The Great Unveiling

This veil business is surprisingly interesting, something I've never paid much attention to until Dan and Sol wrote about it. So congrats, guys, you're getting me to stop thinking about America and start thinking about Canada.

The larger issue here, as Dan briefly touched on, is that Canada has one broad standard of cultural acceptance, and Quebec has a much narrower one. I made mention of this in the comments for Dan's post, but a not insignificant portion of the Canadian elementary/high school social studies curriculum is devoted to parsing the differences between Canadian "multiculturalism" and American melting pot-ism. Obviously, any attempt to talk about Canada and America is fraught with problems of identity, autonomy, and inferiority, and I still to this day do not fully understand what the distinction is or why its a good thing. The 30-word summary of it, though, is that Canadian immigrants are allowed to retain their cultural heritage (becoming Italian-Canadians or Indian-Canadians) while American immigrants have to take a citizenship test and assimilate (becoming Americans, full stop).

Now, much ink has been spilled debating whether this is a good idea. Frankly, I'm no ultra-nationalist, but I think that if Canadians are seriously concerned about maintaining cultural and political autonomy from our neighbors to the south, we need to do a better job of making people proud to be and proud to be called Canadian. At the moment, the "mosaic" approach makes citizenship in Canada look like a great dental plan: of course you're glad to have it, but it ain't you, man. The concept of Canadian identity is largely detached from any social or civic obligation, leaving it to the predations of beer companies and heritage moments.

As we all know and have experienced, Quebec, the nation within a nation, has a much different take on this, one that is fundamentally irreconcilable with the federal concept of multiculturalism. The provincial government has a huge say in determining a) what is part of the Quebec identity b) whether it should be legally enforced and c) how. As the demographics of the country have turned against them (no link, but the French-only population is on the decline), the aggressive defense of French Canadian identity has picked up steam. One can see that in the veil ban, something we seem to all agree has very little to do with feminism and as Dan pointed out effects a very, very small portion of the population.

The problem, for me, is Ignatieff's response. Yes, he's only opposition leader, but he's highlighting a political dynamic that I expect we will be dealing with for some time. In short, the current balance in the House of Commons makes Quebec an incredibly valuable piece of real estate. Conservatives have, in the last three elections, worked hard to take seats from the Bloc, with varying success, largely because they realize that a majority government can only realistically be formed with some portion of French seats. As a result, both the Liberals and the Conservatives have adopted a strategy of neutralization: if they can take away the nationalist reasons for voting for the Bloc, they might have a shot with the Quebec electorate. Harper's 'nation within a nation' is an obvious example of this, and I think Ignatieff's comment on the veil issue is too.

So the federal political climate is basically letting Quebec drift even further away from the multicultural ideal than it was before. This is the worst of both worlds: Canada on the national level remains undefined, while Quebec becomes more and more absurd and militant about its own identity. Stressing the flexibility and openness of Canadian society while tacitly letting Quebec close in on itself is a recipe for disaster, the kind that rhymes with "shmeparation" and maybe also with "shmederal shmissolution".