POUR DIFFUSION IMMÉDIATE
Montréal, le 15 mars 2012

Un colloque international
pour les 80 ans de Charles Taylor
L'événement soulignera la carrière et les contributions exceptionnelles de l’éminent philosophe

Montréalais de naissance, diplômé et professeur émérite de l’Université McGill, éminent philosophe et intellectuel, Charles Taylor sera le sujet et l’invité d’honneur du colloque international Charles Taylor à 80 ans, une importante conférence qui se tiendra au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, du 29 au 31 mars 2012. Dans le cadre de cet événement, des intellectuels du monde entier analyseront ses travaux, ainsi que son apport à la vie publique canadienne.

« Charles Taylor a exercé une profonde influence sur des générations de spécialistes en sciences humaines et sociales au Canada et partout dans le monde, affirme Daniel Weinstock, de l’Université de Montréal. L’annonce de ce colloque a suscité un engouement extraordinaire. »

Dans le cadre de cet événement, certains des scientifiques et des théoriciens parmi les plus éminents au monde présenteront des exposés sur divers aspects des réalisations de Charles Taylor dans les domaines des sciences politiques et de la philosophie. Parmi eux : Craig Calhoun, prochain directeur de la London School of Economics; Tariq Modood (Université de Bristol), spécialiste des minorités ethniques et religieuses en Grande-Bretagne; Jean Bethke Elshtain (Université de Chicago), éthicienne politique très influente aux États-Unis; Anthony Appiah (Université Princeton), philosophe né à Londres qui a grandi au Ghana et étudié en Angleterre et aux États-Unis et dont les travaux sur le cosmopolitisme, l’ethnicité et l’identité lui ont récemment valu la Médaille nationale des sciences humaines du gouvernement américain; et Joseph Heath (Université de Toronto), éminent commentateur sur l’éthique et l’économie au Canada et ancien étudiant de Charles Taylor. Dans l’ensemble, 27 sommités de sept pays et de trois continents livreront une présentation sur la carrière de Charles Taylor. Soulignons par ailleurs que l’honorable Michel Bastarache, ancien juge à la Cour suprême du Canada, fera également partie des panélistes.

Le 30 mars, en soirée, une séance spéciale portera sur la carrière publique de Charles Taylor. « Depuis la création du NPD et les débats sur le rapatriement de la constitution, le fédéralisme et le statut du Québec jusqu’à ses travaux sur le multiculturalisme et les accommodements religieux, Charles Taylor a exercé une influence qui dépasse celle d’un simple "intellectuel engagé" , affirme le professeur Jacob Levy, de l’Université McGill. Pendant plusieurs décennies, il a joué un rôle de premier plan dans la vie publique montréalaise, québécoise et canadienne, et sa vision personnelle de la communauté politique, ainsi que son sentiment d’appartenance à cette dernière, ont donné vie aux débats politiques. »

Au cours des dernières années, ce sont surtout les travaux de Charles Taylor sur la question religieuse qui ont retenu l’attention. Ainsi, en 2008-2009, il a coprésidé, avec Gérard Bouchard, la Commission Bouchard-Taylor sur les accommodements raisonnables envers les minorités religieuses. Il a également reçu, en 2007, le prestigieux Prix Templeton pour le progrès et la découverte dans la recherche sur les réalités spirituelles, et a publié, la même année, un essai colossal intitulé L’âge séculier.

Au cours de sa carrière qui s’est échelonnée sur plus d’un demi-siècle, Charles Taylor a publié une quinzaine d’ouvrages sur des sujets aussi variés que Hegel, la méthodologie des sciences sociales et le multiculturalisme. Il a été titulaire de la Chaire Chichele à l’Université d’Oxford (il succédait alors à son professeur Isaiah Berlin et a par la suite été remplacé par un autre Montréalais d’origine, G. A. Cohen). Il a été invité à présenter les résultats de ses recherches dans le cadre des prestigieuses Conférences Massey. Enfin, il a reçu le Prix Kyoto, a été fait Compagnon de l’Ordre du Canada, été nommé Grand Officier de l’Ordre national du Québec et membre de la Société royale du Canada. Actif sur la scène politique canadienne depuis près de 50 ans, Charles Taylor a été candidat du NPD à quatre reprises au cours des années 1960 et a été défait par Pierre Elliot Trudeau lors de la première campagne électorale de ce dernier.


*Les discussions se tiendront en français et en anglais.

Renseignements :
http://www.mcgill.ca/rgcs/gripp/events/taylor ou http://creum.umontreal.ca/spip.php?article1280

L’inscription est gratuite et obligatoire. Pour vous inscrire, prière d’envoyer un courriel avec votre nom et affiliation à l’adresse suivante : taylor.conference.2012@gmail.com.

