Barrel Strength

I thought the Herouxville Declaration was completely reasonable: it said that Quebecois don’t stone women, don’t want their women in veils, they eat pork and they have no intention of submitting to Islam. Immigrants should accommodate to our ways of doing things, and not natives to them, in all essentials. I agree. This is what immigrants do anyway, within a couple of generations, unless prevented by government policies. Of the Muslims we are not as sure as we would like to be, and the jury is still out. If you actually bother to read the Declaration, you will find little or nothing with which to disagree.

I am under no illusions about French Canada however. My sympathy for the reasonableness of the Herouxville Declaration has not blinded me to the general tribalism of the place. There is a completely unself-conscious racialism/tribalism/nationalism here that offers no apologies about itself. The purpose of the state is to protect the French-Canadian nation/tribe/race, however called. As an English-Quebecer, I have had my language subjected to discriminatory legislation and have seen my community reduced by hundreds of thousands of people since 1976, as we departed for better linguistic and commercial climes.

It is quite difficult for some liberal minds to adjust to the reality that their compatriots are splendid people who do not give damn for political correctness. “Les anglais” are just a richer and more educated sort of foreigner than Caribbeans, say, and possibly more useful, but neither should step out of their place. The place is run by, for and about the interests of French-Canadians, and get used to it.

My friend, the Count of Amsterdam, a Quebec-raised emigrant to Los Angeles, said he spent the winter watching the testimony before the Bouchard Taylor Commission on “reasonable accommodation”. He was fascinated by the overt racism and xenophobia of the Quebecois testifying. Having spent his working life in Los Angeles, the melting pot, he was fascinated by the witnesses’ insistence that immigrants should be exactly like the people they are immigrating towards.

Having lived here for longer, I felt inclined to defend their rights to express themselves in politically incorrect ways: it is how they feel, after all.

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission report has been leaked in advance. The reports in the Montreal Gazette indicate that the Commission believes that the burden of adjustments falls on us rather than on the immigrant.

“The main goal of adjustments is to protect minorities against flaws in the laws of the majority, and not the contrary. [The adjustments] ensure that every person enjoys the same rights. Sometimes different treatment is needed to ensure an equal right. It’s not a question of a privilege. It is a reasonable adaptation.”

Unhappily, the falsity of this position will not be exposed to the ridicule it deserves because the linguistic fascists of Quebec will also trounce the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. You don’t like them and I don’t like them, but we also don’t like the basic premise of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, which is that we have to adapt to the “rights” of immigrants. One of the rights seems to include the right not to adapt to the host culture.

I think it s great mistake to frame discussion of cultural adpatations exclusively in terms of rights. One critic of multi-culti in Britain always used the example of the Aztec immigrants who insisted on their right to conduct live human sacrifices to the angry sun–god Huitzlilopotchli. The same blindness to the issue informs the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. The assertion of “rights” is not an unequivocal good. With every right comes a corresponding obligation on others to respect your rights. The multiplication of “rights” is the multiplication of the responsibilities of others to respect them. Just as with pollution, the “rights” are off-loaded onto the community, and the community bears the cost. The Bouchard-Taylor approach imagines that there is no cost in social cohesion, efficiency or any othe rimportant social value to paid for the expression by others of their rights to be different.

The folly of Bouchard-Taylor and their ilk is that they conflate every right with every other, without a hierarchy among them, so that by the end of this infinite inflation of rights, the value of rights is the same as German Reichsmark in the hyper-inflation of the 1920s. And you know where that led to. I see the same devaluation of rights being caused by the hyper-inflation of rights in the rights-obsessed society we are engineering in Canada

One of the continuing sources of mystery in my life has been the prominence of Charles Taylor in the liberal imagination. I cannot think of a practical or theoretical issue on which he has been right, yet his pious maunderings are received as holy gospel among certain elites. We must not confuse personal decency and high-mindedness, which he possesses in spades, with pragmatic judgment, in which he is as deficient as can be.