Quebec Columnist fingers tabloid for fanning fire in 'accommodation' debate

At that time, controversies erupted in the media over the rights of Orthodox Jews not to have to see scantily clad women exercising in front of a window at a Montreal Y branch. And there was at least one report of Muslims asking not to be served beans with pork at sugaring-off parties for religious reasons.

By now, there probably aren't many Quebecers who haven't heard of 'reasonable accommodation.' Last week, in a talk delivered to an audience at the Jewish Public Library in Snowdon, Quebec-based journalist Lysiane Gagnon reflected on whether the media in the province reported on the debate, or actually created it.

Gagnon, who has been a columnist for Montreal's La Presse and Toronto's Globe and Mail, says Quebecor Media (which publishes the daily Journal de Montréal) bears much of the responsibility for pushing the issue from the start.

"Quebecor Media, always on the lookout for sensational tidbits of news, kept fanning the flames," she said, adding that "Quebecor Media were certainly at the forefront of this movement."

Regarding the Muslims' sugar shack request, she pointed out that Quebecor and other media played it up as if it was part of a widespread phenomenon, when it actually concerned a specific incident involving a private contract between a company and a group of individuals

Gagnon noted that as early as the spring of 2003, when there was a provincial election, ADQ leader Mario Dumont, who was lagging badly, had been championing growing public resistance to reasonable accommodation, and the Journal de Montréal was playing along.

"'It's enough, it doesn't make sense,'" she recalled Dumont saying during an interview with the tabloid, which headlined his words sensationally on its cover, along with a full-page photo of Dumont. Shortly thereafter, the ADQ began rising in the polls.

Gagnon said Quebec Liberal premier Jean Charest only decided to convene a commission on reasonable accommodation earlier this year because the ADQ, which became the official opposition in the 2007 election last March, "was eating away at the Liberal vote." While acknowledging that was "a standard way to deal with a hot potato," she added, "in this case it was irresponsible."

According to Gagnon, contentious demands for reasonable accommodation could have been "quietly dealt with at the local level" if certain agencies, such as Quebec's Commission of Human Rights and various experts on multiculturalism, had been allowed to hold private seminars to help educational and institutional administrators deal with the most difficult issues.

"A major mistake was to appoint Mr. Bouchard and Mr. Taylor as co-heads of the commission," she said, referring to them as intellectuals. "It would have been more sensible to appoint people with a working knowledge of multicultural institutions and immigration issues, and people with a pragmatic outlook."