"Am I still a Quebecer?"
"Am I still a Quebecer?"
Amid a rise in hate crimes and after another nasty election, Muslims in Quebec say they fear what's next.
Sometimes Eve Torres wonders if the hijab she wears is really hers anymore.
Of course, it’s literally her hijab. She sports it with aplomb, using the headscarf to accent whatever brightly coloured outfit she’s wearing that day.
What Torres means, is that — in Quebec — it often feels like her decision to wear the hijab no longer belongs to her. This choice, this deeply personal choice about her body and faith, has been hijacked and turned into a political wedge that’s pushing Muslim women further into the margins.
She says it was true of the federal campaign that wrapped up Monday just as it was true of her own foray into politics during the 2018 provincial election.
“The columnists had a field day when I ran. Denise Bombardier said it was a sign of ‘Quebec’s dark future,’” said Torres, speaking of her ill-fated run as a Québec Solidaire candidate. “Mathieu Bock-Côté, who is in France now thank God, he joined right in. ‘The Islamist launches a political campaign.’ That’s what he wrote. I wasn’t even a person to them. I was Muslim.
“It was a dirty campaign. … There were death threats and defamation in the press that would inevitably be repeated by my political opponents. … That’s what I’ll take away from my experience in Quebec politics.”
The re-election Monday of a minority Liberal government didn’t offer much encouragement for Torres. Once a staunch opponent of Bill 21 (Quebec’s religious symbols ban), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seemed to avoid the subject at all costs throughout the 36-day race.
When the moderator of this election’s only English language debate criticized the religious symbols ban, she was accused of Quebec bashing from pundits of every political stripe. None bothered much with the Muslim women whose lives have been upended by a law that prevents them from teaching in public school or practicing law in a Quebec court.
In fairness to the politicians who’ve gone silent on Bill 21, it’s hard to see the benefit of publicly criticizing Premier François Legault.
His approval rating peaked at 77 per cent last spring, making him far and away the most popular premier in the history of modern Quebec. The provincial Liberals, meanwhile, are polling at least 20 points behind Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec.
But to Torres and two young Muslim women who spoke to me on election night, this isn’t about poll numbers or seat projections. It’s about whether or not they get to be full citizens in their home province. It’s about whether they can even call themselves Quebecers anymore.
As we watched the electoral returns together, there wasn’t much hope that things will get any better for these women. If anything, they worried about what’s coming next.
***
Safa Salman is a lot of things.
She’s a diehard soccer fan, a climate activist and a second-year law student at the University of Ottawa. She’s a bit of a politics nerd too, having participated in mock parliament during her time as a college student in Montreal.
What struck me, when we spoke Monday, was the measured tone she used to describe the humiliation some Muslims have to live with. All she wants to do with her life is practice law in her home province but that’s impossible right now.
Because of all the things that Salman is — hard working, kind, generous and self-deprecating — all that matters to this government is a thin layer of fabric wrapped around her face.
“What hurts me the most are these boxes people try to put us in,” said Salman. “It’s like I have to fit into this stereotype of an introverted woman, a woman not like other women. When, in fact, my hijab says absolutely nothing about me or who I am. And it hurts. Just because I wear this veil, doesn’t mean I'm closed minded, it doesn’t make me anything except who I already am.
“My biggest hope is to graduate in a world without Bill 21.”
You could see a lump forming in Torres’ throat as she listened to Salman. It was for this generation of young Muslim women that Torres ran in the 2018 provincial elections.
“I did it to shake things up,” said Torres, a community organizer and feminist. “I did it to motivate people who look like me to stand up and say, ‘We’re Quebecers just like anyone else.’ We’re here, whether we were born here or we emigrated here.’ I’ve been here 22 years. I redid my law degree here, my daughter is going to law school here, we give back to our community. I don’t have to prove my love for Quebec to anyone. And I don’t need to prove my love for the French language either.
“I was at the Human Right Commission after the (2017) massacre at the mosque in Quebec City. And we went around Quebec, investigating hate crimes. Asking Muslims, Black people, Jewish people, people of colour what the political climate and the media coverage, what impact that was having.
“There were many of us who needed psychological support after everything we heard. (Bill 21) changed people’s lives, it took away people’s dreams. Quebec made some of its own people second class citizens. And that’s unacceptable. So when it comes to people offended by a debate question, methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Seated on a couch across from Torres, Dina Husseini doubled over laughing. It’s hard not to be seduced by Torres' deadpan humour. Husseini doesn’t wear a head covering so her experience is slightly different from Salman and Torres’s.
