By Kevin Woodhouse
www.thesuburban.com
Shortly after the release of the PQ’s proposed Charter of Values last Tuesday, it did not take very much time for the Lester B. Pearson School Board and the Association of Suburban Municipalities (ASM) to denounce the PQ’s latest idea.
The ASM is an associative body comprised of representatives from the demerged cities and encompasses almost a quarter of a million residents and released a press communique that stated the PQ’s proposed charter “reveals a conscious denial of the multicultural reality of Montreal and will only lead to division and exclusion. The plan threatens the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.”
“I can’t imagine this is going to pass,” LBPSB Chairman Suanne Stein-Day told The Suburban. “If it did, it would be a dark day for Quebec society and a definite black mark on Quebec society.”
Stein-Day noted that many of the board’s educators are women and that the charter would oppose the wearing of certain headgear associated with women of the Muslim faith. “We will fight to the ends of the earth for our staff’s freedom of expression and this is another attempt by the PQ to ghettoize a portion of the population. First it was anglophones and now it is multi-culturalism.”
Stein-Day added that the province was “built on opening its doors to immigration and was a facet of the province we could all be proud of but instead, the PQ would rather create acrimony instead of build harmony.”
The ASM’s press release suggested that perhaps the current PQ government spend less time on language issues and ”focus instead on pressing problems such as Quebec’s spiraling debt, crumbling infrastructure, and stagnating economy.”
The school board chair hopes the charter dies before it can be passed into law but it so, “we will assemble a team and go to Quebec City to attend the hearings, just like we did for Bill 14.”
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