The Quebec state has imposed a new Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) program, from primary one to secondary five (Grades 1 to 11) in all schools, public and private.¹ Officially in the making since 2005, the program was introduced in all Quebec schools as of September 2008. It replaces all previous religious instruction and moral education, and it is compulsory.

There is no doubt that this program represents a major development in education in Quebec, and that the thinkers behind it are serious and determined. In the words of the lead philosopher in the team that inspired the program, developed it and is now implementing it, Georges Leroux, “The choice that we are making a historic and … political choice,” and it represents “a genuine rupture.” The major intellectuals involved in the gestation of this remaking of religious and moral education – Jean-Pierre Proulx, Fernand Ouellet and Pierre Lucier along with M. Leroux – are among the most competent of contemporary Quebec academics, and their stated motives are beyond reproach: their fundamental objectives are the “common good” and individual freedom and autonomy.

In this essay, I first distill the philosophical and political postulates of the program’s apologists. I then proceed to issues the universal and compulsory imposition of the program raises for Quebec society: a population existing in space and time – in history – that is the inheritor of an already existing public culture the reformers manifestly wish to break with. Finally, I comment briefly on the implementation process, which has generated considerable controversy: active government “information” initiatives, resistance in the form of a citizens’ movement, and two court cases to date.

The seven pillars

For the purposes of laying out the philosophical and political postulates or premises involved, I rely here on Georges Leroux’s book published in 2007 for the explicit purpose of explaining the program, Éthique, culture religieuse, dialogue: arguments pour un programme² (Ethics, religious culture, dialogue: Arguments for a program), from which the above quote is taken. This book is the public and official apology for the program and is the culmination of a dominant academic school of thought that has been in germination for at least half a century, in Quebec and elsewhere in the West. Drawing on Georges Leroux is also appropriate inasmuch as he has graciously agreed to respond in Inroads.

There are at least seven pillars to the intellectual underpinnings of the program:

• unrelenting committment to secularism in all public institutions;
• a belief in the plausibility of normative pluralism, which is the tortuous access road to universal truths;
• an abiding belief in the role of reason in the formulation of our individual world views and, more particularly, of our ethics;
• belief in the feasibility, by recourse to critical reflection via dialogue, of each individual arriving at his or her individual autonomy;
• the necessity and capacity of the state in fostering and ensuring these ends;
• the need for a shared public culture if a society is to function and survive;
• the cultural corrosiveness of globalization.

Obviously these “pillars” are in many ways complementary and interdependent; nonetheless, they stand out as distinct articles of faith in M. Leroux’s book.

“Secularism,” as practised in the Quebec intellectual milieu, is a dogma from which there can be no deviation or exception. For M. Leroux, secularism is an achievement of modernity, a precondition of democracy and a condition of individual freedom. According to the most radical secularists, no religious authority may be allowed to prevail, even be visible, in the public arena. Hence the display of the Christian crucifix in the Quebec National Assembly or in municipal council chambers is an aberration to be suppressed as soon as possible – even if, as M. Leroux readily admits, Quebec’s social and moral collective capital is the product of a Christian tradition.

As it happens, after the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on the practice of “reasonable accommodation” in Quebec recommended the removal of the crucifix from the National Assembly in 2008, this body voted unanimously not to do so. The commission was headed by two academics supported by an “expert committee” composed of 12 academics and a high-level civil servant. Many municipalities have also refused to remove their crucifixes, despite the directives of the Quebec Civil Rights Commission.

Secularism is of course both a product and a condition of “normative pluralism.” The conviction that a society can function while recognizing the acceptability of varying normative systems is seen to be one of the characterizations of modernity. Differing and even contradictory value systems coexist in the private or “communautariste” niches of a pluralistic society, and their respective members interact together in the secular public sphere. A society that practises normative pluralism is not necessarily composed of individuals who practise normative pluralism. Indeed, given the spiritual dimension in our lives and our particular cultural heritage, many individuals will not be adepts of normative pluralism.

Normative pluralism is possible because in a modern secular state individuals will, as far as the public sphere is concerned, engage in “dialogue” during which, by the exercise of “critical reflection,” they will arrive at a consensus as to the nature and content of the necessary shared public culture in a spirit of civility which is the hallmark of a “vivre ensemble,” a way of living together. This is indeed the dynamic that is to prevail in the ERC program. As for the content of the program, it is ethics as entrenched in our charters and the presentation of the world’s major belief systems: religions, atheism and folk myths.

Yet, for the process of society-wide democratic deliberative discourse to take place, there are conditions that have to be created. Apart from the attenuation of religious authority in the form of existing communautarismes, there is a necessary respect of all for all – the vivre ensemble. In the situation in which Quebec finds itself, and given the corrosive influence of global culture, only the state is in a position of being able to establish and foster these conditions. By seeing to it that these conditions prevail in the educational system, which presumably is an instrument of the state, one can ensure the emergence of a “genuine common public culture” and a vivre ensemble sufficient to the task. The task is also one of ensuring the social cohesion of Quebec society. How transmission of a new cultural canon, whatever it may be (the old classical Western canon having been dissolved by globalization), can occur while operating on the basis of normative pluralism in a context of increasing diversity is not at all clear.³

I believe I have been fair – M. Leroux will tell us if I have not – in representing the essential beliefs of the proponents of the thinking that underlies the ERC program.