À propos du colloque :
Le colloque est organisé conjointement par Daniel Weinstock, titulaire de la Chaire de recherche du Canada en éthique et philosophie politique de l’Université de Montréal; Jocelyn Maclure, professeur agrégé de philosophie à l’Université Laval; et Jacob T. Levy, titulaire de la Chaire de théorie politique Tomlinson de l’Université McGill. L’événement est une initiative conjointe du Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal, du Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal et du Groupe d’études constitutionnelles de l’Université McGill.



Personnes-ressources :
Cynthia Lee
cynthia.lee@mcgill.ca
Relations avec les médias
Université McGill
514 398-6754
http://francais.mcgill.ca/newsroom/
http://twitter.com/#!/McGilluMedia


William Raillant-Clark
w.raillant-clark@umontreal.ca
Attaché de presse international
Université de Montréal
514 343-7593
Cell. : 514 566-3813

Charles Taylor at 80: An international conference

Event celebrates prominent philosopher’s career and contributions

Taylor on Habermas

At "The Immanent Frame," an essay written on the occasion of Habermas' eightieth birthday.

Audio of conference on Bouchard-Taylor report

The GRIPP conference on the Bouchard-Taylor report blogged about here can now be listened to online here.

Tomorrow at McGill: "Two Cultures," with Canada's Kyoto Prize Winners

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of SNow's "Two Cultures," McGill will host a discussion on "Two Cultures: Humanities and the Sciences," with Canada's first two winners of the Kyoto Prize, Charles Taylor (McGill) and Anthony Pawson (University of Toronto).

On May 5, 2009, McGill University will host an event honouring the first two Canadian recipients of the Inamori Foundation’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, often described as Japan's equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

This occasion will feature a public conversation between the 2008 Laureates, Dr. Charles Taylor (Dept of Philosophy, McGill) and Dr. Anthony Pawson (University of Toronto and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital) on the subject of Two Cultures: Humanities and the Sciences.

The theme is drawn from a 1959 lecture by physicist and novelist C.P. Snow, who argued that a growing communication gap between scientists and other intellectuals was getting in the way of solving world problems. The landmark Two Cultures lecture, and subsequent book, sparked widespread debate.

Fifty years later, many scientific and other academic fields have become ever more specialized and arcane. Yet, many educators are striving to bridge the gaps among disciplines. And the Internet revolution is making knowledge more broadly accessible than ever. So where do we stand? Has the rift between the two cultures widened even further? Or is it finally beginning to narrow?

Dr. Taylor, the Kyoto Prize winner in Arts and Philosophy, and Dr. Pawson, the winner in Basic Sciences, will discuss the Two Cultures for about 40 minutes. They will then take questions from an audience of around 300 people. Prof. Antonia Maioni, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, will moderate the forum.

The Kyoto Prize, founded in 1985, is awarded annually to people who have made significant contributions in the three categories of Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy. Through this Prize, the Inamori Foundation seeks not only to recognize outstanding achievements but also to promote academic and cultural development and to contribute to mutual international understanding.

When: Tuesday, May 5, 2009, from 4-6 p.m.

Where: Moyse Hall, Arts Building
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal

A reception will follow.

Taylor wins Kyoto Prize

Political theorist, McGill emeritus professor, and winner of last year's Templeton Prize, and lately co-chair of the Quebec commission on reasonable accommodation has won this year's Kyoto Prize.

The prize, which is often referred to as the "Japanese Nobel", consists of a gold medal and 50 million yen ($470,765) in cash.

"I'm very, very honoured and I still haven't quite gotten over it," Taylor said.

"I feel there must have been some mistake, but I'm honoured to think that I place on a par with those other people that have won this award," including German thinker Jürgen Habermas.

The award citation follows.

Construction of a social philosophy to pursue the coexistence of diverse cultures

Dr. Charles Taylor is an outstanding philosopher who advocates "communitarianism" and "multiculturalism" from the perspective of "holistic individualism." He has constructed and endeavored to put into practice a social philosophy that allows human beings with different historical, traditional, and cultural backgrounds to retain their multiple identities and to live in happiness with each other.

He has criticized the atomistic view of the self, the conception of the human being grounded in the human sciences of naturalistic tendency such as methodological individualism and behaviorism, and tried to establish a "philosophical anthropology" on a foundation of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and language-game theory. In his view, human beings are "self-interpreting animals" that act with a sense of value and purpose: human beings articulate everyday feelings and moral intuitions in language and act according to their own evaluation of goals and values. He criticizes modern utilitarianism for leaving value judgments to the feelings and preferences of the atomistic selves and argues against it that human beings are the "situated selves" that are embedded in the fabric of social relations. In other words, it is through webs of interlocution that human beings develop identities and acquire frameworks within which they determine for themselves what is good, what is valuable, what they should do, and what they are for or against.

