The Montreal Gazette has published an excellent letter from a Canadian now resident in Richmond responding to Quebec premier Pauline Marois’s attack on multiculturalism in Britain.
Category Archives: Secular
Ad aims to lure Quebec doctors to Ontario, targeting values charter
An Ontario hospital is trying to lure Quebec-trained health care workers by tapping into the controversy surrounding Quebec’s values charter.
Lakeridge Health is planning to run the ad, which features a woman wearing a headscarf, in a McGill University student newspaper. The ad says: “We don’t care what’s on your head. We care what’s in it.”
“We thought, given the controversy that’s going on in Quebec … maybe this would be an opportunity to create some awareness of what Lakeridge Health is,” said Kevin Empey, chief executive of the Oshawa-based hospital.
The ‘counterjihad’ movement finds a new ally
Two weeks ago the self-styled Free Press Society and its Danish/Swedish publication Dispatch International announced that they have invited Stephen Lennon and Kevin Carroll to visit Scandinavia for a speaking tour later this month. The English Defence League leaders are to address meetings in Malmö and Copenhagen where they will explain “why they oppose England’s Islamization and how they go about it”.
Dispatch International was launched in August 2012, with Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard as editors, to serve as an organ of the international “counterjihad” movement. The far-right Sweden Democrats party (which observed that it had “many connections … both personal and ideological” with the Free Press Society) was so impressed with the new publication that it sent a free copy to each of its six thousand members. Challenged at a press conference over whether he was happy distributing a newspaper that compares Islam to Nazism, Sweden Democrats spokesperson Richard Jomshof said he thought this was “a perfectly reasonable comparison”.
Quebec: Values charter is ‘conspicuously’ not about secularism
Writing in the Montreal Gazette, Don Macpherson carries out a thorough demolition of the Parti Québécois government’s proposed “Charter of Quebec Values”.
Alan Sked defends multiculturalism, opposes veil ban, accuses UKIP of ‘dog whistle policy to racists’
Amanda Kelly of Global News has interviewed Alan Sked, the founder and former leader of UKIP, to get his perspective on Quebec’s Charter of Values.
Charter of Quebec values would ban religious symbols for civil servants
Public employees would not be allowed to wear overt religious symbols at work under the proposed charter of Quebec values, released by the Parti Québécois today.
The minister in charge of the charter, Bernard Drainville, announced at the national assembly that, if adopted by the legislature, the wearing of kippas, turbans, burkas, hijabs and “large” crosses would be banned for civil servants while they are on the job. “If the state is neutral, those working for the state should be equally neutral in their image,” said Drainville.
Secularism charter for French schools targets Muslims
All pupils in French state schools will be reminded this week that they are not allowed to wear items of religious clothing such as headscarves or crucifixes, nor object to the school curriculum on religious grounds, in a 15-point written statement to be displayed on school walls.
Hijabs banned in Siberian village school
Prosecutors in southern Siberia have demanded that high school girls in a remote mountain village give up Muslim headscarves in classes to avoid violating a new nationwide secular dress code.
A check found some hijab-wearing students in a school in the Kosh-Agachsky district of Russia’s Altai Republic, local prosecutors said on their website Friday.
Quebec premier says multiculturalism led to bombings in England
Pauline Marois has marked her first year in power by claiming multiculturalism is to blame for violence and “bomb throwing” in England as she seeks to push ahead with her controversial Charter of Quebec Values.
The Quebec premier, who says she is proud of her first year in power even though she admits it’s been difficult, told Montreal’s Le Devoir that secularism measures will be phased in over a few years.
Quebec teachers’ union calls for freedom to wear hijabs, kippas
Teachers in Quebec say the Parti Quebecois proposal to prevent people from wearing religious icons and symbols is extremist – and not truly secular.
The Autonomous Teachers Federation (FAE) approves, in principle, of secular values and the separation of religion from the business of the state, but says that is not what the PQ is actually proposing.
“The right of our members to work is at stake,” said FAE president Sylvain Mallette, pointing out that many teachers wear religious icons, being they crosses, kippas, hijabs, or something else which reflects their faith.