Quebec: Labour Must Fight Anti-Muslim Backlash

For Quebec Independence!

Amid a wave of racist demagogy against ethnic minorities, especially Muslims, the March 26 Quebec elections saw Jean Charest’s unpopular Liberals barely squeak back into office, forming Quebec’s first minority government in over 125 years. The sovereignist Parti Québécois, under the no less unpopular André Boisclair, won only 28 percent of the popular vote, its worst showing in 35 years. The PQ lost official opposition status to the upstart right-wing nationalist Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ) of Mario Dumont, which rode the wave of hysteria against immigrants and minorities.

The spark was the 2006 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in favour of Gurbaj Singh Multani, a Sikh high school student in Montreal. Four years ago, Multani’s refusal to remove his kirpan—a small, traditional dagger—spawned racist, “anti-violence” hysteria in the media. As a form of “reasonable accommodation” (itself a very condescending term), the court ruled that Multani could wear his kirpan at school. But this was altogether too “reasonable” for racist demagogues on radio talk shows and elsewhere, who inveighed against any so-called “concessions” aimed at easing life for minorities.

In January, the tiny rural town of Hérouxville—where there are no immigrants!—passed a series of edicts against, among other things, the stoning of women. With its fond references to crosses and other symbols of Christianity, the statement was a blatantly racist anti-Muslim provocation. In short order, a handful of other rural communities said they would follow Hérouxville’s example. The ADQ, languishing far behind in the polls, saw its fortunes rise sharply when it joined this ugly campaign in the name of upholding Quebec’s “traditional values.”

An outpouring of bigotry against Muslim girls and women soon followed. This included vile attacks on young Muslim girls for wearing the hijab (headscarf) at sporting events. Both Dumont and Charest ostentatiously endorsed banning an eleven-year-old girl from a suburban Montreal soccer tournament in February. Days before the election Boisclair, who had opposed this hijab ban, put himself in the vanguard of a campaign to bar the tiny minority of Muslim women who wear the niqab (full veil) from voting if they refused to lift it for identification. Quebec’s chief electoral officer faced death threats for his initial ruling that women wearing the niqab would face no obstacles in voting, and he quickly reversed himself.

This tide of state-backed anti-Muslim xenophobia parallels that in Europe, where veiled women are increasingly targeted for racist abuse. In Britain the ruling Labour Party has run point for a campaign to ban the niqab in certain areas of public life. This has seen teachers fired and girls excluded from school. In France in 2004 the state imposed a ban on the hijab in the schools, and now the Dutch government is proposing to ban the niqab in public places such as buses.

In English Canada, prominent Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente joined the hue and cry over the niqab, stating that the issue here is “Islamic separateness…the deliberate rejection of Western norms” (Globe and Mail, 24 October 2006). And in Quebec, Islamophobia is not confined to right-wingers, as shown by a March 22 statement by Quebec’s main feminist organization, the Fédération des femmes du Québec, which denounced the initial position of the Quebec electoral office allowing women wearing the niqab to vote. In taking this stance, these bourgeois feminists helped to fuel support for deeply reactionary forces like the ADQ, who seek to roll back the gains won by all women.

As Marxists—and therefore atheists and fighters for women’s liberation—we oppose the veil as both a symbol and an instrument of women’s oppression. Nonetheless we unambiguously oppose any state bans or restrictions on this or any other religious symbol as racist and discriminatory. The claim that banning the veil is designed to integrate Muslims into society is false to the core. These bans will only deepen the isolation and oppression of Muslim women, driving them from workplace and school, denying them the right to vote and barring them from using public services.

The present attacks on Muslim women are an aspect of the racist “war on terror.” Yet it is also true that in Quebec the “war on terror,” and particularly Canada’s role in the brutal occupation of Afghanistan, are unpopular. In 2003, the Québécois massively opposed Canadian participation in the U.S./British assault on Iraq in large part because the Canadian military has long been seen, rightly, as an enforcer of national oppression.

