Everything seems to have been said, written, commented on about the Elghawaby affair. However, in private as in public, many still have a lot to say about the state of the battlefield after more than a week of salvos and struggles. There’s mud and scars, and we haven’t finished counting the victims.
Already, we can see the result of 10 days of war of words: excuses extracted from Amira Elghawaby which will never be as sincere as many wished, multiculturalists reinforced in their certainty that Quebec is racist.
The usual followers of Quebec bashing are crippled, the proponents of secularism are crying out loud, but not only: a large part of French-speaking Quebec feels outraged. The shores between the bridges that were to be built by the ideological position of in charge of the fight against Islamophobia have moved away, and not only with regard to the question of Islam.
Ten days later, we say that Justin Trudeau is multiplying attempts to set fire to the social climate in Quebec with full knowledge of the facts. Two weeks ago, he set the table by announcing his intention to ask the Supreme Court about the use of the notwithstanding clause on Bills 21 and 96.
Mr. Trudeau knew very well, by naming a practicing Muslim who, in her writings and her speeches, has never been kind to Quebec, that he was going to cause an outcry in non-multicultural French-speaking Quebec. It even yelled in his Quebec caucus. You just have to see how Boucar Diouf1 and Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin2authors of legitimate texts on the appointment of Mr.me Elghawaby, saw hordes of hate unleashed. And what about the reactions of the ROC (rest of Canada).
The PM, usually soft and inconsistent, has however, for some time, been intractable towards Quebec. It’s starting to look like a leitmotif, this way of surfing the neo-Quebec bashingto maintain distrust, even aggressiveness towards a province portrayed as colonialist, racist, the two supreme flaws in the country of identity inclusion, as if the ROC escaped it…
These gestures are deliberate and calculated. First the creation of the litigious post, then the way of delivering Quebec as food to “Quebecophobes”. The idea being to play in the head, in the image that Quebecers have of themselves, then especially, in that which the ROC has of us: intolerant and racist.
Not to mention how Trudeau is in the process of modifying the social fabric of Quebec, in fact. By leaving the consequences of the massive opening of Roxham Road to Quebec’s responsibility, he is committing another insensitivity. He knows that he is mortgaging social services, education, housing resources in extreme tension without managing the difficult daily operability.
He plays on the proverbial sense of welcome of Quebecers, makes us (and the Legault government) pass for a people hostile to immigration, when this is false, and it is high time that the federal government, even if he pays a substantial part of the generated invoice, his sense of responsibility prevails over his cynicism.
So, like a great architect, mockingly, Justin Trudeau observes the result of his deliberate acts. The land is devastated. A double gap has been opened: between Muslims and other Quebecers, between Quebec and Canada.
In the blind spot, Muslims of whom little is said; those who are however in the majority in Quebec and in Canada, moreover, who are religious (or not), and when they are, do not claim a strict and political Islam. They aspire to live in peace, like Quebecers and Canadians.
It must really offend them that we thought of creating a single position in charge of the fight against Islamophobia, that the federal government assigns them and reduces ALL of them to their religion, and even then, in its most rigid aspects, and that he believes this is the ideal way to build bridges.
Singling out Muslims to such an extent, when religion is not, for the majority of them, their essence, is simplistic for them and insulting for the host society, which is widely open and which is suspected of the worst. . The majority of Muslims get over it quickly here…
What is beginning to emerge from this desolation is that Justin Trudeau doesn’t give a damn about Quebec. Worse: he despises Quebec. He believes he won’t be needed in the next election. He woos cheaply the rest of Canada, which he has already modeled well in his dream of a post-national state, where all cultures come to annihilate the idea of founding peoples.
The future will tell if his calculation turned out to be correct. But in the meantime, despite the Quebec outcry, Trudeau did win a round, in the meanest way.