The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50094
opinion B A C K PA G E BY EZRA LEVANT Colour-blind laws and equal justice under attack taurants, which feature traditional Middle Eastern hookah pipes, will be permitted to allow patrons to puff away. Everyone else in town has to butt out — even on outdoor sidewalks and patios. Emad Yacoub, who has five restaurants L in Vancouver, was ecstatic. He lobbied city hall for his own exemptions, but was glad to see the law applied to his competitors — including fines up to $2,000. "I support no smoking on the patios," he said. Of course he does — all the more people to come into his smoke- friendly restaurants. There is nothing quite as righteous as the indignation of an anti-smoking activ- ist. They are full of missionary zeal, 21st- century puritans saving non-smokers from smokers, and saving smokers from them- selves. They cannot abide the idea that ra- tional adults might voluntarily decide to put enjoyment above health. Well, maybe in the case of an after-dinner cheesecake; or a bottle of wine; or, in Vancouver, a govern- ment-subsidized safe place to inject hard drugs. But not tobacco: such self-destructive fools need to be saved from themselves. Except if they're Middle Eastern. Vancouver's city council accepted the argument from the Arab restaurateurs that smoking lounges help immigrants deal with "depression" and make them feel at home. Now that's surely true. But it's no less true for any other ethnic group, including First Nations who discov- ered tobacco, the British who brought it back to the Old World, and other sub- cultures where smoking is important. No doubt, savvy non-Arab businessmen are busily redecorating their Irish pubs as desert tents. The restaurant business will probably survive. But can the same be said for the rule of law? It's not just tobacco. At least one constitutional challenge claims that the criminalization of khat — a stimulant ast fall, Vancouver's city council unanimously voted to exempt Arab restaurants from its city- wide smoking ban. The res- multiculturalism was supposed to mean. Tobacco and khat are small exam- ples, but they're part of a trend that includes Election Canada's decision to allow fully veiled Muslim women to vote without showing their face to con- firm their identity. In Quebec, it's led to a full-blown commission travel- ling the province asking how far the province should go to provide "reason- able accommodation" to immigrants. That's a strange question, since Quebec has been absorbing and accommodating immigrants for decades. The fervour of the recent debate has coincided with the increase in Muslim immigrants, overlaid banned under Canadian law — violates the Charter of Rights, because it is an in- tegral part of being Somali. "Every community in Canada has something that is special to their culture," Toronto lawyer Mohamed Doli told the National Post. "Khat is specific to the Somali and Yemeni communities. So when khat is criminalized, in essence you have criminalized the culture of these communities." So far, khat remains criminal — Canada's Parliament has yet to join with Doli in ac- cording drug addiction the status of a cen- tral tenet of being Somali. But it's not hard to guess what will happen when a Charter challenge actually gets to court. Many So- mali Canadians despise khat — especially women, who complain about the drug's ef- fect on their husbands' work ethic and fam- ily budgets. But such complaints are no dif- ferent than the arguments against tobacco, immediately forgotten when the question of race enters the room. Maybe Canada's approach to drugs is too strict and invasive; maybe this is an in- stance where Middle Eastern and Somali immigrants can bring a new perspective to Canada. But that hasn't happened yet. Our laws remain on the books. All that's hap- pening is the racial fragmentation of the law — where rights and privileges depend on your skin colour or religion or country of origin, precisely the opposite of what 64 JANU AR Y 2008 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com on post-Sept. 11 fears about Islam. Ac- cording to SES Research, only 5.4 per cent of Quebeckers now believe in reasonable accommodation — a number so small, it means most immigrants themselves are worried about the new trend toward racial ghettoization. Of the Quebeckers polled by SES, 77 per cent want immigrants to "fully adapt" to the mainstream culture, a groundswell credited by pundits for the ascent of the Ac- tion démocratique du Québec party. Simi- lar anti-immigrant sentiments were behind the defeat of John Tory's Ontario campaign and its promise to fund sectarian schools. Of course, Catholic and Jewish schools have been in Ontario forever; it's the new schools that worried voters. Canadians are not racist. Ours is the most tolerant country in the world, boasting foreign-born Parliamentarians, premiers, and two foreign-born women of colour in a row as governors general. We accept more than twice as many legal immigrants per capita as the United States. What the recent polls and elections indi- cate is not un-Canadian racism. Quite the opposite: it's a lament that the Canadian values of colour-blind laws, equal justice, and the separation of mosque and state are being eroded. Ezra Levant is the publisher of the Western Standard. SCOTT PAGE