During the summer I had the chance to see a play performed that has come to have a rather profound impact on my thinking over the last few months. The play by David Campton is entitled "Us and Them" and it tells the story of two groups who travel to the same place only to discover they will have to share the land. Very quickly the "sharing" defaults to the usual sandbox games where petty comments escalate into full blown suspicions and walls are erected to keep out the "neighbours." The us and them attitudes are all about fears of the unknown and fears of cultures subsuming cultures. There are no redeeming characteristics among these individuals who all fall in line to justify the building of the wall.
Teaching politics is often about teaching how the borders between and within nations are created to protect, or built in the name of protecting, culture, language, and heritage. Political science, at least in part, is also about teaching about the balance between the protection of important shared traditions and the willingness to share one's "place" with others. Canada has traditionally succeeded as a country in its willingness to create a multicultural country.
Many years ago a well-known travel and cultural writer name Pico Iyer gave the inaugural Hart House lecture at the University of Toronto and he delivered a masterful personal narrative about growing up as global soul "... born in England, into an Indian household, [who] was officially living in California (while spending most of [his] time in Japan)." He knew Canada mostly through our literature which seemed to him to provide a breath of fresh air and he "imagined Canada" through this literature. In his imaginings he thought that it may be possible to say that Canada was the model for a "global future." And, although Iyer was rather too idealistic about what Canada had achieved by comparison to other countries, Canada, he said, could be a global model for understanding the "other."
I wonder what Iyer would say today as Quebec prepares its Charter of Values. Some months ago in this column I wrote about a decision by the Quebec Soccer Federation to ban turbans on the playing field and I said that Quebec's "Quiet Revolution led to a fundamental change in the way that Quebeckers viewed the role of the state. A choice was made to separate Church and state in the institutional and political structures of society. The French language was taken on as the core political identity rather than the Catholic religion. Thus secularization has led to all sorts of policy decisions that have attempted to exclude religion from civic life. For example, a married woman must use her maiden on her provincial identification, like a health card..." But the values that this Charter asserts are a far cry from the use of one's maiden name on a drivers license and, moreover, many of the restrictions are absurd and, in some cases blatantly hypocritical. I wonder who is going to enforce the rule that only small religious symbols can be worn. For example, a necklace with a small crucifix will be permitted. I wonder, will police officers be given a measuring tape to carry alongside their gun so they can measure the size of the cross. And I wonder what they mean by "small." Will there be dimensions given so workers don't show up at work with the wrong size crucifix around their neck? And what about Christmas trees? Oh, apparently they are ok. They don't seem to violate the rules because they are "cultural" symbols and not "religious" symbols. I am not sure who decided that but the last time I checked the spelling of Christ-mas tree has not changed.
Even if we could make these rather pedantic distinctions, the fact is that this Charter of Values is very problematic. We should fear a state that does not see that norms need to develop in civil society and that when the state decides to make laws that determine what is "in" and what is "out" in terms of symbols and practices that shape our identity, they have taken a step toward building a wall that will create "the us and the them."