These seven pillars of the program are infused by an ideology that I would characterize as utopian voluntarism. The Leroux dispensation is voluntaristic because of its reliance on reason as exercised by individuals who have decided and are able to construct their individual ethic, and utopian because of its faith in a benevolent state operating on a level playing field in which all participants are well-meaning and equally committed to the common good and social “harmony,” a term that occurs throughout the book. There is no provision for the weakness of human nature, evil players, latent systemic perverse effects and determining conditions beyond the control of individual actors and the benevolent state acting in the common interest.

This ideology raises a number of issues for the citizens of contemporary Quebec who do not live in academia and who function according to the precepts of an already existing public culture. And I insist that Quebec society exists and, by all accounts, even in the considered opinion of Messrs. Bouchard and Taylor, functions quite well. This existing shared public culture is the outcome of collective wisdom, accumulated by trial and error and experience over at least five millennia. This existing shared public culture is, with the adaptation experienced as the result of five hundred years of experience in North America, essentially the “Western” or “Greco-Judeo-Christian” tradition, whose core is definitely neither as voluntaristic nor as utopian as the ERC program.

The role of parents

The first of these issues is that the role of parents in transmitting their culture, beliefs and values to their progeny is compromised, and no accommodation is made for this parental role. Young people are exposed to the normative pluralism of the ECR course beginning in Grade 1 at the age of six. At this age, children are still in the process of internalizing and consolidating the beliefs and convictions of their parents which are, in many cases, those of a religious community: what M. Leroux calls “communautarisme.”

In fact, through the ERC course, the school becomes a countervailing authority at a stage when children should still be under the influence of their parents. Not only does our existing public culture maintain this, but it holds that parents are responsible for the acts of their children until the age of 18. Furthermore, the methodology of the program intrudes on family by calling for reaching a consensus in a so-called neutral context in which the dialogue involves sharing with others the religious practice observed in their families.

In reality it is not a question of whether primary school pupils will be indoctrinated or not, but by whom. In our tradition, this role falls to parents and the communities of which they are members. The ERC program, inasmuch as it is imposed from the beginning of primary school, is a usurpation of the role of parents.

Second, although the program may be built on the principle of normative pluralism, not relativism, for the pupil it is a relativizing experience. If all religions as presented in the course are equally “true” then there is – at least until normative pluralism’s objective of eventual access to universal truths is attained – no truth at all. In the child’s mind and experience of the course, it is relativistic and may lead at best to disenchantment and at worst to cynical opportunism. This is a very real problem for young people who, before they are capable of critical reflection, have a need for certainty.

Schools and the state

The next issue is the role of the state in imposing values and beliefs. Most of us recognize that the state has a role in initiating students in our civic culture via a minimal curriculum, and in a shared cultural heritage via history and literature – what we call the societal cultural “canon.” Yet that is quite distinct from what is being proposed here. The stated objective of the ERC course is the initiation of young people – through exposure to various ethical and religious systems and dialogue – into a new and more adequate shared public culture to be propagated by the state.

However benevolent your conception of the state might be, this violates an essential tenet of our existing public culture, notably the separation of church and state. When the state imposes itself on the “church,” as opposed to the church imposing itself on the state, we have the same violation of this principle. (Interestingly enough, it is this very principle that made secularism possible.) In transmitting religious content, even if it is meant to be merely “cultural” and “neutral,” and by not allowing any exemptions to exposure to this content – which was the case in the first year of its implementation – the program encroaches on liberty of religion and conscience.

As it happens, the Mouvement Laïque du Québec, the major secularist movement in Quebec, has publicly criticized the ERC program for this reason, as well as considering the program inappropriate for primary-school-aged young people. Parents who have asked for exemptions have done so because they anticipate that it could cause serious harm to their children by calling into question the beliefs and convictions they are learning from their parents. Some parents claim violation of freedom of religion and conscience because the mere presentation to very young children of a variety of religious beliefs will relativize their parents’ own religious tradition or atheism.

Given the program’s avowed “political” purpose, to create and impose a new shared public culture and vivre ensemble, the state is indeed using its power of collective coercion to see to it that everyone experiences the course – there can be no dissidents. This is something new in Quebec: in its entire history of compulsory education, since the middle of the nineteenth century, there has always been provision for “dissenters.”

The role of the state in this program raises two related issues.The first is the capacity of the state to be ethical, let alone teach ethics. In our Western public culture, we neither conceive nor expect the state to be ethical. The individual legislator or state functionary is ethical or unethical, but not the state as such. The purpose of the state is to manage collective coercion in the interest of the common good as interpreted by our tradition and elected representatives.

The other related issue is that, in the Western tradition, schools do not belong to the state, and when they do it is an aberration that can become a serious problem if allowed to prevail. Schools in our public culture are part and parcel of civil society, created and administered by ratepayers’ associations (school boards), churches or even trade unions or guilds. They are in fact a “communautariste” reality, precisely the reality that the authors of the program have explicitly decided to exclude from education.

Nonetheless, Quebecers and others in the Western world have acquiesced since World War II in the idea that schools belong to the state and that teachers are the agents of the state, as indeed the Bouchard-Taylor Commission explicitly states.⁴ This is another deviation, a serious one, from our existing shared public culture. Schools are the extension of communities within civil society, and teachers, who are expected to act in loco parentis, are the moral spokespersons of these same communities. They are, above all, not agents of the state. The school in Ste-Edwidge where I live was, until recently, the school of the community of Ste-Edwidge and the teachers were fellow members of the community.

