«« Intégration et religion

Multiculturalism at work

Editorial - Justice Claude Tellier of Quebec Superior Court made exactly the right ruling Tuesday when he said in a temporary injunction that 12-year-old Gurbaj Singh could wear his kirpan, wrapped tightly and tucked away, when he's in school. But issues such as this one won't be settled by the courts alone.

Parents and students at Ste. Catherine Labouré School in LaSalle are learning the hard way about the awkward realities of our multicultural present and future. Glossy government advertisements show smiling people of all sorts living in cheerful harmony, but the reality can be a little trickier.

Reasonable resolution of cases such as this one, where two different rights bump up against each other, requires an atmosphere of calm, which can be elusive when parents feel their children are threatened with violence. In the age of Columbine and so many comparable tragedies, the slightest hint of school conflict becomes terrifying.

So it's encouraging that the other students' parents, meeting yesterday in a church hall, took steps to scale back the rhetoric and stifle certain ugly aspects of the disagreement over one boy's kirpan, the curved, 10-centimetre knife that is a religious symbol baptized Sikhs are supposed to bear at all times.

The fellow students who called young Gurbaj "Paki" and taunted him about his religious beliefs earlier this week did more harm to the spirit of their neighbourhood than any number of tucked-away kirpans could do. People of good will can certainly disagree about this issue; others have no place in the debate.

That said, the concerned parents have every right to continue their protest - 37 students were out of school yesterday, down from 47 Wednesday - if they see this as a safety issue. Equally, Gurbaj's family cannot be faulted for insisting on his right to wear the kirpan. All our brave talk about diversity is just so much fog if everyone must grudgingly conform to majority practices.

This is what openness, tolerance, multi-culturalism and our other buzzwords really mean. Not all bits of our cultural mosaic will have the same height, texture and contours. Not everybody will live in just the same way as the Tremblays and the McDonalds have lived since they got here centuries ago.

Beyond a doubt, Canada has profited greatly from growing cultural and demographic diversity, and we will continue to profit. But it's not always easy. We all have to work at it. This might not be the week for it, but sometime soon, LaSalle community leaders, including Sikhs, may well want to organize mutual-comprehension events for the public. Governments, and citizens, do need to lubricate the friction points where cultures meet.

Meanwhile, at Ste. Catherine Labouré, the first issue is safety. We see no real evidence Gurbaj and his beliefs and his kirpan pose any danger to anyone. Pieces of ordinary school equipment - a pair of scissors, a geometry compass, a metal-edged ruler, even a heavy textbook - are more likely to become weapons than one little boy's tucked-away religious knife.

And that means Gurbaj Singh, and any other baptized Sikh student who wants to, should be free to live his faith in this matter.