Having made extensive studies of the philosophy of Hegel, which are widely regarded as the best contemporary work on the philosopher written in English, Dr. Taylor delved back into the thought of Rousseau and Herder. He then adopted Gadamer's notions "fusion of horizons" and "history of effects" to situate his own thought in a historical context and has built a convincing social theory. Drawing on the concept of "recognition," which is a key to his philosophy, he contrasts the "dialogical self" with the "monological self" and offers "freedom in situation" in place of "absolute freedom." Human beings can flourish only if their identities are recognized by others and, accordingly, he stresses the importance of bonds with community and sense of community as a necessary condition for the realization of liberalism emphasizing individual autonomy.

The concept of recognition is at the base of Dr. Taylor's multiculturalism as well. Identity-formation in modern society is sometimes rooted in a distorted recognition, and this often results in self-repression and in a subsequent struggle aimed at a revision of "self-representations" projected upon by others. Dr. Taylor argues that "it's reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect, even if it goes along with much that we have to abhor and reject." In putting forth this principle, he has provided rational grounds for the dignity of human beings living a deep diversity and for their demands for recognition.

In his native Canada, Dr. Taylor is also involved in political activities campaigning for the recognition of collective rights of minority groups to preserve their cultural identities. He has been seeking a way to overcome Eurocentrism and to reach for genuinely global values, paying due attention to the specific conditions of non-Western societies. He has invariably aspired to a society resting on mutual recognition, where each member strives by mutual efforts through dialogue for a better understanding and for changing the narrow frameworks of understanding with the realization that the space occupied by him/her as a self within the whole "story" of mankind is quite limited and he/she is in no possession of an absolute standard for judging the relative merits of various cultures. Dr. Taylor is a prominent thinker who has pointed the future course for us through his own life, envisioning the future in which diverse, heterogeneous cultures peacefully coexist upon mutual recognition.

A slap in the face: a tale of the Brezhnev Doctrine

While I don't agree with all of it, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission Report is a very thoughtful, judicious, impressive document-- extraordinarily so, given the circumstances of its creation.

And the ink wasn't yet dry on it when the Charest government made clear how thoughtfully it would treat the the report's analyses and recommendations. It rushed to the National Assembly and introduced a unanimously-approved quickie resolution affirming that the crucifix would not come down off the Assembly's walls.

Bouchard and Taylro spent months, at the request of the Charest government, trying to conceive and describe a balance among the various rights, responsibilities, and identity claims at stake in the accommodation debate and related disputes. Their proposals rested in part on an "open secularism," a secular state that was not as reflexively anti-clerical or Jacobin as post-Quiet Revolution Quebec has sometimes been. One of the most prominent obstacles to that is the very public symbol of a non-secular Quebec that is the crucifix on the QNA walls.

Charest defended the crucifix as embodying 350 years of Quebec history, though it does no such thing. It was erected in 1936 by Duplessis, who more than any other politician embodies the Francoist Catholic-corporatist regime of the bad old days when members of minority religions were actively persecuted in Quebec.

The immediate rejection of the crucifix's removal is an obvious attempt by the government to escape any political fallout from the commission it appointed in its rush to survive the ADQ's challenge before the last election. Insofar as the commission made recommendations that depart from already-existing majority sentiment, it will be ignored. This was always likely, of course, but it did not need to be expressed in quite so obnoxious a manner. Bouchard and Taylor (and the taxpayers, and the hundreds of people who took part in the process) could be forgiven for wondering today why they wasted their time. Surely one of the things that we've learned in thinking about religious accommodation is that symbols matter, and the symbolic import of yesterday's action coulnd't have been clearer. Charest slapped Bouchard and Taylor in the face in exchange for their months of service.

But the graver slap to the face is to religious minorities. What they have learned is that questions of religion and politics remain ripe for demagoguery in Quebec. Any possible steps taken as a result of the report that will protect their religiou freedom will be slow, painstaking, reluctant, and potentially voted down in the QNA by the two opposition parties. Kirpans, turbans, hijabs, and kosher and halal food all apparently raise difficult questions that require careful government consideration even after the commission has done its work. The crucifix requires no such careful consideration. In short, religious minorities who might have been hoping for the unlikely outcome that the commission's report would be taken seriously now know better. The message from the Charest government to them is a variant on the old Brezhnev Doctrine: What's ours is ours, what's yours is negotiable.

CTV appearance

My CTV appearance last night is online.