All of the above are issues because the program constitutes, as the authors themselves say, a rupture with the existing social reality. If we wish to continue to benifit from the liberty, creativity and prosperity that our existing public culture affords us, we should resist the voluntaristic utopianism of state-sponsored academics, while remaining conscious of the challenge and threats of our times such as the erosion of local cultures by globalization.

Deconfessionalization without debate

The process whereby the ERC course has been implemented is extremely revealing, and reflects a great deal about the motives and ethics of our new secular elite.

One of the major aspects of the whole process of secularization of Quebec society over the last half century has been the deconfessionalization of education, culminating in the implementation of the compulsory ERC course. What has been remarkable about the whole process is that the intellectuals who have been spearheading this process maintain that it is based on a societal consensus. The manufacturing of such a consensus, with the subsequent assumption that it exists in the population at large, is one of the great lies of recent years.

In fact, there is at present no such societal consensus, and there was never a genuine public debate on the “projet de société” consisting of an exclusively nondenominational school system. Pauline Marois, then Education Minister, promised such a debate during the 1997 joint Senate-Commons hearings on the abrogation of section 93 of the British North America Act – the objective the minister specified at the time was deconfessionalization of “structures” (school boards) only, not schools as such. The debate never took place.

During the preceding “États Généraux sur l’Éducation” of 1995–96, not a single group outside of the Montreal area asked for deconfessionalization during the public hearings of the first and open consultation phase. It was only in the second round of consultation, with a predetermined agenda presented to preselected audiences, that the subject emerged. As for the Proulx Task Force on the Place of Relig-ion in Schools in Quebec, Mme Marois’s follow-up on her promise of a societal debate, no truly “public” consultations were held. The churches of Quebec were either co-opted or simply ignored the government. None of the mainstream Catholic or Protestant churches initiated a debate within their communities, although the evangelical Protestant and Asian Christian communities did.

Parliamentary debate in the National Assembly on the bills dealing with deconfessionalization was virtually nonexistent, with no nominal vote being taken. When the Education Act was amended in 2005 to provide for the removal of all religious instruction in schools, this required a rewriting of section 41 of the 1975 Quebec Charter which explicitly guaranteed the right to religious instruction in public schools. There was a parliamentary commission to which one had to be invited. Needless to say, few opponents succeeded in getting invited.

With regard to the constitutional amendment which paved the way for compulsory and universal deconfessionalization, it was patently obvious to any constitutionalist interested in the subject that removal of section 93 of the BNA Act as regards Quebec would do away with any constitutional basis for denominational schools and would liquidate the autonomy of local school boards, which henceforth would no longer have the power to “administer” Catholic or Protestant schools. Yet not one of the half dozen Quebec constitutionalists spoke up at the time. As for the Catholic Church of Quebec, some of its spokespersons have now said that they were misled when they were told the objective was to deconfessionalize structures only but not schools.

The cultural and political elite may have acquiesced in deconfessionalization – although most of them continued to send their children to Quebec semiprivate denominational (prior to ERC) schools – but the people at large were never asked if they wanted it: it was never an election issue.

Denial of due process and abuse of power

Two trials involving the two parties who petitioned for exemption – the Lavallée family in Drummondville and Loyola High School, a private Catholic secondary school – resulted in the documentation of how the Ministry of Education had proceeded. During the trials, it became apparent that despite there being a provision in the Education Act (section 222) allowing for exemptions in cases where parents believed their children might experience “serious harm” by attending the course, no procedures – explanation of the section, forms for applying for exemptions, indications as to where a request should be addressed, appeal process – were available. And although more than 1,700 requests were made, none were granted. In the case of Loyola High School, which had requested exemption under an “exemption of equivalence” clause in the private schools law, the ministry did not even respond to the request; Loyola had to initiate the procedure by taking legal action.

The refusal of authorities to allow any exemptions as provided by law was, in effect, a denial of due process: access to the law and adequate opportunity to be heard and considered by the relevant authorities. One should have been able to assume that if legislators had left section 222 of the Education Act in the law book, it was because they intended to leave the door open for exemptions. But no, the government educational establishment took literally the prescriptions of the philosopher-conceptor of the program that there should be no exemptions.

Moreover, not only was there a denial of due process, but there was also a flagrant abuse of power. It took the form of the Ministry of Education instructing school boards not to allow exemptions: except for secondary five, the year in which the ministry issues graduation diplomas, whether or not an exemption will be granted falls under the jurisdiction of the school boards, not the ministry.

Another aspect of the implementation process has been that, despite the invocation in the ERC course itself of the Canadian Charter as an ethical standard, no deference was given to section 1 of the Charter, which states that none of the rights and liberties in the Charter can be restricted except by an intelligible rule of law, and within limits acceptable in a free and democratic society. In the present case, the restriction is compulsory attendance in a course that parents, in their sincere opinion, think may be a violation of their liberty of conscience and religion.

