PQ twists turban dispute

The Canadian Soccer Association’s decision on Monday to suspend the Quebec Soccer Federation for sticking with its new ban on players wearing turbans is far more likely to cause controversy than to change the QSF’s mind. And it’s no small decision: Quebec teams may be barred from playing tournaments outside the province; on Tuesday La Presse reported that Team Quebec would be excluded from the soccer competition at the upcoming Canada Games in Sherbrooke.

“Youth will suffer in the short term,” Parti Québécois Sports Minister Marie Malavoy warned on Tuesday — this from a woman who couldn’t care less about the reported 200 Sikh children currently being forced to choose between their faith and their sport. Suddenly this battle concerns all of Quebec society, and she’s upset. Good. Quebec society has a bit of a problem.

It has been more than a week since QSF director-general Brigitte Frot suggested that Sikh children should go “play in their backyard.” In any other province, that brand of malevolent hillbillyism would send politicians scrambling for their Twitter apps to vent outrage.

In Quebec, the opposition Liberals and coalition avenir Québec quickly sided with the QSF, which argues that if the international soccer federation, FIFA, wants turbans on the province’s soccer pitches, it should say so explicitly. The governing Parti Québécois, meanwhile, seemed oddly reticent — until Tuesday. With the cSA’s intervention, the issue became prime fodder for Premier Pauline Marois’ gasping pursuit of “winning conditions” for a sovereignty referendum.

The cSA’s decision is “unacceptable,” she said at a news conference.

“I think the Quebec federation has the right to establish its own regulations,” she said. “It is not subject [to the canadian association], it is autonomous, not subject to the canadian federation and in this regard I support it in its orientations.”

“Autonomous” is a strange word to describe a provincial soccer organization that justifies its turban ban using the regulations of an international soccer organization headquartered in Zurich; and clearly the QSF is subject to the cSA or else there would be no problem. But we are not in the land of logic and reason here.

Neither Ms. Marois nor Bernard drainville, the minister responsible for secularism issues, was even brave enough to support the turban ban. Instead they insisted it was all about the provincial soccer organization’s supposedly inviolable right to chart its own course in the world. remind you of anything? This strategy of inventing or cultivating grievances with Ottawa and the rest of canada, then hawking them to Quebecers as proof of their own unrealized misery, is so dreary, negative and insultingly transparent as to make one pine for the finger-tenting scheming of Jacques Parizeau. yet there’s no one at the provincial level, even among the federalists, willing to call out the premier unambiguously.

A bitter version of a broken

dream

And why would there be? A government-commissioned Léger poll recently confirmed that Quebecers are still seriously hung up on religious accommodations: On a scale of importance between zero and 10, 43% ranked the issue between eight and 10; 68% agreed that canada and Quebec have “contradictory visions” when it comes to social integration; and 81% opposed allowing athletes to alter any equipment for religious reasons.

The good news is, federal politicians seem ever less inclined to walk on eggshells. Leading conservative ministers and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau — who has every reason not to annoy Quebecers — have been fiercely and proactively critical of the QSF. New democrat leader Thomas Mulcair has been less fierce and proactive, but unambiguously deplores the plight facing Quebec’s soccer-playing Sikhs.

Maybe they know something about Quebecers’ attitudes that provincial politicians don’t. Maybe they’re standing purely on principle. either way, it’s the sign of a maturing and more confident federation. Quebec society is indeed distinct and largely autonomous.

One of the distinctions it needs to get a handle on autonomously is that its soccer federation, and only its soccer federation, has a problem with players wearing turbans.

Quebecers are free to react to outside criticism by embracing separatism, as Ms. Marois hopes they will. But I suspect it’s clear to the majority that she is yesterday’s woman selling a bitter version of a broken dream. The alternative is to decide not to give a damn whether Sikhs wear turbans on soccer pitches, which was the status quo — and the mark of a civilized, tolerant, First World society like Quebec’s.

Ms. Marois is right about one thing: It’s the QSF that should make that decision, not the cSA or FIFA. But until it makes it, Quebec will quite rightly suffer the consequences.