Fear and ignorance: a rural revolt – The Vancouver Sun

March 1, 2007

Fear and ignorance: A rural revolt: Immigrants are not the main target of small-town outcasts. Rather, it is the foreign land the big cities have become
Vancouver Sun
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Page: A17
Section: Editorial
Byline: Alain Dubuc
Column: Alain Dubuc
Source: Special to the Sun

In her LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture to be delivered in Vancouver on Friday, Adrienne Clarkson makes several references to Herouxville, a small rural community in Quebec, not far from Jean Chretien's home town of Shawinigan, where a troubling series of events has taken place.

To defend themselves against what they perceive to be the cultural consequences of Canada's ambitious immigration policies, the citizens of Herouxville adopted a "code of living" to indicate to newcomers which "Quebecois" values must be respected. They went out of their way to note that stoning and female circumcision are formally prohibited in their town.

Herouxville's proclamation represented a cry of anger and expressed two elements common among the intolerant: Fear and ignorance.

The intolerance on display in Herouxville remind us of the importance of open and honest public dialogue, upon which Clarkson bases so much hope in her wonderful and timely speech.

But bursts of intolerance in small-town Quebec also show the extent to which it is necessary to include "the outcasts" from mainstream public dialogue, people such as the citizens of Herouxville, and other similar towns across Canada, who do not actively participate in the vast experiment that predicates the "society of difference."

The crisis in Herouxville was set off by a debate about what is being called "reasonable accommodation," that profoundly Canadian way of adapting rules and standards so that they do not have a discriminatory effect on members of ethnic or religious minorities.

It is an admirable principle followed with the best of intentions by certain institutions, especially in the public sector, but followed in what could be considered a rather unreasonable way, for example refusing to allow fathers-to-be to attend prenatal seminars for fear of upsetting ultra-conservative Muslim families.

Such minor incidents, taken as singular occurrences, have piled up in the public imagination and in so doing have become a symbol of the increasingly uneasiness of a host society in dealing with high levels of immigration numbers that is becoming more and more heterogeneous.

Even if Herouxville's approach skirts the xenophobic, immigrants are probably not the main target of their anger and unhappiness. There is something else at play, and that something else is a rural revolt against the "Big City," its ideas, its way of life, and its growing influence.

There is, however, something atypical in this latest of a long history of rural movements spurred on by rapid social change. Usually, racial tensions occur where communities exist in close proximity, when their mutual coexistence is threatened by the behaviour of groups that challenge collective norms.

In the case of Herouxville, this kind of multicultural friction is simply non-existent. The people of this town have undoubtedly never seen a woman wearing a veil, outside of on television. And that's where the anger simmers. At the same time, we have seen no such uproar in the Montreal region, even though people there are living in permanent contact with minorities.

This leads me to think that there is another process at work. Certainly, the people of Herouxville are expressing their fears with respect to the social change created by high levels of immigration.

But they are far more unhappy with the tolerance of Montrealers, of what Clarkson would call their passive acceptance of the social transformation that immigration engenders. It isn't women wearing veils that is threatening their identity, but rather the urban world in general, which, with its multiethnic culture, its departure from religion, its various elites and intellectuals, its gay villages, its artists and its movers and shakers, represents a challenge to their more traditional way of life.

As Montreal resembles less and less places like Herouxville, it's becoming for rural Quebecers a foreign land. This same split between the rural communities and urban centres, which have been profoundly transformed by immigration, is found across the western world.

We are reminded that the fragmentation of a society can take on several different forms, and that the risk of withdrawal or retreat, which can damage the connection between host society and newcomers, may also divide the host society itself. What separates the urban and rural worlds can sometimes be more important that what separates communities sharing the same urban space.

Canadian society, in dealing with matters related to immigration, as with other issues, such as gay marriage or first nations' rights, exists in a state of gentle schizophrenia.

The elite -- politicians, judges, intellectuals and the media -- have elaborated a vision of the relationship between the majority and the various minorities, without bothering to check if the people were following along, and pretending not to see the cracks forming in the self-righteous facade.

We must not forget this other more contentious dialogue, even though it gets a lot less attention, if we want to be able to respond to the kinds of fear and escalation that gives birth to crises such as Herouxville.

Alain Dubuc is journalist with La Presse and a member of the LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium advisory council.