As for the first condition, the provision of an accessible and intelligible rule of law, what is flagrant is that there is an accessible and intelligible text that says exactly the opposite: that there may be exemptions. As for the condition that the restriction – in this case, compulsory attendance – be acceptable in a free and democratic society, the established test in Canadian jurisprudence is the Oakes test, arising out of the judgement in R. v. Oakes in 1986. This test lays out four criteria, all of which have to be met for the restriction to be acceptable in a free and democratic society:

• there must be a real and urgent objective requiring the restriction of the right;
• there must be a rational connection between the restriction of the right and the objective;
• the restriction of the right in question must be as minimal as possible;
• there must be proportionality between the restricion of the right and the objective.

The last criterion is judged to be superfluous by some authorities; hence, let us consider the first three. In the case of contemporary Quebec, I submit that there is neither the need nor the urgency for the restriction of the right of conscience and religion that arises from making compulsory a course designed to create a new shared public culture and to ensure civility and respect for others in the midst of diversity.

In actual fact, the diversity of Quebec society – the increase of which is the source of the need and urgency invoked by the course’s conceptors – is not great and is not greatly increasing. Eighty per cent of Quebecers are native French speakers and this proportion has been constant for the last quarter of a century. Furthermore, immigration has been and still is largely Christian in culture, with the result that 90 per cent of the population identified itself as Christian in the 2001 census. Admittedly, there has been an increase in the ethnic diversity of the one fifth of the population that is not native French-speaking.

Moreover, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, in its 2008 report, maintained that “the foundations of collective life in Québec are not in a critical situation,”⁵ and one reason is that Quebec society already has a working shared public culture. According to the same commission, “Québec … has acquired institutions, norms and guidelines that are components of what can be called … a ‘common public culture.’”⁶

As for the rational link between the objective of the course and the constraining measure – compulsory attendance – the disconnect between fostering respect in diversity and creating a climate of civility (“vivre ensemble”) on the one hand and the lack of respect for parents who believe their liberty of religion and conscience is restricted on the other is flagrant. In the name of fostering respect and tolerance for religious diversity, the dissidents receive a treatment akin to excommunication.

Which brings us to the third criterion, that the constraining measure taken be the least restrictive possible. Students who were withdrawn by parents and did not attend the course could have been allowed, for example, to read in the library instead of being expelled. In practice some more accommodating boards adopted this practice, while declining to inform the ministry. In Granby, where parents protested the severity of expulsion, the courts immediately quashed the board’s decision and required that the pupils in question be readmitted to their schools until the outcome of the trials.

In summary, given that there is no accessible and intelligible law justifying the compulsory nature of the ERC course – on the contrary, there are legal provisions for exemptions – and given that the government’s action fails to meet all the criteria of the Oakes test, we have here a straightforward violation of section 1 of the Canadian Charter, which makes the restriction unconstitutional.

Civil society is our real hope

In conclusion, we return to the avowed intentions of the conceptors of the program. Will the compulsory ERC course foster the emergence of a new shared public culture that will create society-wide civility and sufficient social cohesion to ensure that a supposedly increasingly diverse Quebec society does not succumb to the cultural corrosion brought on by globalization?

I think not. First, the program is based on an unduly voluntaristic premise: that each member of society will be capable of and interested in elaborating, through reason and dialogue, his or her ethical posture. Philosophers do this, and it is one of their contributions to society, but not all of us have the time, interest, capacity or disposition to do so.

Nevertheless, most of us need a degree of certainty about what we should and can do to be able to get on with our lives. And most of us rely on the moral and truth capital provided by a system of beliefs and convictions we have inherited, initially from our parents and subsequently via religion or models supplied by history and literature. Ideally, individuals internalize these beliefs. We may rebel against these “authorities” at some point, but at least we have something to be critical of, and the process of refinement or rejection is part of the edification of our autonomy. Karl Popper’s “burden of freedom” is not for everyone, and to impose it on everyone is both irresponsible and pregnant with unexpected consequences.

The other major weakness of the ERC program project arises from the utopian nature of its conceptors’ ideology. In their zeal to create the new Quebec citizen armed with a new “shared public culture,” they are proposing to effect a rupture with the existing shared public culture and the “communautarisme” it harbours.

Without civil society communities, most of us would be very isolated, atomized and hence vulnerable, especially in a globalized world that also undercuts communal solidarity. Thus, not only will the new shared public culture not be operative for several generations (the existing one took five thousand years to emerge in its present form), but the existing one will no longer be transmitted. After a generation of compulsory ERC acculturation, Quebecers will be ethically at sea, drifting from one fashion to another while becoming desperate for ethical and moral saviours. The accelerating growth of sects and evangelical Christian denominations in Quebec is a harbinger of this. And radical Islamism, which provides complete certainty, will find fertile ground for conversions in a ERC-nurtured population.

Furthermore, these utopians, by placing on the state a burden it is incapable of bearing, are contributing in yet another way to unfavourable prospects for Quebec society. Witness what happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Quebec when the state and church became too close: religion was, to a great extent, emptied of its real meaning and became predominantly a matter of social convention and social control, unsupported by internalized belief and ethics. The reality that Quebecers are very vulnerable to the worst effects of “modernism” is a function of the superficiality of the state-sanctioned Catholicism of the premodern period. Chances are that the state-sponsored new shared public culture and “vivre ensemble” will not do much better.

Another major obstacle to the success of the program will be that, despite the benefits of familiarizing students (particularly at the end of their secondary education) with major world religions, preparing teachers to accomplish this is no mean task. Can we reasonably expect all primary school teachers to be sufficiently familiar with Budhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism – not to mention Christianity – to meet the desired objectives? Or will they simply regurgitate ministry-approved material?

