The Quebec mosque shooting is proof that Canada is just as divided as the rest of the West

Source Link

DANIEL CAPURRO

With all the uproar surrounding Donald Trump’s travel ban on citizens from several Muslim-majority nations, it might come as a shock to many that Canada, one of the few Western nations willing to accept thousands of Syrian refugees – and apparently very happily – would suffer a terrorist attack. Even more so that it was one targeting the country’s Muslim population.

Yet the cheery, sometimes fawning coverage from abroad of Justin Trudeau’s first year as prime minister masks two truths about Canada that mark it out as not that different from the rest of the western world.

The first is that, just like Britain, the United States, and most of Western Europe, Canada is a divided society. The fault lines runs along the old divisions of conservative and liberal, and the new ones of open and closed.

Before Trudeau, Canada was dominated for nine years by the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper. It was a new movement that brought together the “red tories” of the Progressive Conservatives and the Texas-style nationalist conservatism of the Canadian Alliance.

Big oil, climate change scepticism, immigration reform, armed interventions abroad, and the promotion of a school history curriculum focusing on Canadian military victories may not sound like "Canadian values" to admiring foreigners, but they won Harper three elections in a row.

The 2015 federal election, in which Harper was ousted, was, by Canadian standards, quite nasty. The most contentious point was the Conservatives suddenly making a burqa ban an election issue. Realising he was sliding in the polls and with the economy struggling with low commodity prices, Harper turned to a “get the base out” strategy of promoting conservative "Canadian values" and focusing on the foreign terror threat. 

We will never cease our efforts to keep Canadians safe, and Canada secure. #elxn42 Source Link

It backfired, but it nonetheless highlighted that a large proportion of Canadian society, especially in the Prairie provinces and the former industrial powerhouses of southern Ontario and Cape Breton, has more in common with Donald Trump’s forgotten men and women than with Justin Trudeau’s “country strong, not in spite of our differences, but because of them”.

Indeed, during the neighbouring US election, it was not unusual to see Canadians openly wearing Trump 2016 t-shirts around town.

Trudeau’s remarkable turnaround of the Liberal Party from third place irrelevance to outright majority was, thanks to first past the post and a three party system, achieved with just 39 per cent of the popular vote. The Conservatives won 31 per cent. Those fractures still exist, no matter how well they are disguised by the media-savvy foreign popularity of the current government. 

The second truth is that Quebec, ever the troublesome child of Canadian confederation, has its own inner cultural conflicts. The province is home to one of the world’s largest truly bilingual cities in the shape of the highly multicultural Montreal, but its capital, Quebec City – three hours from Montreal by road – is 95 per cent French-speaking and 90 per cent Catholic.

Quebec has a complicated cultural heritage. Part colonial oppressors, part colonially oppressed, it has a heritage of pre-revolution French statism but is adherent to Napoleonic civil law in an English speaking, common law using federation. On top of this comes a highly secular tradition secured by the “quiet revolution” of the 1960s after three centuries of Catholic domination of the State. It is a hodgepodge society of competing cultural, religious, linguistic, and political interests. 

And divisions that are rife within Canada are all the more stark and complex in Quebec. Like the rest of the country, it needs immigrants. Yet, obsessed with maintaining its “unique cultural identity” it places onerous language requirements on them, and calls are frequently made to cut the total number permitted. The Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), an upstart centre-right party, demands a 20 per cent cut in immigration levels.

In 2014, and again in 2016, the province fought bitter culture wars over a new “charter of values” that would ban those with “ostentatious religious symbols” from receiving or administering public services. Supposedly aimed at all religions, informational posters accompanying the campaign appeared to explicitly target muslims. In February 2015 a Quebec judge refused to hear a woman’s case in court until she removed her hijab, although the judge was later rebuked by the Quebec Superior Court. 

Canada, and Quebec all the more so, is suffering the same divisive and corrosive arguments over national identity, immigration, secularism, radical Islam, and terrorism as Britain, the United States, and the European Union. It should come as no surprise if Canada succumbs to the same internal violence.

In the charismatic Justin Trudeau it has found a way of promoting a liberal and open approach to these challenges. But it wasn't always this way and it may not continue to be so.

Those who believe in the Canadian brand of liberalism can only hope that its compassion and defiance can overcome this latest challenge.