I was a little bit longwinded; I was also a little bit angry, because on my way to the studio I heard the news that the Charest government had rushed through a unanimous resolution insisting that the crucifix would remain on the National Assembly walls. I never expected it to come down, but I though the government would have the decency to ignore unpopular or difficult recommendations rather than deliberately hanging the commissioners out to dry. I'll have more to say on that in the next couple days.

Commission report reactions

I'll be answering reader questions about reasonable accommodation tomorrow starting at 3 pm at globeandmail.com . Questions can be sent in advance or during the session.

I'll be on CBC Newsworld tomorrow afternoon, apparently. I'll be taping an interview not long after the 12:30 press conference that unveils the report; not sure when it will air.

Update: I'll also be on CTV tonight, probably between 7 and 8 pm.

Update: The globeandmail.com link above (now fixed) remains good even though question time is now closed; the questions and answers are all there (and my typing fingers are tired!)

Bouchard-Taylor Commission: The Climax Approaches

The press has gotten ahold of a leaked (French) copy of the commission's report: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

From the summaries and reactions, it seems as though the report was filled with decency, moderation, and good sense (e.g. "enough about the hijab")... which means it's doomed to impotence. Better that than the alternative, but I feel for the commissioners; they're in for a brutal reception. As I've said several times, they were given an impossible combination of explicit and implicit missions.

I'll have more to say after I've read the report myself.

The official

Larmore on Taylor

Charles Larmore reviews A Secular Age in TNR. It's a severe review that highlights important philosophical differences between the two, a very critical review that leaves me more interested in reading the book, not less, though I'm sure I will think Larmore is right on most of the questions that divide the two Charleses. A thoughtful and thought-provoking essay in its own right (unsurprisingly); highly recommended.

We cannot live in a secular age without some view about what it means to have left behind an age of faith. The trouble is that these views generally take the form of "subtraction stories." They portray the modern world as having come into being by sloughing off the illusions of religion and letting the human condition finally appear for what it has been all along. Accounts of this sort, Taylor maintains, embody a fundamental mistake about modernity. They miss the fact that to see nature as operating by laws of its own, not by God's purposes, and to see society as bound together by human interests, not by sacred ritual, depends on a substantive set of values, cognitive and moral, that are by no means the universal property of mankind, but have come to be espoused in the West for historically contingent reasons. Our secular age did not arise by a process of subtraction, but through the creation of a whole new conception of man and world.

Secularization can mean three different things, all of them distinctive features of modern Western society. First, there is the separation between church and state, emerging in the seventeenth century after one hundred years of religious war in Europe and transferring the basis of political authority from divine will to notions of consent and individual rights. No longer sustained by public affirmation and enforcement, religion has turned into a private affair, and as a result it has lost its influence over more and more people. And so secularization also involves--this is its second sense, for Taylor--the all-too-familiar decline of religious belief in the West.

Yet these two developments could not have occurred, he claims, without a fundamental alteration in worldview. There had to emerge a conception of nature and society which Taylor dubs "the immanent frame." This is his third, and decisive, notion of secularism. The natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine, came to be so sharply marked off from one another that making sense of the world around us appeared possible in this-worldly terms alone. Only within such a framework could political community dispense with the aura of religious unity, and people find ways of giving meaning to their lives without looking beyond the human realm. Only on this basis could belief in God cease to be the immediate and uncontroversial certainty that it once was, the inescapable backdrop to every thought and endeavor, and become instead a possibility that on reflection people might either endorse or reject--"one option among others and frequently not the easiest to embrace."

How, according to Taylor, did this intellectual revolution take place? Obviously, the rise of modern science played a great role. But in order for scientific inquiry to take off in the form that we recognize today, nature had to be emptied of the spirits, portents, and cosmic purposes that once seemed a fact of everyday experience. It had to be conceived as fundamentally an impersonal order of matter and force, governed by causal laws. This conception of nature was itself the expression of a new attitude toward the world that Taylor calls "disengagement," the distancing outlook of "the buffered self." People learned to stand back from the forces of nature around them (as well as within them), and to regulate their actions so as no longer to feel at the mercy of hidden powers, and thus to turn the vast expanse of matter in motion before them into a domain for prediction and control. Nature ceased to be mind- like, full of the signs and wonders invoked in Shakespeare's plays, and became instead a neutral object of sober inquiry for the only minds there are, namely our own.

What inspired this shift was not, Taylor insists, a decision to dispel the mists of religion and look reality at last squarely in the face. It was instead a new ethic of self-possession and instrumental manipulation, which exalted "the independent, disengaged subject, reflexively controlling his own thought- processes, 'self-responsibly,' in Husserl's famous phrase." Contrary to one well-known but naive sort of subtraction story, modern science did not arise through the substitution of observation for fantasy. It involved the systematic combination of experiment and mathematics, designed (as Bacon and Kant said) to "put nature on the rack" and "constrain it to give answers to questions of reason's own devising." Epistemology, Taylor claims, is ultimately rooted in ethics. We form our beliefs in accordance with conceptions of method and evidence that tell us in effect how we should respect our dignity as thinking beings in dealing with a world where truth is elusive. And these ideals of intellectual virtue vary from one historical epoch to the next.

