The injustice of Quebec's Bill 21 and the Canadian federal election

In The Washington Post Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi takes on Bill 21:

In Quebec, a new law prohibits people who wear conspicuous religious attire from holding certain public-sector jobs, including teachers and police officers.
Jagmeet Singh, a lawyer, is running for prime minister as leader of a national party but, because he wears a turban, could not serve as a judge in Quebec. I, as a Muslim man, could hold any job I want, but under this law, a Muslim woman who covers with a headscarf cannot. Muslim men who wear long beards could claim it’s just a nod to hipster-dom, and be free and clear, but Orthodox Jewish men with the same beard or a yarmulke cannot. Montreal’s mayor can hold any role, but the leader of her opposition, who wears a kippa, cannot. They’ve stood together against the law. 

It’s all flagrantly unconstitutional, but the province of Quebec used the “notwithstanding clause,” a constitutional override provision (ironically, like multiculturalism, a gift from the tenure of the first Prime Minster Trudeau) to protect itself from legal challenge. 

[...] 

Even though the federal government could restrict Quebec’s financing or use its legal power to enjoin the provincial legislation, our federal leaders so far haven’t demonstrated the courage to do so. They’re hardly even talking about it. The law is popular in Quebec, and among others in the country, too. In an election year, they must be thinking, why risk losing those votes? 

[...] 

We cannot stand on moral high ground calling out leaders for offensive things they did, years ago, if we’re not also willing to stand up against the racist and discriminatory behavior that’s right in front of our faces in 2019. We cannot choose our values a la carte when they benefit us — we need to be all-in, all the time.

I wish Jagmeet Singh would adopt something like Nenshi's position on Bill 21. The NDP are going to be wiped out in Quebec anyway, so they may as well go out fighting for justice.

Members of Parliament for non-resident citizens

Parliamentary democracy is based on territorial representation: Members of Parliament are elected to represent citizens who reside within certain geographically-defined electoral districts (called ‘ridings’ in Canada).

One problem with this system concerns the representation of citizens who reside abroad. Insofar as such persons remain citizens of the country in question—the state remains the ultimate protector of such citizens’ rights and interests; it is the one place that they can go to if denied residency elsewhere—it would seem that they should have some kind of representation in their country’s legislature.

Many countries allow non-resident citizens to continue to vote within the electoral districts wherein they last resided, at least for a certain period of time (currently, Canadians can vote in federal elections so long as they have not resided abroad for more than five years). But a better form of representation, I think, would be to allocate a certain number of MPs to represent directly non-resident citizens.

Or so I have proposed in the past—viz., that there should be a number of MPs within the Canadian federal Parliament to represent Canadians abroad. (Such forms of representation, it should be noted, already exist for French and Italian citizens.) Interesting, a Briton residing in Spain recently has made a very similar proposal, and has started a petition to get the proposal debated within the UK Parliament. I wish him luck!

Explaining Canadian Exceptionalism

Joe Heath (of the University of Toronto) has an interesting post on ‘Canadian exceptionalism’ at the In Due Course blog.

‘Canadian exceptionalism’, roughly, refers to the absence of any significant anti-immigrant or anti-diversity sentiment—and the consequent absence of a nativist or right-wing populist political movement—in Canada.

The post has the virtue of identifying institutional, geographic, and policy factors that help explain this exceptionalism, rather than appealing to some kind of amorphous 'spirit of toleration' that makes us Canucks so welcoming. More specifically, Heath identifies the following factors as relevant: (a) the existence of very little illegal immigration to Canada; (b) the policy of bringing people in from all over the world; (c) a political system that encourages moderation; (d) the policy of including immigrants within the larger nation-building project; and (e) the institutional protection of the majority cultures (French and English) throughout the process.

Happy (belated) Canada Day!

Coming soon: voting rights for non-resident Canadians

Over a year ago I wrote: (a) that Canadians who live abroad for five or more years should retain their right to vote in federal elections, and (b) that such Canadians should have special representation in Parliament (say, a dozen or so MPs) rather than voting for MPs in particular ridings. (See my post here or at In Due Course from August 2015.)

