When Is Discrimination Not Discrimination?

Answer: When it occurs in Quebec.

Question #2: Where is teaching tolerance, respect and understanding considered contrary to the public good?

Answer: Quebec

It would seem that in La Belle Province, a little learning is a dangerous thing:

Since 2008, elementary and high school students in Quebec have taken a mandatory course aimed at cultivating respect and tolerance for people of different cultures and faiths.

But after years of relentless criticism from Quebec nationalists and committed secularists who say the ethics and religious culture course is peddling a multiculturalist view to impressionable young Quebecers, the provincial government is abolishing the course.

Education Minister Jean-Francois Roberge and his colleagues see a course aimed at fostering “the recognition of others and the pursuit of the common good” as contrary to Quebec values. Ardent critics of the course

have long described [it] as a type of mental virus, contaminating a generation of young people by making them amenable to Canadian multiculturalism and other pluralist ideas.

Oh, the horror of promoting a pluralistic society.

Nadia El-Mabrouk, professor at Universite de Montreal’s computer science department...suggested in a recent interview the course is partly responsible for the fact that, according to polls, young Quebecers are less likely to support Bill 21, the legislation adopted last June that bans some public sector workers, including teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols on the job.

Others within that 'distinct society' see this for what it is. A teacher of the course, Sabrina Jafralie, says it

...explains to students that Quebec is filled with people who have different driving forces. It doesn’t teach young people to be religious, she said, it simply explains why other people may be.

The course exposes students to religions from around the world, and according to the teaching guides, “attention is also given to the influence of Judaism and Native spirituality on this heritage, as well as other religions that today contribute to Quebec culture.”

“But what the government is trying to do,” Jafralie said, “is in fact replace the ability to investigate and explore religiosity, with their own new religion — which is secularism.”

In any other jurisdiction, such an agenda would be denounced as blatant discrimination and racism. I guess the special status that Quebec occupies within our confederation spares it that opprobrium, however.

Vive la difference, eh?