December 3: Day of Action Against Bill 94

December 3, 2010 By Krista

In case you haven’t heard enough about Bill 94 from my two posts this week, I wanted to let you know that today, December 3, is a day of action against the bill.  Below are some suggested actions from the Non/No Bill 94 Coalition:

Speak up! Write, email, phone, fax Quebec Premier Jean Charest, along with Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities Yolande James, Minister of Justice Kathleen Weil, and Minister of Culture, Communications & the Status of Women Christine St-Pierre to voice your concern regarding the discriminatory Bill 94. CC us at nonbill94@gmail.com along with your Member of Parliament, Member of the Legislative Assembly, and Member of Provincial Parliament. You can also send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff, M.P., Liberal Leader. Find their contact information here.

Host email hubs where friends, co-worker, communities and individuals can send messages opposing Bill 94 via our Emailer. Find No/Non Bill 94 Emailer here. The emailer will send a message directly to Quebec Premier Jean Charest, along with Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities Yolande James, Minister of Justice Kathleen Weil, and Minister of Culture, Communications and the Status of Women Christine St-Pierre to voice your concern regarding the discriminatory Bill 94. Find talking points and contacts here.

Circulate this call to action widely to your networks, friends, allies, co-workers. Have conversations with them about your concerns about Bill 94 and refer them to articles on the proposed legislation. Find resources here.

Organize a rally in your community or attend ours in Toronto on December 3rd to oppose and spread awareness about Bill 94.

Change your Facebook/Twitter/Tumbler display picture to a No/Non Bill 94 image/poster. Find image/poster here. You can also change your status to link the Emailer. Find the Emailer link here.

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Revealing Democracy: A Conference on Bill 94 (Part II)

December 2, 2010 By Krista

(See Part 1 here.)

I didn’t make it to the Friday panels because of schoolwork, but I was able to catch the talks on Saturday (November 20).  The first panel was called “The Theoretical and Analytical Challenges of Identity Politics,” with speakers Monique Deveaux, Cécile Laborde, and Beverley Baines; the second panel was entitled “’Managing’ Religious and Ethnocultural Diversity: Looking Beyond Existing Models,” and included Sirma Bilge, Sedef Arat-Koç, and François Rocher.  Because many of the topics overlapped, I’ll look at the main themes that arose, rather than at each speech individually.

One issue that came up on the first panel was the difference between formal equality (everyone being treated in exactly the same way) and substantive equality (a more equity-focused concept, in which it is recognized that identical treatment doesn’t necessarily have egalitarian results.)  The argument here is that, while Bill 94 claims to treat everyone equally by requiring all people to show their faces, the result will have disproportionately negative effects on women for whom showing their faces in certain situations is just not an option; Bill 94, in other words, represents formal equality but will result in substantive inequality.

Deveaux and Baines both referred to an article that Baines wrote about Bill 94 (available here), where she discusses the possibilities for constitutional challenges if Bill 94 passes (which everyone seems to expect will happen), and argues that while there’s an obvious way to challenge the bill based on issues of religious freedom, it may also be possible to challenge it based on principles of sexual equality, since the Canadian Supreme Court has a history of prioritizing substantive equality over formal equality.  At the same time, Baines cautioned that the Supreme Court has a much less impressive history of being able to consider intersecting forms of oppression, and that it’s hard to say where a challenge to the bill would go.

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Revealing Democracy: A Conference on Bill 94 (Part I)

December 1, 2010 By Krista

Quebec’s Bill 94, which would deny access to public services to women who wear niqab, is back in parliamentary hearings and, by all accounts, likely to pass.  This past weekend, an international conference entitled “Revealing Democracy: Bill 94 and the challenges of religious pluralism and ethnocultural diversity in Quebec” was held at Concordia University in Montreal.  Its focus was on looking critically at the social and political contexts in which the bill has come to be.  Among other topics, presenters talked about secularism, racism, sexism, multiculturalism, and Islamophobia.

This discussion will be longer and more academic than some other MMW posts, but I thought it was worth sharing, because there were many issues raised that reflect a lot of the conversations that we often have on this blog.  I’ll talk about the keynote speech for now, and will get to some of the panels in part two.

Wendy Brown, a professor from the University of California – Berkeley, was the keynote speaker.  She began her speech with reference to this “astonishing historical moment in which women’s clothes are subject to legislation in a 21st-century liberal democracy,” a moment where, in order to remain in the public sphere, women are being asked to take off their clothes.  Brown followed this by acknowledging several elements of the context around Bill 94 that she would not be discussing in her speech: that the West is in the midst of a “giant Islamophobic seizure”; that the proposed Bill 94 here as well as the burqa bans across Europe represent an aggression towards Islam that exceeds any other form of institutionalized racism in recent decades; that the vast “range of reasons given for these bans cancels out their credibility”; that women are finding themselves as “battlegrounds for masculine norms of female sexual comportment,” and that dress is being attacked under the pretext of saving women, while other forms of violence against women are continuing rampantly and largely unaddressed.

Setting all of this aside, Brown moved to the main part of her talk, which was to look at the assumptions that make this kind of legislation possible, with a particular focus on understandings of secularism and tolerance.  She raised five major assumptions:

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