Well, it looks I got my wish for (a). Here is the official statement from the Canadian government.

So while 2016 has been a complete disaster politically in many parts of the world, at least something good is happening for people like me (the roughly 9 percent of Canadians who live abroad*).

(*One reason why I especially care about this issue is that while I work and live abroad, I spend roughly one-third of my time [about 4 months of the year] in Canada, so I find the 5-year limit on voting especially vexing given my strong, ongoing connection to the country.)

Hobbes’s Leviathan and the peaceful Canadians

I found the article, “Canada’s History of Violence,” by Pascual Restrepo in today’s New York Times to be quite fascinating.

In the article Restrepo describes Steven Pinker’s hypothesis that the reason why Canadian society is less violent than American society can be explained, at least in part, by their different histories. 

“Before the settlement of the Canadian West…the Mounties established a series of forts. That’s where they exercised authority, enforced contracts and protected the property of settlers. Where Mounties were present, self-justice was rare. Canadians on the whole developed a less violent culture.”  

The American frontier, in contrast, more closely resembled Thomas Hobbes’s ‘state of nature,’ as settlers were responsible, to a great extent, for defending themselves and their property.  (I think that something like this claim is in fact quite old and is not Pinker’s creation.  I recall being familiar with some version of this hypothesis decades ago as a student.  So I suspect that Pinker, who is Canadian himself, simply reformulated a claim that has been around for some time.  But no matter.)

What is especially interesting is that those Canadian settlers who lived close to Mountie forts were more peaceful than those who lived farther away.  Restrepo writes: 

“I compared settlements that in the late 1890s were near Mountie forts with those that were not. There are no homicide statistics for that period, but the 1911 census reveals male mortality patterns. Settlements far from the Mounties’ reach had more widows than widowers, suggesting unusually high adult male death rates. In fact, remote Canadian settlements during this period looked a lot like those of the Wild West. We do not know for certain why male death rates in these communities were high, but homicide is the prime suspect. After all, men kill other men more often than they kill women.”  

Restrepo goes on to explain how these patterns remain today, as shown by the propensity of hockey players from different regions of the Canadian West to engage in violence on the ice (viz., those from regions near those early Mountie forts generally are less violent than those from regions farther away).

Here is what Hobbes says about the importance of the sovereign in Leviathan:

“The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature… But by safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself.”

[From The 2nd Part of Leviathan, Ch. 30, “Of the Office of the Sovereign Representative”.]

So the agents and symbols of the Western Canadian version of Hobbes’s sovereign – the Mounties – managed to instill adequate awe and fear in those citizens directly subject to their effective authority, that is, near their forts.  This sovereign power allowed Canada to develop into a more peaceful society than the one to its immediate south.  And the impact on people’s behavior of living closer to or farther away from the institutions of sovereign authority and power, the Mountie forts, continues to this day (long after those forts have disappeared).  

Interesting stuff.  I think that I’ll use this article the next time I teach Hobbes.

[Agents of the Canadian Leviathan.]

An open letter regarding the campaign tactics of the Conservative Party of Canada

The following letter was published today in the Ottawa Citizen:

We are a diverse group of academics with different political views and different political allegiances. We are united by a common interest in the integrity of democratic processes and a concern about the ugly and dangerous turn we have recently witnessed in the election campaign. 

In democratic electoral politics there is an ethical line that distinguishes spirited partisan strategy from cynical tactics that betray the values of mutual respect and toleration that lie at the heart civil democratic discourse. Honourable politicians do not cross that line even when they think doing so will be politically advantageous. Disreputable politicians ignore the line when they find it convenient to do so. 

The Conservative Party under Stephen Harper has already come perilously close to this line by suggesting that religion is an appropriate basis to select refugees and by fanning fears of terrorism as a pretext for revoking citizenship from some Canadians. Distinguishing ‘old-stock’ Canadians from new ones was also divisive and problematic. Increasingly, the Conservatives seem to have been opting for a particularly nasty form of “wedge politics.” 

