The French Canadians do not want to be told what to do by immigrants and are becoming vocal.

Immigration panel hears intolerance
Attempt to heal divisions in Quebec may have backfired
By IAN AUSTEN | The New York Times
December 23, 2007

MONTREAL - Viewed separately, the incidents seemed insignificant. Members of a Hasidic synagogue wanted a neighboring YMCA to block or tint the windows of an exercise room used by women.

A Muslim girl was barred from playing soccer for wearing a hijab on the field. And in Quebec City, some Muslims and Orthodox Jews refused to deal with police officers and physicians of the opposite sex.

Then came the decision in late January by Herouxville, Quebec — a town of French-speaking Catholics — to create a code of conduct for immigrants that prohibited, among other things, the covering of women's faces except on Halloween, and the use of public stoning as a form of punishment. This despite the fact that there are no Muslims in the town and no modern history of stonings.

The move offended many Muslims in Quebec and prompted a wide, and not always temperate, debate among the French-speaking majority about the role of immigrants in the province. After a political opponent took up the anti-immigrant backlash as his cause, Premier Jean Charest of Quebec responded by creating a commission to discuss immigration concerns. But rather than quell the debate, it may have made matters worse.

At a series of public, televised meetings that began in August and ended this month, the Quebec Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences heard several reasoned suggestions for improving relations. Still, its sessions proved irresistible for the xenophobic. Their frustrations and fears, particularly about the province's Muslim and Jewish populations, sometimes turned the commission's meetings into a bigots' roadshow in the view of minority leaders.

"People are now more divided than they were a year ago, that is without question," said Sameer Zuberi, the human rights coordinator of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Over one year, people's opinions have formed, and it's really going to take a while for that to melt away."

The panel will make recommendations in March on the integration of other cultures.

"It's giving us a fair amount of anxiety," said Charles Taylor, a professor emeritus at McGill University who along with historian and sociologist Gerard Bouchard leads the commission.

Neither Taylor nor Bouchard have indicated what they may recommend.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nation ... 6217.story