[...]

Taylor's other main line of apologetic argument is little better. It leans on his thesis that epistemology is ultimately rooted in ethics. People who claim that there is no warrant for religious belief, given what science now tells us about the world, fail to see that modern science has been driven by certain intellectual values--in particular, by the values of rational control and individual conscience--which arose historically, and within a Christian context. From the standpoint of faith, therefore, these values can still take on the spiritual hue that they once possessed. And being historically contingent, they have more the character of a "new construction" than a "simple discovery." Consequently, they are open to revision. Constructed, Taylor cautions, is not supposed to mean merely invented. "To say that these [values] are 'constructions' is not to say that the issues here are unarbitrable by reason." And yet "their arbitration is much more complicated, like that between Kuhnian paradigms, and also involves issues of hermeneutical adequacy."

Readers familiar with the lay of the land in contemporary philosophy will know that bringing in the fuzzy business of "paradigm shifts" and "hermeneutics" is a sure way to guarantee that the issues will not be settled. Some straightforward reflection shows that, at least in the case of the disenchantment of nature, the underlying values are more than simply "constructed." Imagine that, having drained the natural world of all magical powers and secret sympathies and reconceived it as an impersonal order of causal laws, physics had remained what it had largely been like in antiquity and the middle ages--a mere succession of different theories, each one a fresh speculation. That, of course, is precisely what did not happen. Modern science became a cumulative and publicly verifiable enterprise. New theories deepened the understanding of nature already achieved by their predecessors, which is as much as to say that science at last got on the track of the truth.

Now consider Taylor's thesis that this process has been driven by an ethic of rational manipulation and self-discipline, which was a modern innovation. This thesis is true, and he is right to insist on its importance. But the proper conclusion to draw is this: if this ethic is a "construction," it is a "discovery" as well. Developing it has been tantamount to learning what is the most fruitful attitude toward nature, at least if our aim is to know how it works. There is no room in this case for playing off "construction" against "discovery," as Taylor tendentiously tries to do. Discoveries are no less real for being historically contingent.[...]

There is the more worrisome matter of Taylor's general attitude toward life.

Taylor appears to think that living at cross-purposes with ourselves is intolerable, a human failure. In his view, we need to give our dilemmas a "spin, " and "leap" to conclusions about how they are to be handled. But why? Is not being drawn in contrary directions an abiding feature of the human condition? Would we not do better to get used to the fact that our lives are always fraught with essential contradictions and ambiguities? Why should we prefer Taylor's quick fixes to the great enterprise of learning to live with ourselves and our circumstances? Our secular age is certainly of two minds, divided as it is between an ethic of rational control and human well-being and a longing for some deeper structure of meaning beyond. Yet on Taylor's own account, the age of faith was unstable, too--a post-Axial compromise between Christ's teachings and pre-Christian survivals that spawned throughout the medieval period one reform effort after another. We have never been, and we will never be, at one with ourselves.

Fundamental conflicts may go unacknowledged, of course. And once we perceive them, we can no doubt find philosophers--spin doctors, really--who will teach us how to make them vanish by a misleading use of words (such as glib oppositions between "open" and "closed," "construction" and "discovery"). But problems, when they are genuine, cannot be talked away. They disappear only when they are actually solved, by our finding better ways, backed up by reasons, of making sense of the world. And even then, the result is bound to bring some new source of inner conflict in its wake. This is not secular. It is human.

Good for them.

As the hearings conclude,
the professors give a platform to the Muslim group that was absurdly attacked last year because a private commercial establishment wanted their business enough to serve them beans without pork.

Back in March, they were castigated in the populist media for insisting on praying at a Quebec maple-sugar shack and eating pork-free baked beans.

Yesterday, the same Muslims who organized that cultural field trip appeared before the Bouchard-Taylor commission and were gently asked to set the record straight.

Did they demand a change in the traditional menu of pork and beans, and did they force a small party in the next room to can its loud music so they could pray in peace? No, there were no unreasonable demands, just a mutual arrangement with the owner, said Akram Benalia, spokesperson for Astrolabe, the Muslim community association that organized the March 11 trip to the Érablière au Sous Bois, in Mont St. Grégoire.

"It was a commercial agreement that had nothing to do with reasonable accommodations," Benalia said.