Which brings us, full circle, to the prospects of counteracting the culturally corrosive nature of globalization, the peril of which is one of the seven premises the ERC program is based on. It is, I suggest, the communautarisme new and old of a free and pluralistic society that is our real hope. In other words, it is the vitality of civil society, and not the taking in hand of our “spiritual development” by the state (as the Quebec Education Act prescribes), that will be decisive. Already, there are indications that civil society, in many Western countries, is producing its own antidote to corrosive globalization.

On the strictly political level, the ERC program and its proponents will not succeed owing to failure to respet the conventions and tenets of our existing shared public culture – notably, the prerogatives of parents in education, freedom of religion and conscience, the proper role of the state, the separation of church and state, and the separation of powers (legislative, executive and judicial). In this last respect, the role of judicial institutions in determining whether the compulsory nature of the course is justified is going to be crucial.

I expect that the courts will eventually decide that the methods used to implement the ERC course are in violation of our democratic liberties: notably the right to due process and protection from arbitrary government action (abuse of power). And if this is indeed what happens, the final irony will be that the course and its proponents wll have been judged to be “unethical,” and the champions of secularism will have been found to have failed to adequately take into account the very conditions that made secularism possible: separation of church and state and freedom of religion and conscience.

However, should the courts eventually decide otherwise, or should the government decide to overerride the courts by invoking the notwithstanding clause, we would experience a revolutionary political and social change in Quebec – in the words of Georges Leroux, a historic development. In such an eventuality, members of the population will either acquiesce, resort to political activism or, as is possible in an open society such as ours, leave.

Continue reading “Imposed From Above” →

Coping with “deep cultural diversity”¹ has become a major preoccupation in Western societies since the advent of globalization and demographic dependence on immigration. Contemporary Quebec, with its almost negative reproduction rate and its besieged cultural situation, is no exception. To understand the issues these changes have provoked, it is first necessary to sketch out the context in terms of five major relevant societal developments and social policy initiatives of the last three or four decades.

Perhaps the major relevant social policy change that was implemented from the sixties forward was the déconfessionnalisation of Quebec society. The Parent Report on education (1963–65) and the much later abrogation of the clause in the British North America Act that protected public denominational Catholic and Protestant schools (1998) were the two major turning points in Quebec’s secularization strategy. Since the turn of the century, this strategy has become more radical, notably through the exorcising of vestiges of religious manifestations in public places, such as Christmas trees and crucifixes, by the Quebec human rights commission. However, the emergence of a radical secularization strategy was largely an initiative of the cultural elite and new technocratic social class, in which the population was never actively involved. It was simply laid on from above, without consultation or even input.

The initial motivation of the elite was a modernizing vision accompanied by a zeal for democratization. Both of these were driven by anticlericalism (although not anti-Catholicism), fuelled by a substantial ressentiment (a pervading sentiment of envy with regard to privileges or power) against a church that had become so politically powerful that it was a coercive mechanism of social control. These first anticlerical reformers – many of them defrocked priests – were superseded in the late seventies and early eighties by a new social-class formation, technocrats of the public and parapublic sectors who had a material interest in déconfessionnalisation and a personal interest in libertarianism. François Ricard’s La génération lyrique (1992) is one of the best critiques of the rationalization of these people.

A second, and not unrelated, major social policy development was the gradual but inexorable incorporation of public education into the state sphere, to the point that the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, set up in 2007 to examine concerns about “unreasonable” accommodations to cultural and religious minorities, could as a matter of course refer to Quebec teachers as “agents of the state.” Today in the 21st century public education – and most of private education – has been entirely appropriated by the Quebec state. While this situation may not be all that different from what has been happening elsewhere in the industrialized world, it has very real consequences in terms of social policy generally.

One of these consequences, our third major development, has been the state-initiated implantation of a multicultural orthodoxy throughout the educational establishment, from kindergarten to graduate school. The multicultural vanguard was made up of university professors who, in a remarkably short period, imposed multicultural ideology as an orthodoxy, propagating it throughout the whole public apparatus.

This orthodoxy and its institutionalization in charters (Quebec in 1975 and Canada in 1982), combined with statist education, paved the way for a new generation of philosopher-kings, among whom the most eminent figures are Jean-Pierre Proulx and Georges Leroux. These people are convinced that the state knows best what is in the public interest and is the only social institution capable of implementing the measures that are necessary for assuring the public good.

Such figures, and their university fellow-travellers in the public and parapublic sphere under their influence, begot the Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) course, obligatory in all Quebec schools, public and private, from Grade 1 to the end of secondary school, with the exception of Secondary 3 (Grade 9). The explicit and predominant rationalization behind the need for the course was preparing Quebec youth for the new racial and cultural diversity of Quebec society. In the thinking of those who conceived and implemented the new course, religious differences are an important manifestation of “cultural” diversity.

The state-imposed course’s answer to the problems of “diversity” and its objective was the development of a new shared or common public culture (culture publique commune) and an enhancement of young people’s ability to be tolerant and understanding of cultural differences (vivre-ensemble). The means to achieving this are in-class group dialogue, a form of “deliberative democracy,” and a “neutral” presentation of numerous religions, thus relativizing them all.

