Sheema Khan misrepresents her fellow Canadians’ legitimate notions of their society when, as an example of Canada’s membership in a “culture club of fear,” she talks about “the hysterical tone over faith-based family arbitration and provincial funding for faith-based schools in Ontario.”
What Khan is referring to, what she is dressing up as bigotry and xenophobia, is a decision to reject religion in two important areas of the public sphere: justice and education.
There is a long history to that rejection, a history to Canadians’ desire to privatize piety and erase a momentous fault line of our past—from opposition to the Anglican clergy reserve lands that was one of the principle causes of the 1837 rebellion to the ugly anti-Roman Catholicism of the Orange Order, to the 19th-century religious divisiveness over education, politics and the execution of Riel, to Laurier’s opposition to the ultramontaine bishops and their state within a state, to the evil institutional presence of religion in the residential schools, to the exclusion of Jews and Roman Catholics from anglo-Canadian elites, to the social repression by the church in Quebec, to the homophobia and misogyny that still lingers on in institutional religion.
We are a society flawed in so many ways. But I think, in the wisdom Canadians have acquired from the evolution of their culture, they have learned to avoid things that divide and embrace things that unify.
I would argue that most Ontarians had no idea there was any religious presence in family dispute mediation and arbitration until the Sharia law issue arose, and that the public will was to erase it entirely: for the Jews and the Ismailis as well as for other branches of Islam. I would also argue that any referendum in Ontario on getting rid of the publicly funded Roman Catholic separate school system would pass overwhelmingly.