"But it shows how people can use this kind of situation to denigrate Muslims and amplify Islamophobia, and that's what really sickened us." The owner of the sugar shack had agreed to make baked beans without pork for the 260 Muslims in the group, in order to meet their dietary restrictions, he said. And it was the owner who asked the party next door to turn off its music for a few minutes while some of the Muslims prayed.

The way it came out in the media, however, the Muslims were portrayed as unwilling to adapt to traditional Quebec customs, "imposing" their values on a Quebec archtype, the end-of-winter outing when families and friends go "sugaring off" in the woods.

Co-chairmen Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard sympathized with the group.

"It leaves us speechless - this was a myth which was invented and propagated and which caused a lot of harm," Taylor told the delegation, which included two women wearing hijabs.

"You realize, your generation has the thankless role to play these days," Bouchard told them. "There are some Quebecers who are learning the hard way about diversity - at your expense. And your role is to help us, all of us, to overcome the stereotypes and misunderstandings we have." "We'll do it for Quebec, for our Quebec, so that we can all live in harmony, and that our children can, too - it'll be our pleasure," Benalia replied.

See my messy office...

tonight on the 6 pm Global TV evening newscast, where ten minutes of highly intellectual discussion about the reasonable accommodation in Quebec will undoubtedly be cut to three words spoken at the moment when I was making a funny face.

Update: A sentence fragment, but not too funny a face. It's here, click on screen on the left that says "accommodation," and go to about 03:30.

Taylor-Bouchard Commission quote of the day

From CBC:

André Bissonnette described himself as a "frustrated Quebecer" who said he's tired of watching immigrants impose their religion on Quebecers.

"I'm not a practicing Catholic, so why would I yield to the religion of others? They can go worship in their churches, I have nothing against that, but don't make us follow you."

People keep saying things like this. I cannot begin to understand what they think they mean. The results of the polls on accommodation show that anti-minority-religion sentiment isn't just a matter of misunderstanding; it's not that all will be well if it's made clear that no one's proposing to make Islam the official religion of Quebec. But there does seem to be some portion of the populace who's convinced that that's exactly what's on the agenda.

Taylor-blogging that doesn't involve the commission

hat-tip Henry: SSRC has created a new scholar-blog: "The immanent frame: secularism, religion, and the public sphere," and it currently features Professor Taylor among others blogging about A Secular Age.

On the one hand...

the Taylor-Bouchard commission hearings have been a train wreck-- a juicy opportunity for the most bigoted elements in Quebec society to get a live televised audience for their views. And the sense that they've been a train wreck is only compounded when Professors Bouchard and Taylor step out of information-gathering mode and into exasperated argument with the citizens they're supposed to be listening to.

On the other hand... they're right, and for that matter they're right to be exasperated, and it's cheering to have them express it.

Bouchard was talking to local retiree Henri Pepin, who had come to tell the commissioners publicly what he and many other Quebecers: that rising numbers of Muslims and other immigrants are swamping Quebec.

"In 100 years, I don't think there will be many Quebecois left," Pépin said.

"That, sir, is just a fairy tale," Bouchard retorted. "You're raising these fears for nothing."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you say we're raising these fears for nothing," Pepin replied "But just wait until what's happening in France happens here."

Bouchard had heard enough, and spelled out how Quebec can avoid the strife that France - an officially secular state - has gone through with its millions of Muslim immigrants from the former colonies in the Maghreb.

In Quebec, "we have a duty to make sure that all immigrants become as integrated as possible in our society, that they share our fundamental values," Bouchard said.

"And the way to do that, sometimes, is to perhaps grant them an accommodation, to make their life easier, so that they stay in our milieu, in our 'bouillon de culture', that they submit to the lifestyle that is our own, and that they can more easily assimilate our fundamental values."

Assimilate - it was the first time either co-chairman had mentioned the term as something they wish for immigrants and minorities. "If you give them the means to go into the margins, they'll never have the opportunity to assimilate our fundamental values," Bouchard continued.

"It's a fact that you should keep in mind," he told Pepin, one of 11 people to address the commission today. "It's more complicated than you say."

Bouchard also chastised another speaker, a young engineer named Luc Lafreniere, who said Quebec should force new immigrants - especially those with special religious demands like devout Muslims - to settle in the regions rather than allow them to "take possession" of some Montreal neighbourhoods.

"That's a way to target Muslims," Bouchard replied. "All the time - it's Muslims, Muslims, Muslims."

To another speaker, a man who described himself as a "psycho-educator" and talked disdainfully of "multiculturalism a la Canadian" (pronounced in English), Taylor was dismissive.

"I don't think you've ever read the original texts of Canadian multiculturalism policy," he told Jacques Lamothe. "Never was it written that people who come here can apply their customs without making any changes to them."