It is revealing that in 2008 the entire political and cultural elite acquiesced in the decree that the ERC course had to be mandatory from the beginning to the end of compulsory schooling. The Bouchard-Taylor Commission also endorsed this position in its 2008 report. An indirect and unforeseen consequence of ERC is that it has contributed immensely to enshrining the charters in Quebec: as the course is rigorously relativist (no religion offers the truth) and as there is, by necessity in an “ethics” course, a need for a final transcending moral standard, it becomes, by default, the charters.

Another development affecting diversity, our fourth, has been the dissolution of a pre-existing historical consciousness. This is, of course, directly related to the ideological hegemony of multiculturalism. Educational content has become largely disembodied from Quebec history. This “cultural discontinuity” is a very recent development in Quebec. For instance, Quebecers under 45 who know what the battle of Châteauguay (1813) was and the name of the French-Canadian British commander (de Salaberry) are extremely rare, whereas most educated Quebecers over 50 acquired such knowledge at school.

Very recently, neonationalists such as Mathieu Bock-Côté and Éric Bédard have begun to agitate against what they call the “denationalization” of the teaching of history, but this has only happened in the last half decade.

And finally, the fifth development relevant to “diversity” is that the period as a whole – approximately 1970 to 2010 – has been one of economic stagnation in Quebec. Although the rise in the standard of living has kept up with Ontario, this has been at the expense of underinvestment in long-term development (capital equipment, public infrastructure and public services such as education and health). Although general awareness of this stagnation or relative decline – the “Lucides” and Alain Dubuc’s book L’éloge de la richesse (2006) – is relatively recent, the phenomenon itself has been documented since the seventies. Among the consequences are declining population growth, declining productivity and creativity (othen than artistic) and a declining capacity to do anything about it (high public debt and no real increase in educational attainment). Quebec is a society in which there is now generalized competition for a bigger slice of a pie which has stopped growing – fertile ground for ressentiment.

One final comment about the societal context of cultural diversity in Quebec: cultural diversity, contrary to what the multicultural pundits would have us believe, has not increased greatly in recent Quebec history. Granted, the nonfrancophone population is more ethnically diverse, but it still represents only one fifth of the population. Even in terms of religion, or perhaps more properly religious culture, 90 per cent of Quebecers are self-declared Christians according to the last census, and the majority of immigrants are still Christians. In terms of “diversity,” Montreal is still nothing like Toronto, where “whites” are close to becoming a “visible minority” and White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are a fast declining ethnic group.

In summary, these five societal contextual developments – imposed secularization, state appropriation of public education, propagation of a multicultural orthodoxy, loss of historical consciousness and societal stagnation – have set the stage for the emergence of a new public ressentiment that does not augur well for collective coping with the “deep cultural diversity” which may, indeed, come to pass, if only for reasons of forced population growth and labour-market requirements.

Recent developments: A commission and two court cases

This ressentiment came to the fore with the Supreme Court of Canada’s kirpan decision of 2004, which overturned Quebec court decisions that had upheld a school board’s decision to forbid the wearing of the ceremonial Sikh dagger (kirpan) in school. A series of “accommodations” to religious claims in Quebec and Ontario in the previous decade (the majority of which were arrived at out of court)² were judged to be “unreasonable” by popular Quebec opinion and reported as such in the Quebec media. A notorious expression of the ressentiment thus engendered was the “code of conduct” published in 2007 by the municipal council of Hérouxville in the St. Maurice Valley, in which it was proclaimed that the wearing of the full veil (niqab or burqa) and stoning would not be tolerated.

Eventually the media storm around “unreasonable accommodations” was such that the Charest government, on the eve of an election in 2007, established a commission headed by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor to air the whole subject of “reasonable accommodations,” which had been inspired by and justified by the new multiculturalist orthodoxy and the charters.³ The Bouchard-Taylor Commission subsequently (2008) pronounced that in most cases individuals and institutions were able to come to reasonable accommodations and that the media had played an important part in whipping up a public storm.

The most recent developments are two court cases. The case of the Lavallée family of Drummondville involves the rights of parents to get their child exempted from the obligatory ERC course, while the issue in the Loyola College case is the right of a private institution to be exempted from teaching the course by replacing it with their own related course (“Great Religions”). In both cases the requests were made by virtue of relevant exemption clauses in educational legislation. In the Drummondville case, the judge decided in favour of the government, and in the Loyola case a Montreal judge decided against.

Both judgements have been appealed, the Drummondville case by the parents and the Loyola case by the Quebec government. In all likelihood – given the constitutional aspect – both will be heard together by the Supreme Court. In the Loyola case the ruling was that the minister, in the first instance, had not acted within the confines of the rule of law, having overstepped her powers, and in the second instance, had violated the religious freedom enshrined in the Quebec charter. The decision, quite a bombshell in Quebec although poorly reported by the media, focuses several of the issues facing a contemporary Quebec trying to maintain a distinct society while dealing with cultural diversity. I proceed to an articulation of what I believe those issues to be.

Four current diversity issues

Assuming the will to maintain a distinct society based on the sociopolitical reality which is geographical Quebec, the first issue is whether a common public culture into which all Quebecers would be acculturated is necessary. Of course, any “national” entity experiencing cultural diversity faces the same question. The necessity of such a common public culture is now generally recognized in Quebec and is coming to be so in most modern political entities. Both Britain and France are going through a period of reassessment in this regard.

