The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
When Bochra Manaï was appointed commissioner for the fight against racism and systemic discrimination at the City of Montreal, Valérie Plante assured Montrealers that she had been selected following “a very rigorous process” which was “guarantee of quality of the person who had been chosen” and that the latter knew that she was now serving an “institution” and understood well “her [nouveau] role “.
Many Montrealers were indeed worried about the fact that the main person concerned had made herself known above all as a spokesperson for the National Council of Canadian Muslims and that as such, she had publicly criticized Bill 21 on the secularism of the State and Quebec as a whole, which has become, according to her, “a reference for supremacists and extremists around the world”. Could we really think that someone who had made such provocative and unobjective remarks a few weeks earlier (she had gone so far as to associate Bill 21 with the attacks in Quebec and Christchurch, New Zealand) was going to change instantly, by the magic of an appointment, as an impartial commissioner?
The crux of the problem is there. We recruit political activists to make them civil servants who are supposed to be objective and impartial and we are then surprised that they have remained above all… activists.
The City of Montreal is obviously not the only government to act in this way: think of the recent appointment of Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s special representative in the fight against Islamophobia. Coincidentally, she too was close to the National Council of Canadian Muslims, for which she had worked for five years as communications director.
By appointing her to this position, did Justin Trudeau also believe that she would become an impartial observer of Islamophobia in the country? It would be just as improbable as entrusting an animal activist with the mandate to rule objectively on the fate of deer in Longueuil!
Entrusting public mandates to people who have devoted most of their previous career to the service of a cause is to confuse genres. In a healthy democracy, there must be activists ready to defend causes that are close to their hearts, even if they are controversial and even if this sometimes leads them to cross the line and scandalize a significant part of the population. public opinion by making outrageous remarks. But it is also necessary for representatives of public institutions to be above all suspicion when it comes to partisanship.
The experts who are summoned to give their opinion and inform the action of governments, the people who are invited to offer training on racism or sexism to civil servants, the commissioners who are appointed to study a problem and making recommendations must remain as objective as possible. Their credibility is at stake, as is that of the institutions in whose service they work.
If experts, trainers, commissioners are chosen according to their political or community allegiances, the conclusions reached by the former are written in advance, the training provided by the latter turns into indoctrination, the judgments made by the latter will be systematically tainted by partisanship, and the impartiality of institutions becomes a sinister farce, leading to delegitimization and loss of public confidence in them.
How did we come to trivialize such partisan appointments? Why did the Plante administration name Bochra Manaï commissioner for the fight against racism? Why did the Trudeau government decide to create the position of special representative in the fight against Islamophobia and entrust it to Amira Elghawaby? Whereas, in these two cases, it was rather obvious that these were not, as the English say, the right people in the right place.
If we ask ourselves the question, the most obvious answer seems to be this: we appoint to positions of responsibility (non-elected) representatives of ethnic, religious, sexual “communities” (which only have a real existence). in the speech of their self-proclaimed representatives) in the hope that the members of the said “communities” will in return give their votes to the political leaders who have pampered their supposed representatives. One of the sources of so-called Canadian multiculturalism is a community neofeudalism so pervasive that it goes so far as to dictate the choice of candidates for elections and, in part, even Canada’s foreign policy.
Satisfying these different lobbies is also a way for our governments to buy peace. They think, by integrating some of their leaders into the administrative apparatus or by distributing generous subsidies to them, they can defuse their most virulent critics at a lower cost. The small-time Machiavellianism of some thus responds to the entryism of others; but it is a game where there is a big loser: the ordinary citizen, who does not recognize himself in any “community” and has not given any lobby a mandate to represent him.
Far from promoting “inclusiveness”, this identity-based communitarianism which fuels clientelism is killing all concern for the common good and all sense of public service.