Near the start of today's hearing, Bouchard made what he called "a kind of declaration" : He and Taylor has spent all last night in a private focus group with local residents - something they've been doing quietly in every city on their tour.

The focus groups are a "third way" - after the open-mike nights and daytime presentation of briefs - for the commissioners to hear how the "silent majority," people who don't attend hearings, really feel abut the issues, spokesman Sylvain Leclerc later explained.

But last night's meeting - with about 20 immigrants and refugees, mostly Colombians and others Latinos - impressed Taylor and Bouchard no end. It was a welcome antidote to two days of hearings dominated by the question of Herouxville, the Mauricie village whose controversial "code of life" aimed at religious immigrants grabbed headlines.

The people in the focus group sent the commissioners a different message entirely.

"We were extremely impressed by this spectacle of people who left everything behind, who arrived here completely destitute with the families and children, who didn't even speak French, who couldn't find work in their profession, who experienced xenophobia first-hand, and who showed extraordinary courage in rebuilding their lives," Bouchard said.

"In sum, theirs is a reality all Quebecers should know about, but which unfortunately is quite misunderstood."

If that reality was better known, "it would put an end to a lot of stereotypes," he added.

"It's a great misery that that reality is not better known."

Taylor agreed. The focus group, he said, "opened our eyes to aspects of life here that are being ignored by the population at large."

And, as if stabbing right at the heart of Herouxville, the commissioners concluded with an observation: that the immigrants they met didn't succeed here in a vacuum - they were helped by many local families and volunteers, every step of the way.

"It's true," Bouchard said, "there's a lot of compassion in Quebec - very true."

Vox pop

From The Gazette:

Hearings a Pandora's box of bigotry, groups say
Jeff Heinrich, The Gazette

Before they had even begun, Charles Taylor and Gerard Bouchard worried that the cross-Quebec series of open-mike hearings they were about to embark on would become a Pandora's box of bigotry, to be pried open live and unfiltered on national TV.

Now - six weeks after the 17-city "reasonable accommodation" road show got under way and derogatory remarks against Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other religious minorities started flying - it seems that Quebecers think the chairmen were right to worry.

In a new poll, 62 per cent - rising to 74 per cent in central Quebec, scene of the Herouxville controversy - said the commission should have done something from the outset to prevent racist and anti-Semitic statements from being expressed.

And 40 per cent of non-francophones polled said those views are so objectionable that the hearings should no longer be carried live on Radio-Canada.

The concern echoes that of Quebec's Jewish community leaders, who told a national Jewish newspaper last week they fear the commission has become a forum for intolerance.

"A soapbox for venting racism and a beat-the-immigrant festival" - that's how Steven Slimovitch, national legal counsel for B'nai Brith Canada, described the proceedings to the Canadian Jewish News.

The proof was nowhere more evident than Sept. 24 in St. Jerome, north of Montreal, when speaker after speaker took the open mike to vent their frustration with Jews: their money, their kosher labels on foods, their cottages in the Laurentians.

The vitriol was "very painful," Rabbi Reuben Poupko of Congregation Beth Israel Beth Aaron told the Canadian Jewish News. The hearings, he said, had become "a magnet for some of the most extreme and dangerous voices in Quebec."

Bouchard and Taylor - who only once have cut a speaker off for making xenophobic remarks, and often engage in open debate with people who say they don't like Muslims or other "fanatics" - should intervene more when comments "go beyond the pale," Poupko said.

Do other Quebecers agree? Not quite.

The Leger Marketing poll, carried out for the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, suggests that Quebecers are split on how well the chairmen are handling the proceedings.

Fifty-four per cent said Taylor and Bouchard have moderated the forums "in an efficient way" - an approval rating that, paradoxically, rises to 57 per cent for non-francophones. Only 16 per cent thought they were doing an excellent job.

Overall, 69 per cent said the hearings are worthwhile despite the racism and anti-Semitism that has shown through. Only one-third of Quebecers think the hearings are "a mistake."

Two-thirds of Quebecers think the hearings are a good way to "send an important message about the limits" of accommodations of immigrants and religious minorities - not the freedom they provide.

A large majority - 71 per cent - also say the hearings show how much Quebecers "value cultural diversity" - just not religious diversity.

Sixty per cent feel the hearings "will generate an important critique of the place of immigrants in Quebec" and will "help to better define what Quebec's identity is."

However, many people think the commission is blind to some of the province's oldest and long-established minorities: anglophones and aboriginals.

Two-thirds said they want to hear more anglos and First Nations people come forth and address the commission - and an even higher proportion of non-anglophones agreed.

Overall, 70 per cent said the hearings are a "healthy" way for opinions to be aired in public, although only half think those opinions reflect what most Quebecers believe.

