Our Own Bias

Photo Alain Roberge, archives La Presse

Educator Nada Chouhaita plays with the children at the Oasis Bout'chou daycare in Laval. During Question Period at the National Assembly on Tuesday, Gouin MNA Nicolas Girard brandished a Ministry of Families document justifying the allocation of spaces at this daycare on the grounds of a "homogeneous environment."

La Presse, Sept. 16th 2013

Dear Ms. Marois, I write to you with all the force and immodesty of words, pouring out in bursts, so great is my need to convey to you the deep sadness that fills me as I read your government's project, "Because we believe in our values."

I think above all of Pierre and Charles, my little loves, who live peacefully alongside several Hasidic Jewish families whose visible difference takes the form of clothing unfamiliar to them and of religious and cultural traditions far removed from their own.

For them, in their children's imagination, this is the Quebec they know and love: a land of human richness, a crossroads of cultures living side by side in harmony, a mirror reflecting the certainty that they are nothing but stardust, that the planet is vast, rich and diverse, and that this planet is also reproduced on the balconies of the people who are our neighbours.

I think too of Yamina, a Muslim woman wearing the hijab who was a daily ray of sunshine in Pierre's life, patiently guiding the daycare children along the long road toward knowledge, respect for the Other and human fellowship. She embodied the face of the State. Wearing her veil, which she wears for beliefs that are her own, she taught them to recite Quebec nursery rhymes, to give and receive affection, to dance to the tunes of Henriette Major and to welcome Santa Claus handing out gifts to one and all. She embodied, above all, the success of a society that had extended its hand to her.

With her great skill and her contagious passion, Yamina never allowed any religious partiality to colour her relationship with the children. She is clearly not alone. Nothing allows us to conclude that there is a "crisis of partiality" within the state apparatus, quite the contrary.

Partiality comes from our own gaze, from our way of apprehending the world through fear, from our obsession with tangible signs whose personal, subjective interpretation is probably as varied as the individuals who wear them. What if the "crisis" justifying government intervention came precisely from that, from a reductive vision that distorts the Other by attributing to them acts they have never committed, or by attacking an "appearance of partiality" about which they can do nothing, short of surrendering a part of their existence? Beneath the religious sign there is a human being who breathes the same air as we do, walks the same streets, exchanges a smile while sharing a seat on the metro. For some immigrants who left everything behind, at times risking their own lives and those of their children, this sign represents the visibility of a past now invisible, the country that watched them grow up but will never watch them die.

Dear Ms. Marois, first woman to lead Quebec, our fellow citizens deserve better than the division you are proposing. What will we tell our children when they ask us, drenched in the incomprehensible pain of losing someone dear to them, why the Yaminas of Quebec are no longer there to greet them in the early morning? "Because we believe in our values"? Intellectual honesty and legal rigour demand more than that. So does the human being.