Such a position, the necessity of a common public culture, stands contrary to multicultural orthodoxy, for which such a common public culture represents an obstacle to the adequate recognition of diverse cultures within the political entity, as well as being an expression of ethnocentrism. Indeed, it is seen as being contrary to the position of liberal thinkers of the Rawlsian tradition for whom all that is necessary in a liberal pluralistic society is a willingness to obey the law, itself conceived as disembodied from any particular cultural heritage.

In Quebec, however, events of the last half century have tended to demonstrate that a common public culture, rather than mere contractual legalism, is necessary if Quebec is to survive as a distinct society. Manifestations of what is required are the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) of 1977, the Cullen–Couture immigrant selection agreement of 1978 and the McDougall–Gagnon-Tremblay agreement of 1991 which allowed Quebec to impose a “moral contract” on immigrants accepted in Quebec.

Later, after the turn of the century, the Quebec Department of Education proposed as one of the two anticipated outcomes of its ERC course a common public culture; the other was a vivre-ensemble that would allow for the tolerance of cultural diversity. Subsequently, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission reaffirmed both the need for and the existence of a common public culture, as well as the appropriateness of imposing the obligatory ERC course to bolster these two objectives. And finally, in the last five years a new generation of Quebec nationalist thinkers has called for a stop to the disregard of national history brought on by a multicultural pedagogical perspective.

All of these developments have led to the explicit acceptance of the need for a clearer vision of what the common public culture is, and of the need to ensure its transmission. Acculturation to the common public culture would be incumbent both on all school children and on immigrants and would provide a basis on which to manage cultural diversity.

Our second issue is the adequacy of multicultural ideology and its constitutional “human rights” offspring, the charters, in coping with cultural diversity in Quebec. Multiculturalism and its benign idealism are coming to be seen as having contributed to the dissolution of the Quebec historical consciousness and to the charters becoming enshrined, by default, as the ultimate moral reference in public matters. Multiculturalism and the charters are insufficient to alleviate the resurgence of the ressentiment of Quebecers who see themselves as dispossessed. The charters’ legal sanctity is not enough to convince a population that “accommodations” derived from these documents are possible not only for newcomers but also for them.

The decisive and inescapable role of the Quebec charter in Judge Gérard Dugré’s Loyola decision is extremely revealing in this regard. Indeed, Judge Dugré’s second reason for invalidating the obligatory nature of Quebec’s ERC course was that such an imposition violates the religious freedom disposition in Quebec’s own charter. This being the case, assuming that the judgement is upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada, there is no legal limit to religious claims for exemption from government-imposed cultural pretensions in Quebec: scientology and moderate Islam could make claims identical to those made by the very Catholic Loyola College.

The two court cases involving the role played by the Department of Education in imposing the ERC course lead us directly to the third “diversity” issue that has emerged in the last five years: the role that government can legitimately play in coping with diversity by laying on remedial educational programs.

Government in a postmodern society like Quebec is of such a rigorously secular nature that there seems to be no possible arrangement according to which it can deal directly with the topic of religion in schools. Quebec tried with the “religious culture” approach, but neither believers nor atheists have found the method acceptable. It is, and rightly in my opinion, seen as an infringement on fundamental liberties: freedom of religion and conscience and parental prerogative in education. The only acceptable position would now seem to be that the state as such, as opposed to the school, not impose any content of a religious character in the curriculum, but rather limit itself to “ethics” and “civics.”

The fourth “diversity” issue is the problem created by the displacement, by omission and delegitimization, of the society’s historical consciousness, a consequence of the influence of multicultural ideology and the relativizing mindset it cultivates. Put concretely, in the context we are dealing with, the current generation of high school graduates are rigorously ignorant of Quebec, Canadian and Western history dating back to before the Quiet Revolution. Put positively, the issue is whether a postmodern secular and pluralistic society can legitimately insist on the teaching of its own history.

If a common public culture is to be successfully articulated, kept alive and transmitted, I think the answer is yes. However, it would have to be done within the limits of the rule of law. Here is where Judge Dugré’s Loyola judgement is so crucial. The judgement maintains that in the imposition of its culturally interventionist role (here in the sphere of religion, not history), the Quebec government had been acting without due regard to the rule of law: the executive authority did not act in conformity with its mandate from the legislative authority. This aspect of the decision is even more remarkable in that the abuse of administrative power leading to the denial of due process, even access to the law, was much more evident – even flagrant – in the Drummondville case.

The crux of the question then becomes: how is a secular pluralistic society to privilege the teaching of its own history and culture, the ultimate source and justification of its common public culture, while remaining within the bounds of the rule of law – the kind of law generated by a legislative authority acting in conformity with the same common public culture?

Unless there is a way of legitimizing the teaching of national history, there is no stopping the erosion of indigenous historical consciousness. Even the high priests of multiculturalism are beginning to recognize that this is a problem: Georges Leroux with regard to the transmission of a literary and philosophical canon in his article “Enjeux de la transmission” and Joseph Heath with regard to shared values in his article “The Myth of Shared Values in Canada.”⁴

The solution to this dilemma is available in Quebec’s constitutional history, and it is recourse to the “notwithstanding clauses” that exist in both of the charters. Section 52 of the Quebec charter specifies that “no provision of any Act … may derogate from sections 1 to 38, except so far as provided by those sections, unless such Act expressly states that it applies despite the Charter” (emphasis added). Section 1 of the Canadian charter notes that its rights are freedoms are guaranteed “subject to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” Furthermore, section 33 allows Parliament or a provincial legislature to expressly declare that an act “shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.”