However, by injecting the inflammatory rhetoric of “barbaric cultural practices” into the current campaign, the Conservative Party has flagrantly crossed the line. The repeated use of this phrase along with a proposed tip line to root out undesirables are cynically calculated to distract and divide citizens by insinuating that some law abiding and peaceful members of the community are freedom-hating barbarians who threaten Canadian society. The Conservatives know that Canada faces no such threat and that the vast majority of citizens, irrespective of their religious commitments or cultural backgrounds, embrace the basic rights and liberties upon which our democracy is based. By conjuring up a phantom menace to the country and implying that some immigrants and religious minorities are enemies, the Conservatives hope to pit Canadians against one another. Like many sophisticated forms of vicious propaganda, the invocation of barbarism is meant to create fear and anxiety rather than to identify a real problem.

We enjoy the rule of law in Canada and it requires the equal application of the law. Those who break the law should be treated within a common system of criminal justice. A special mechanism that targets some minorities for extra scrutiny is as unnecessary as it is odious. The devious strategists who have devised this campaign know that their objectives are not well served by employing racist or anti-religious epithets, so they ask us to imagine unspecified but supposedly real barbarians. So we are encouraged to demonize those who are different from ourselves and whose religious or cultural practices we do not share or understand. In the present context, this is hate mongering, and it has no place in Canadian democracy. 

We do not deny that there is room to discuss and debate how contemporary democracies should respond to religious, cultural and linguistic pluralism. Indeed, Canadian legal and political theory is at the forefront of exploring such matters. But a common point of departure for these debates and discussions is a commitment to civility, decency and toleration. 

Toleration does not require that one like or endorse the cultural or religious practices of others, but it does require that we refrain from insulting the dignity of those with whom we disagree. The Conservatives have shown contempt for a politics of mutual respect. We condemn the unethical Conservative strategy that brings shame to Canadian politics. We hope that Canadians will join us in repudiating the politics of hate. Instead let us embrace a nobler vision of civil discourse that is truly oriented to achieving the common good for all Canadians. 

By Avigail Eisenberg (University of Victoria), Colin Macleod (University of Victoria), Jocelyn Maclure (Université Laval), and Daniel Weinstock (McGill University). At time of posting, this letter has had over 530 signatories.

(The full list of signatures is here.)

For some background on this issue, this post by Joseph Heath may be helpful.

On voting rights and Members of Parliament for non-resident Canadian citizens

So there will be a federal election in Canada on October 19th.

I’m a Canadian citizen.  But from 2007 to this year I was not able to vote in federal Canadian elections.  The reason is that – despite living in Canada on a regular, albeit sporadic, basis (2-3 months every year, depending upon my teaching schedule) – my primary residence was abroad (Ireland until 2008, the United States from 2008 to 2014).   Fortunately, my year in Toronto has ‘re-booted’ my residency here, so I will be able to vote in the forthcoming election.  But more than a million other Canadians who live abroad will not be able to do so.

Since 1993, Canadians who live abroad for more than 5 years have been ineligible to vote.  Until 2007, however, merely visiting Canada was enough to ‘reset the clock’ with respect to one’s status (that is, after a visit, one would have to be away for another 5 years in order to lose the right to vote).  In May 2014, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Penny ruled that this part of the Canada Elections Act was unconstitutional.  Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned this decision, thereby once again taking away the right of non-resident citizens to vote.  Hopefully this case will now go to the Supreme Court of Canada.  If it does, I’m optimistic that the voting rights of all Canadians will be affirmed and protected.  But until then, over a million Canadian citizens are denied the right to vote.

There has been a flurry of editorials and opinions pieces in the Canadian press recently over this issue.  The actor Donald Sutherland would like to be able vote again, and made his case in The Globe and Mail.  I admire his refusal to become a dual citizen.  Disappointingly, however, his piece is little more than a rant.  Given his fame, though, it has prompted further public discussion (e.g., this episode of CBC Radio’s ‘The Current’ [the host of which is terrible, but the first two guests have intelligent things to say]).