Quebec is certainly the most secular part of Canada, yet as the Hérouxville edicts made clear, Catholicism has hardly departed the stage, especially in the overwhelmingly francophone rural areas. Boisclair was himself attacked for proposing to remove the crucifix from the National Assembly. In our fight for the separation of religion and state, we Marxists insist that all modern religion is an instrument of reaction that defends capitalist exploitation and befuddles the working people. Religion should not have any official state backing; at the same time, people should be free to practice their religion without state interference and persecution. Thus while we denounce the racist bans on Muslims, we also opposed the plan to allow state-sanctioned sharia law in Ontario when this was proposed three years ago. As we noted at the time, for the Canadian rulers, nurturing religious reaction and smearing Muslims as “terrorists” both serve to regiment and scapegoat minorities.

Chauvinism, Nationalism and Racist Reaction

Much of the English Canadian media indulged in finger-wagging at the “intolerance” toward minorities shown during the Quebec elections. Their charge, implied or otherwise, was that Quebec nationalism is uniquely intolerant and reactionary, unlike the “multiculturalism” long touted as official policy by the rulers in Ottawa. This is rich indeed considering the federal government’s years-long witchhunt of Muslims, under the Liberals and Tories alike. From Maher Arar to the new all-Canadian “no-fly list,” this campaign has seen multiple frame-ups, detentions, people “rendered” to other countries to be tortured and a sustained assault on the rights of everyone. Moreover, while the sovereignist PQ certainly played its part in fomenting anti-Muslim bigotry, it was the staunchly federalist Charest and vaguely “autonomist” Dumont who were in the forefront of the attacks.

In any case, Stephen Harper et al. were quite satisfied with the outcome of the Quebec election. The feds and sections of the English-language media claimed it dealt (yet another!) death blow to Quebec sovereignty, and presented the decline of the PQ as a good sign for a “united Canada.” This is but the habitual self-delusion of Anglo-chauvinist federalism.

Even as the PQ vote dropped, support for sovereignty remains relatively high (about 45 percent, and much higher among francophones). Indeed, a good part of the ADQ’s support came from soft-core sovereignists who don’t want another losing referendum right now. Dumont’s talk of “autonomy” is purposely ambivalent, aiming to rally a section of the nationalist vote while offering Québécois capitalists a “safer” alternative than outright independence. As Toronto Star Quebec bureau chief Sean Gordon noted (31 March):

“But there is a reasonable case to be made that the sovereignty movement is in better shape than its traditional federalist rival….

“Quebec’s two mainstream sovereignist parties, the PQ and the smaller, left-wing Québec Solidaire, together won about as many votes as they did in 2003. The PQ had its worst performance in terms of total votes since 1970, but still gathered 28.5 per cent with arguably the most radical sovereignist platform in its history.”

The ADQ’s “autonomist” rhetoric harks back to the right-wing nationalist regime of Maurice Duplessis, who ran the province with an iron fist after World War II through a combination of religious obscurantism and repression, while English Canadian and American capitalists viciously exploited francophone workers. Today Dumont and the ADQ, like Duplessis, are right-wing demagogues rooted in conservative small-town Quebec. Their central aim is to roll back many of the gains for labour, women and youth stemming from the tumultuous social struggles that accompanied and fuelled Quebec’s modernizing Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. And that means attacking the labour movement and taking the knife to social programs.

As well as targeting immigrants and ethnic minorities—who are overwhelmingly concentrated in Montreal—the ADQ has pledged to uphold the “traditional family” through such measures as providing extra cash for more babies. Driven by Quebec’s low birth rate—its population growth has for many years been solely due to immigration—similar “baby bonus” schemes were also tried in the late 1980s by the Liberal regime of Robert Bourassa. The logic of such “family values” campaigns is that women are to blame for the low birthrate and hence Quebec’s “decline,” and to compel poor women in particular to bear more children. As always, behind this looms the shadow of attacks on abortion rights and on women’s integration into the workforce. As all-round reactionaries, the ADQ also fuelled the anti-homosexual bigotry against the PQ’s openly gay leader Boisclair that was an undercurrent in the election campaign.