"Clearly, most Quebecers hold a positive view of the hearings," said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies.

"The commission has not lost credibility. People are concerned about the anti-Semitism and racist remarks, but they feel the deliberations are sufficiently important that we should look beyond them."

One-way

I haven't had time to blog about the extraordinarily depressing results of the La Presse poll on the accommodation of religious minorities (linked story and poll results are both in French). Still don't, but I will at some point. It's not good. Every accommodation of or basic freedom for a non-Christian religion-- prayer spaces, individuals wearing hijabs or turbans or kirpans in public schools or public employment, cafeterias serving kosher or halaal food-- is opposed by a Quebecois majority, and typically by 65-90%. Meanwhile, 68% want to leave the Catholic crucifix in the National Assembly (NB to non-locals: Quebec's provincial parliament).

Reasonable accommodation hearings fact of the day

From the Gazette:

"When I face a Catholic priest or a Muslim mullah, I have the same fear as a gay man," he said in English - the first time anyone has addressed the commission in English. (Ten per cent of Gaspe residents have English as a mother tongue.)

I know that the hearings haven't reached Montreal yet, but I was still surprised by that. It's politic of anglophones to tread lightly in these debates about Quebec identity, but still.

Relatedly, it was pointed out to me yesterday that (mid-grant-application) I'd missed a big story last week: PQ leader Pauline Marois has declared that the solution to the difficulties exposed by the reasonable accommodation debate is... sovereignty!

Marois says the closely watched Bouchard-Taylor commission hearings on reasonable accomodation show that Quebecers are asking questions about their own identity and history.

"Quebecers need to make peace with themselves and get past the uncertainty surrounding their identity by creating their own country," Marois said.

Yes, I know what happens when your only policy is a hammer, but, c'mon. If you're in that position and you're confronted with a glass object that needs repair, you could at least maintain a decent silence instead of volunteering to give it a good whack. I'm sure it's a very nice hammer, and maybe it's the most important tool in the toolbox, but the world's a complex place and some things really aren't nails.

If Quebec were either thoroughly laique or thoroughly Catholic, then sovereignty would just expose religious minorities to a hostile, homogenous local majority. Sovereignty would solve the problem in the same way that it would solve the problem of the First Nations; the minority would have no chance, and the majority wouldn't have to be bothered listening anymore. Since Quebec continues to have a real identity divide-- laique/ Catholic, urban/ rural, etc., just like any healthy democratic society-- it might not turn out quite that way. Then again it might; after all, the great discovery of the past year is that the Catholic and laique voers can find common ground in excluding Muslims and Orthodox Jews. A sovereign Quebec would be dancing a delicate dance with its anglophone minority; a good round of bashing smaller and weaker minorities might be just the safe identity-building tonic that the nationalist doctor ordered.

Note that this doesn't mean sovereignty mightn't be justified all things considered (though I don't happen to think so). But we know enough about post-secession nation-building and the behavior of newly-more-ethnically-homogenous states to know that the majority's sudden mastery in its own house doesn't make it confident and therefore tolerant toward minorities. Quite the contrary. Now, to be fair, Marois didn't say that it would do so; she offered no guarantees about how the Quebecois identity struggle would be resolved. But either she's openly embracing the "there will be no problem, because there are more of us than of you" exclusionary path, or (more likely) she's wrongly (maybe sincerely, but still wrongly) suggesting that a sovereign people could get over its identity crisis and stop being so threatened by minorities. That's not how these things work...

Great moments in multiculturalism, continued

Women's group targets hijab, yarmulke

If the Quebec Council on the Status of Women has its way, teachers, doctors and anyone working in a public institution in this province would not be permitted to wear hijabs or yarmulkes.

The council is calling on the Quebec government to ban what it calls visible religious symbols.

While a crucifix or a Star of David on a necklace would be acceptable, council president Christiane Pelchat said, public employees should not be permitted to wear such overt symbols as the hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women, or the yarmulke, a skullcap worn by Jewish men.

The council plans to argue for a ban on religious symbols before Quebec's roving commission on "reasonable accommodation" of immigrants and religious minorities.

The commission's hearings are to wrap up Nov. 30.

That would mean female Muslim teachers would not be allowed to wear a hijab in public schools, Pelchat said this week during a meeting with The Gazette's editorial board.

"Teachers are role models and they should be promoting equality between men and women," Pelchat said. "Because you prevent someone from wearing a hijab, it doesn't mean you are preventing them from believing."

Pelchat, a former Liberal MNA, said the council believes "a secular state promotes freedom of religion for all believers of various denominations."

The council also stated it believes the right to equality between men and women trumps the rights to freedom of religion.
[...]

The Quebec Council on the Status of Women is a 20-member body that advises the government on issues relating to women.