Central to the decision by the Ontario Court of Appeals is its claim that non-resident citizens should not be able to vote because the laws of the government of Canada do not affect their lives significantly, unlike the lives of resident citizens.  This strikes me as both irrelevant and incorrect.  I’ll explain why it’s irrelevant below.  Why it is incorrect seems obvious: Canadian foreign policy affects non-residents’ lives in significant ways – far more than it does the lives of most residents.  Moreover, Canadian citizens have the right to return to Canada at any time.  So any laws passed by the government will affect profoundly citizens’ lives upon their return to the country.  And of course, many non-resident Canadians have family and other significant relations in Canada, as well as property and other ties.  The laws of the Canada directly affect these interests.

Mark MacKinnon, a journalist for The Globe and Mail, makes a solid case that the Court’s reasoning is misguided in his opinion piece, “I am Canadian – but now not as much as I used to be.”  A piece at Rabble.ca by Raksha Vasudevan also does a decent job in rebutting the Court’s claim that the laws and policies of the federal government have no significant impact on the lives of non-residents.

In any case, as I mentioned earlier, the ‘impact’ or ‘profundity of effect’ justification for denying non-resident citizens the right to vote is irrelevant.  Voting rights are based on citizenship. According to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of the members of the House of Commons.”   If impact were the criterion for determining who should be able to vote in elections, then non-Canadians who reside in Canada should have that right.  (And maybe they should have the right to vote.  There certainly is an interesting discussion to be had on that question.  But the current understanding of ‘citizenship’ and its associated rights and duties, within Canada and most other liberal democratic societies, is not residency-based.)  Jackson Doughart makes something like this point in his piece at The National Post.

The five-year limit on non-resident citizens’ right to vote, I should point out, applies to all non-resident citizens, not simply dual citizens who do not reside in Canada.  (I mention this because such dual citizens seem to be the focus of some conservative defences of the law.)  Now I can understand – and indeed agree with – a requirement that dual citizens vote in only one country’s elections (presumably the one in which they currently reside, or most recently resided).  But most Canadians who live abroad are not dual citizens.  I am not a dual citizen.  (And I probably never will become one.  I think that the concept or dual  or plural citizenship is philosophically incoherent.  However, I’ll try to defend that claim on another day).

Now one difficulty for defending the right of non-resident Canadians to vote concerns the role of ‘ridings’ (electoral districts) in the Canadian parliamentary system.  In theory, every Canadian lives in a particular riding, and during an election the candidate who receives the most votes from the people who live in that riding becomes the Member of Parliament (MP) for that riding.  But many non-residents don’t have a riding in any meaningful sense.  While letting non-resident citizens vote for candidates in the ridings in which they last resided is better than denying them the right to vote altogether, there is, I think, a better option.

This brings me to the opinion piece by Mark Kerten, a researcher at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.  He points out that some other democratic societies provide special representation for non-residents:

Instead of constructing barriers to democratic participation, what a progressive government could, and should, do is to create a handful of members of Parliament to directly represent Canadians who live abroad. France and Italy already have parliamentarians who represent their respective diasporas. Why not have MPs on Parliament Hill to represent the unique interests and diversity of Canadians living abroad? Surely that could only enrich our democracy.

I’ve long thought that Canada should adopt something like the French model and allocate a number of seats in the House of Commons (perhaps 10-12) to non-residents.  (If this should ever happen, then my dream of becoming the MP for the riding of the ‘Greater Great Lakes Region West’ might finally come true!)

In any case, I have the right to vote in this election, and I look forward to exercising it on October 19th.  Hopefully a new government will come to power on that day, one that takes seriously the rights of all Canadians.

[UPDATE: This is now a 'guest post' at the blog 'In Due Course' (which is an excellent blog, one of the few that I regularly check).]