Labour: Break With the PQ! Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!

We are proletarian revolutionaries who fight to overthrow the capitalist system of misery, oppression and wars in Canada and internationally. For this reason the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste advocates independence for Quebec—both to combat the Anglo chauvinism that dominates in Canada, and to break the hold of the defensive nationalism it engenders among Québécois workers. Chauvinism and nationalism serve to tie the workers to the belief that “their” capitalist masters are somehow allies, as opposed to the brutal exploiters they really are. We advocate independence as the means to get the national question off the agenda and bring the class question to the fore. Workers must come to see that all nationalisms are ultimately tools of the bosses and that, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, “The working men have no country.”

The long history of English Canadian chauvinism and keenly felt national oppression has meant that the Québécois working class is largely pro-sovereignty. The rise of nationalism was fuelled by intense language discrimination, especially in the workplace, military occupation in 1970 (threatened again in 1995 in the context of the sovereignty referendum) and much more. But the national and social aspirations of the Québécois workers have long been channeled by Quebec’s nationalist union tops into support for the bourgeois-nationalist PQ. In turn, the PQ has alternated with the Liberals in administering Quebec on behalf of the bosses, carrying out some of the most sweeping attacks on trade unions and social programs.

Boisclair attempted to distance the PQ from its union allies before the recent election campaign. Nevertheless, most unions called to vote for this capitalist party, and the PQ retained the strongholds of its francophone working-class base in east-end Montreal, suburban Longueuil and the industrial and mining areas of the Canadian Shield in the north. When the PQ is in power, the leaders of the FTQ, CSN and CSQ union federations look to “concertation” (collaboration) with the government. When the Liberals rule, as has been the case since 2003, they feign a more oppositional stance, only to undermine labour’s struggles in the service of support to the PQ.

In 2003 and 2004, attacks by the Charest Liberals provoked the biggest labour mobilizations in two decades. The following year, tens of thousands of college and university students hit the streets in a province-wide student strike. Yet these struggles were demobilized by the pro-capitalist union tops, who caved in shamefully when Charest imposed contracts on half a million public sector workers in December 2005. They called off strikes and mass protests and told workers to look instead to the next elections to “teach Charest a lesson.”

Now the results are in, and the “lesson” is that not only is Charest still in power, but the ADQ official opposition is if anything even more committed to gutting union rights and social programs. All sections of the Quebec capitalists see taking on the unions (especially in the public sector) as key to their aim of increasing productivity and competitiveness. In late 2005 former PQ premier Lucien Bouchard joined with a number of right-wing federalist bosses in the widely publicized manifesto “For a Clear-Eyed Vision of Quebec” (Pour un Québec Lucide) that called for sweeping attacks on social programs and “privileged” Quebec workers.

Dumont’s call for more autonomy from English Canada was linked to a promise to “clean up” the province’s finances through savage cutbacks and further attacks on the unions. Aside from Dumont, the ADQ’s only other well-known figure is Gilles Taillon, former head of the rabidly anti-union Quebec employers association. And the PQ’s likely future leader after Boisclair’s post-election resignation, Pauline Marois, was a central figure in the PQ governments of the late 1990s as it launched frontal attacks on organized labour and social programs.

The only answer to the coming capitalist onslaught is hard class struggle against the exploiters and their government, wielding labour’s social power at the head of all the oppressed. Yet in the wake of the elections, the union tops remain firmly wedded to their bankrupt class-collaborationist perspective. While the FTQ bureaucrats openly back the PQ, former CSN president Gérard Larose (now head of the Conseil de la souveraineté) has called for a “new sovereignist coalition.” But you can’t fight the Liberals or ADQ with the equally capitalist PQ. What is needed is a break with all the political representatives of the bosses and the forging of a workers party committed to the class struggle in both English Canada and Quebec!

Labour Must Defend Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities!

