Taken by DanJackson_UK, Flickr Creative Commons
Fresh on the heels of the Bouchard-Taylor commission is a new pledge that the Quebec government will require immigrants to sign. The pledge asserts “Quebec values” including French as an official language, gender equality and the separation of church and state. Link to the cbc.ca story is here.
This pledge doesn’t seem to have any practical application. What do they expect to happen: someone travels all the way here, refuses to sign the pledge, and Quebec manages to keep out those who don’t want to assimilate? Or, conversely, an immigrant signs and we can expect no cultural tension from then on in? The only real effect this pledge appears to have is to offend many and create further divisiveness both in Quebec and throughout Canada.
The comments on the CBC story are, as usual, more disheartening than the story itself: while some criticize the idea of the pledge, many do so while making fun of Quebec; others applaud the move as a good one to “protect Canadian culture.” Are we this insecure about Canadian culture that we think a pledge is going to protect it?
Most offensive to me was this comment by a CBC user called Social Programming. Responding to a user named Patriot Games, who pointed out that every Canadian, excluding Aboriginals, can trace lineage back to immigration, Social Programming said
For your information my ancestors were not immigrants. They were adventurers, settlers, pioneers and explorers. The guy named Habib at 7-11 who eyes me suspiciously when I walk past the penny candies as if I were about to engage in thievery… that guy is an immigrant.
Interesting how “adventures, settlers, pioneers and explorers” can also be “colonizers, murderers, losers, and racists” in another legitimate interpretation of history, one that acknowledges the systematic suffering experienced by Aboriginal peoples following the arrival of European “adventurers.” Why don’t people realize that this juvenile “We were here first” attitude popular on these anti-immigration threads can lead only to an ideology that would see everyone but the truly First Nations Canadians being kicked off the continent?
Social Programming’s words highlight a common (and unfortunate) negative connotation of the word “immigrant” that illustrates how complicated this whole issue gets when we start looking at semantics. For example, if the Quebec immigration pledge asserts the equality of the sexes, then what is next – a problematic assertion that wearing the hijab , for example, violates this equality, and then eventually a pledge against hijabs is put into place?
The pledge, in short, is an act of bullying scrawled on paper: and, at that, it is highly ambiguous bullying. Why aren’t our governments making more provisions to welcome immigrants by, say, providing them with information on where to access free or subsidized classes in French and English, instead of saying “You’d better learn French or else you should just go back to your home country.” Way to say bienvenue.
