wield state power for a living — as a police officer, Crown prosecutor, prison guard or teacher — then you also have to remove any religious symbols while you’re on the job.

Now the mere presence of a hijab on a little girl in a library, or anywhere in public, is problematic in Quebec.

Those who’ve always believed Bill 21 wasn’t punitive enough, including St-Pierre Plamondon, have concluded that Bill 21 must be toughened in response to the scandal at the Bedford elementary school. And it all could have been avoided if the school board had just done its bloody job.

Expect a third referendum to boil down to this: linguistic and religious freedom versus restrictions thereof. That can’t not be ugly — and it won’t work for the Yes side. The referendum would fail, and Canada would still include an even-more-divided Quebec that’s even more out of step with the rest of Canada’s concepts of linguistic and religious freedom.

National Post [email protected]

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.