The bourgeoisie’s attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities—the most vulnerable and exploited sectors of the working class—are poison to labour’s struggle. Muslims and other ethnic minorities make up a growing part of the working class in the Montreal area. This simply underscores that to win against the bosses requires defending the unity and integrity of the working class against racist anti-immigrant demagogy. An injury to one is an injury to all! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

The increased prevalence of the Islamic veil in Quebec, as elsewhere, is in part due to the rise of political Islam internationally. It is also a result of the relentless racism and poverty suffered by Muslim immigrants and their descendants in the imperialist centers. The “multiculturalism” policies promoted by the Canadian rulers have served to reinforce the cultural and racial segregation of minority communities under a mask of “tolerance” and “anti-racism.” Among other things, they obscure the fact that minority communities, like the rest of society, are class-divided, and that the struggles of immigrant and other minority workers for jobs, unions and equal status requires breaking the grip of religious and other conservative “community leaders.”

Since the narrow defeat of the 1995 sovereignty referendum—which then PQ leader Jacques Parizeau blamed on “money and the ethnic vote”—the PQ has attempted to shed its image of hostility to immigrants and minorities. Increasing numbers of second-generation ethnic minorities in Montreal, most of whom integrate into francophone Quebec society rather than the anglophone minority, now support sovereignty, though still in a lower proportion than among “old stock” francophones.

Whatever their particular posture, however, all the bourgeois parties—federalist, sovereignist and “autonomist”—necessarily promote racism against minorities, because such “divide and rule” policies are intrinsic to a social system based on the grinding exploitation of the working class. We Marxists fight for the voluntary integration of all minorities based on full equality. But we understand that eradicating racism, women’s oppression and all forms of discrimination requires a revolutionary struggle, mobilizing the power of the proletariat to uproot capitalism and liberate humanity from poverty and want.

Québec Solidaire: A Populist Trap

This class-struggle perspective is definitely not shared by the various reformist left groups in Quebec who have immersed themselves in Québec Solidaire (QS), the new populist political party. Dissatisfied with the PQ’s right-wing profile under Boisclair, a layer of more left-inclined nationalists have shifted their adherence to QS. While polling only 3.6 percent province-wide, QS leaders Amir Khadir and Françoise David won nearly 30 percent of the vote in their ridings in Montreal’s francophone Plateau-Mont-Royal district, a center of left-leaning artists, student youth and intellectuals.

But QS is not even a half-step toward an anti-capitalist alternative. While winning endorsement from some union leaders including the Montreal CSN, QS’s election platform made not even a rhetorical nod to the class struggle, let alone socialism. Instead, it was a laundry list of sub-reformist demands such as increased taxes on dividends and nationalization of the wind energy sector. This party, many of whose leaders are leftovers from Quebec’s once large “Marxist-Leninist” (Maoist) organizations of the 1970s, is an obstacle to forging the anti-capitalist proletarian leadership that is so urgently needed.

From the International Socialists (I.S.) to Socialist Action, Gauche Socialiste and the Quebec Communist Party (PCQ), the reformist left groups in Quebec are well-nigh uncritical cheerleaders for the petty-bourgeois QS. The I.S.’s French-language paper Résistance (January 2007) saluted QS’s tepid platform as “a clear rupture with neo-liberalism.” For the PCQ, it is “daring in its feminist, ecologist, and socially progressive tendencies” (“Quebec: A High Stakes Election,” 12 April 2007). That self-described leftists would hail QS’s populist pablum testifies to their abandonment of even a pretense of fighting for socialist revolution.

Workers and youth looking for a way forward must break with the nationalist consensus in Quebec (including left variants such as QS) and take up the fight for an internationalist proletarian perspective. Our call for Quebec independence is an element of this struggle. But only socialist revolution will lay the basis for a vast increase in production worldwide, ending poverty and scarcity and opening the road to full human emancipation, including the final liberation of women from the stultifying hold of family and religion. The Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste fights to forge a party of socialist revolution to lead the binational, multiethnic proletariat in a struggle to put an end to racist capitalism. Down with anti-Muslim racism! For the fighting unity of the working class!