A disgrace

A column from Le Devoir's Monday editions, by Jean-François Nadeau

The original version of this column, published in Le Devoir on Monday.

[Earlier this month Radio-Canada reported that more than 100 support staff working in Montreal’s largest school board had lost their jobs because of Quebec’s new secularism law, Bill 94. Quebec has already had a law since 2019 making it illegal for teachers to wear conspicuous religious symbols. That’s Bill 21, recently the subject of a week’s hearings at the Supreme Court of Canada. The new law extends that ban to special-education teachers, lunchroom monitors and other support staff, and while it applies in theory to men and women of any religion, every reported actual job loss has been a case of Muslim women who insisted on wearing head scarves.

On Monday Jean-François Nadeau dedicated his weekly column in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir to the new job losses caused by the extended secularism law. While it took the long way around to getting to its main topic, it ended up as a memorably angry column, one that took the side of the women who’ve lost their jobs rather than indulging some theoretical debate about constitutional law. I decided to republish Nadeau’s column in English, and I am grateful to Le Devoir for granting me the rights.

A few times over the last several years in my own writing I’ve sometimes tried to explain the motivation behind these laws, a desire to establish a strong separation between church and state, inspired to some extent by political thinking in France and by Quebec’s own heritage of Catholic Church domination before the Quiet Revolution. For my efforts I’ve sometimes been roundly mocked by colleagues in Toronto. In fact, as I’ve also written, whatever their motivation, I think these laws are deeply misguided. What encourages me is that one hardly needs to be an anglophone or an outsider to share this opinion. A large number of journalists, lawyers, politicians and academics in Quebec do too. The so-called Quebec consensus on these matters is shaky indeed. Here’s Jean-Francois Nadeau. — pw]

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“The first time I saw homeless people was when I arrived in Paris. There weren’t any in Montreal.” That is what Montreal pianist Hélène Mercier-Arnault stated, in all seriousness, during an interview.

This happened in France, on RTL, a leading private radio outlet. The pianist was there to promote a new album. This particular bit of her interview was discreetly edited out before broadcast. But it resurfaced anyway, and several news outlets picked it up. Since then, Hélène Mercier-Arnault has insisted she was misunderstood.

So what are we to make of another excerpt, also trimmed before airing, in which she added: “What I’m about to say may shock you. The homeless — I don’t think about them every day.”

And why would she, really? After all, homelessness, in her view, is a “lifestyle choice, made by people who have decided to give up on society. It’s a withdrawal from the world.”

Faced with such a phenomenon, the only thing to do, apparently, is to recoil. It’s every man for himself, and to each their own choices. Pianist Hélène Mercier-Arnault has chosen to live in luxury. It must be said that in marrying Bernard Arnault, she didn’t exactly wed a pauper. Her husband reigns over the LVMH group, the global giant of ultra-luxury. In the palm of his hand he holds brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Givenchy, Fendi, Bulgari, Sephora, Dom Pérignon, and Tiffany & Co. The man also owns newspapers, and is an avid art collector. In short: these are people who do not end up on the pavement.

The 77-year-old magnate holds an estimated fortune of $220 billion, an amount comparable to the GDP of countries like New Zealand, Hungary, or Greece. Bernard Arnault ranks ninth among the wealthiest people in the world, and possesses Europe’s single largest fortune. His wife therefore orbits, like him, in a gilded nebula alongside such latter-day gods as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. No wonder these people see no homeless on the sidewalks they walk. In their world, which no longer touches the ground, one looks toward the heavens of money before looking at people.

The most recent count of homelessness in Quebec recorded more than 12,000 people living on the streets. Yet faced with such injustice, it’s not the super-rich who face scrutiny. While social inequalities multiply, we instead tighten the screws elsewhere: on people whose crime is to be too visible.

School service centres, a legacy of the Legault government, have begun applying the new provisions of the secularism law, leading to the dismissal or forced departure of daycare educators who wear the veil. Yet surely a society’s right to swing its fist should stop where somebody else’s nose begins.

In Montreal, nearly 150 employees have been fired or forced out. And Radio-Canada reports that 146 positions remain unfilled. So even though schools are short of qualified staff, we push people out in the name of a whim.

We show the door to women who have broken no law, harmed no one, and failed in no professional duty. Their veil becomes a pretext for fantasies and suspicions, in contempt of the essential work they perform every day for children.

In a school system already grappling with challenges like dropout rates, overcrowded classrooms, special needs, and lack of resources, was it really so urgent this spring to fire appreciated, qualified, well-integrated women? Is this truly how the injustices within this leaking-from-every-seam education system will be corrected?

This is what the operation unfolding before our eyes comes down to: making a very real shortage worse in order to satisfy an idea of secularism presented as an almost sacred necessity. Tying ourselves in knots to fend off some great Satan on the verge of devouring our children.

In fact what we’re doing is sacrificing competent, beloved people on the altar of principles whipped into a froth, even if it means pressing others deemed more acceptable into service, simply because they dress differently. It’s as though we decided symbols matter more than children. Is Quebec mad about its children, or just mad?

A friend, stunned by this law being applied without restraint, told me: we now have to explain to children why women they love, who care for them well, are being forced to leave from one day to the next. It makes the children cry more often than smile. This same friend also noted that many of these women are among the most educated in the system. They came here with credentials the system doesn’t recognize. Their French is impeccable. We applauded their arrival, celebrated their presence. Now we show them the door.

Once again, it is women who pay the price of this moral crusade. Competent educators, technicians, supervisors, and attendants. We tell ourselves we’re defending their freedom by punishing them. We say we’re protecting them as we humiliate them. We claim equality is our goal while we target those who, in practice, have the least of it. And then we let ourselves off the hook by saying they made a “lifestyle choice.” Just a simple choice. What a convenient turn of phrase. It covers up so many injustices.

It’s a disgrace.