“I’m invisible Muslim. Unless I tell you, you probably don’t know,” said Husseini, the co-founder of Youth Inclusion, which helps young people of colour get involved in politics.
“I don’t live with the same obstacles hijabi women do. But when I tell people I’m Muslim, that’s when the obstacles emerge. That’s when my life, in the public sphere, changes. Am I still welcome to debate Bill 21? Am I still a Quebecer?
“I become the other. I am no longer Dina who was born here. I become the second generation immigrant, I become someone who doesn’t belong here.”
I ask her if it ever feels like her membership in Quebec society is conditional. Does it ever seem like she’s only a full citizen until she’s critical of Bill 21?
“It feels like it, yes,” she says. “What is Quebec identity? Am I still a Quebecer even though my parents came from Lebanon? Am I a Quebecer even though I’m Muslim? It feels like I always have to second guess my own identity.
“I feel like I’m in a constant fight between who I am, who I want to be and what society says I am. Do I have to see myself as an immigrant even though I was born here? And yet, I am Canadian, I am a Quebecer, I’m a Montrealer and I come from Côte-des-Neiges. That’s how I identify first, as a woman from Côte-des-Neiges. Not as a Canadian, not as a Quebecer, not even as a Montrealer.
“But to some people, that’s not the real Quebec.”
***
Just as there’s been no motivation, lately, for politicians to challenge Premier Legault, it seems the opposite is true when it comes to demonizing Muslims.
Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet has repeatedly implied that people who practice Islam are homophobic, submissive and not in line with progressive values. Legault praises the work of firebrand columnist Mathieu Bock Côté, whose writing paints Islam as an existential threat to Quebec and the western world.
“(Blanchet) is surfing on this wave of Islamophobia,” said Torres. “There’s no consequences for him when he goes home at night. He’s just courting votes. And that’s politics, it’s like this fun game where you try to seduce certain voters with these identity politics.
“For us, there are real consequences.”
This is a national problem, not one limited to Quebec. Hate crimes against Muslims in Canada increased from 45 in 2012 to 181 in 2018, according to Statistics Canada. And that was before a terrorist killed a Muslim family outside a mosque in London, Ont. in June.
A study by the research group CISION found a 600 per cent rise in hate speech on Canadian social media from 2015 to 2016. One of the most frequent hashtags used in these posts was #muslimban. Since 2015, there have been more Muslims killed in targeted hate crimes in Canada than any other G-7 country, according to a report by the National Council of Canadian Muslims.
Police meanwhile, investigate less than 1 per cent of the self-reported hate crimes in Canada. That’s what a recent investigation by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network found.
And yet, none of the federal parties came forward during this election to address the crisis of Islamophobia in our country. Whether it’s modernizing our hate speech laws to better suit the social media era or supporting victims throughout the complaint process, solutions exist.
“What we see reported to police, that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Torres.
She says most Muslims she knows don’t think the police will take them seriously. And even if they did, the process of reporting and reliving the trauma may not feel like it’s worth the trouble. So they learn to live with the expectation that sometimes they’ll be shouted down in public, harassed online or, God forbid, suffer a worse fate.
We in the media play a role in this too. Between horse race election coverage and dozens of Quebec bashing columns, there wasn’t much room in the conversation for people like Torres.
“For some in Quebec to deny the existence of systemic racism on one hand and then to put Quebec bashing centre stage, that was the problem with this election,” said Salman. “It’s as though Quebec bashing has become the only argument so that we can avoid speaking honestly and critically of Bill 21.”
Husseini wonders if the fight over Bill 21 is already lost and, if it is, she says she’s afraid of what will come next.
“I think we’re in the beginning of a dark period, we’re where France was 20 years ago,” she said. “Now is the time to mobilize, to get a coalition of people from different walks of life to fight to preserve our basic freedoms and even to advance them. Because this is just the beginning of a right wing wave that’s fuelled by these identity issues.
“At least, that’s what it feels like when you’re Muslim.”
These interviews were a result of our collaboration with La Converse, a Quebec-based media outlet that supports work by journalists of colour, women and others who don’t often get the platform they deserve. Check out La Converse online and consider supporting its work.
Lela Savić, who founded the outlet, is a former Metro Montreal reporter and a board member at the journalism advocacy group Press Forward.
That must have been such an interesting but heavy experience! Those ladies are so right on-I'm very worried about the rise of the right. I'm not sure what we can do about it - the People's Party got 10% of the popular vote, 800,000 votes! Biden is being assailed by the unflexibles in his own party, and I think Trudeau is a weak leader, but the best of a bad lot. Are we being pushed by mob rule? Very unsettling. And then there's climate. Sheesh! I was wondering what you were doing election night...