It is worth recalling here that Bill 101, implemented to protect the French language in Quebec, was constitutional at the time as it predated the Canadian charter, but would be impossible today without recourse to the “notwithstanding” clause. This clause in the federal charter was inserted on the insistence of Peter Lougheed, Premier of Alberta at the time, for just such reasons as invoked here: to allow a province to protect itself from what it sees as a threat to its “cultural” powers as provided for by the 1867 British North America Act and still intact in the 1982 Constitution Act. There is, it seems, no alternative to “notwithstanding” clauses – in either a federated or an independent Quebec – if a common public culture is to be maintained. Recourse to a “notwithstanding” mechanism in human rights charters needs to be legitimized as a necessary instrument for the survival of regional cultures in a globalizing world.

The Western canon: The only workable outcome

These four major “diversity” issues are now, I suggest, inescapable in Quebec:

• The existing common public culture, which is constantly evolving, needs to be rehabilitated by articulation and transmission.
• Multicultural ideology and charters have had perverse effects with regard to fostering tolerance of diversity, and have become the source of a new ressentiment. This is not surprising given the circumstances: the overall economic stagnation of contemporary Quebec.
• In a secular pluralistic society, the state should not, in an attempt to deal with cultural diversity, be involved in putting forward any matter of religious content in the schools.
• Again in a secular pluralistic society, the state needs to privilege the teaching of the society’s own history, on which its common public culture is based, in a context of respect for one of the pillars of that common public culture, the rule of law.

From these observations, we conclude that the best policy is to limit “reasonable accommodations” in the public sphere by systematic recourse to the notwithstanding clauses in the charters. Recently Quebec did indeed introduce a bill (Bill 94) that would require full facial exposure in the dispensing of government services, by the provider and the recipient, hence banning the niqab or burqa.⁵ Should this bill become law, and should there be a charter challenge, as there probably would be, Quebec should immediately invoke the “notwithstanding” clause.

Second, Quebec should promote a more rigorous “civic” and “ethics” curriculum, both in the context of a rehabilitation of “national” history and the transmission of the Western canon in literature and philosophy. Obviously, in terms of multicultural orthodoxy this is discrimination and ethnocentrism. Since in a multicultural world there can be no “national” values but only “universal” values, the transcending purposes of a particular national common public culture are always suspect, being judged arbitrary or “essentialist.” However, since any functioning and enduring society must have a common public culture, at least if such a culture is historically grounded then it is not totally arbitrary and has stood the test of time. It has the merit of having been experienced, of having matured in the light of its successes and failures.

All of that having been said, I am quite conscious of having left untouched one major issue which is pertinent to the cultural diversity question, although the discussion of it is beyond the scope of this text. It was aptly put by the now deceased Alan Jones in 1979 in his review of the work of the late-19th-century British educational reformer Lyulph Stanley:

In the endless debate on the place of church schools in a nation-wide system of education, a debate which led to that compromise which engulfed the school boards, Stanley left one question unasked: whence comes the moral authority of the state? To take schools away from the control of the Church in Victorian England did not change them much, for teachers were either Christian, or, if not, they justified themselves by outdoing Christians in moral rectitude. Once that situation vanished then it is difficult to see what the ultimate basis for the operation of the schools might be. To argue that teachers should be chosen not for their churchmanship but for their citizenship may seem unexceptionable, but does citizenship imply, say, obedience, and, if it does, where does the ultimate jurisdiction rest? To answer, “in each man’s conscience,” or, less likely, “with the authorities,” seems to give a choice in the end between the chaos of individualism and the tyranny of state control.⁶

“That situation” referred to by Jones has now vanished both in contemporary Britain and in Quebec with the accomplishment of dechristianization. Are we now faced with the “chaos of individualism” or the “tyranny of state control”? Some, perhaps many, would argue that the role of Christianity as the ultimate moral arbiter – the Bible being the “Great Code” in Northhop Frye’s terms – has been replaced by “Human Rights” as enshrined in the various charters and constitutions of the contemporary world. The Quebec case would seem to suggest that the charters alone are an insufficient moral authority in preempting ressentiment from becoming an obstacle to tolerance of “deep cultural diversity.” If so, Alan Jones’s question regarding religion and 19th-century public education in England still stands unasked in Quebec more than a century later. Incidentally, it is noteworthy that the religion issue, déconfessionnalisation, also engulfed school boards in Quebec, or rather led to their being effectively eviscerated.

However, even more to the point of the present discussion, if the charters have become, by default, the de facto ultimate moral authority, then how does one proceed to “notwithstand” the charters? My response to this dilemma is that the answer to Jones’s question, “whence comes the moral authority of the state?”, has to come from within the Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition or the Western canon; there is no other workable outcome available to us in our Quebec context. And if this is so, the limits to and the assurance of a workable “cultural diversity” continue to be found in the deployment, propagation and transmission of the Western tradition, of which the charters are, after all, only circumstantial, circumscribed and ephemeral (in the Quebec case because constantly changing) derivations, not to be taken for the real thing. “You shall not raise up images in my name.”

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