Little Rock, Quebec

A dark-skinned child is escorted to school by police past a gauntlet of white adults screaming their hatred at him.

Little Rock, Ark., in 1957? No, the LaSalle district of Montreal, Que., this week.

Did it really have to come to such an ugly, disgraceful point, this question of whether a 12-year-old Sikh boy should be allowed to attend school wearing a kirpan, the ceremonial dagger baptized Sikhs must wear at all times?

Apparently, it did, for Sylvain Simard to wake up to the possibility that as the education minister for the province in which the LaSalle school is located, he might have some responsibility to show some moral leadership to try to defuse the situation.

It wasn't until the day after the ugly scene at the LaSalle school this week that Simard finally got around to saying something in public about the situation there. (And even then it was only because he was asked about it by reporters, not by the opposition in the National Assembly, which seems to have been as much asleep as he was.)

Simard appealed for calm and said he had instructed officials of his department to work with the school board concerned to seek a solution that would reconcile the pupil's religious freedom with the school's non-denominationalism.

Maybe it wouldn't have been up to a judge to impose a solution if, incredible as it now might seem, it hadn't first been left to the school alone to decide a question involving such issues as freedom of religion, violence in school and inter-community relations.

Two months ago, the school board concerned and the pupil's family had worked out a compromise that, in fact, turned out to be very similar to the temporary solution imposed by the judge this week. He hands down his final decision May 16.

The boy would have been allowed to wear the 10-centimetre kirpan to school as long as it was sheathed and then sewn into a cloth cover and strapped securely beneath his clothing, out of sight and inaccessible.

But the school board did not impose the compromise on the school. Instead, it left it up to the school's governing board to decide.

Led by the parent and teacher representatives on the board, the board decided allowing the pupil to wear the kirpan would violate the school's anti-violence, zero-tolerance policy barring weapons.

The pupil's family then went to court, arguing forbidding the boy from wearing the kirpan to school violated his religious freedom.

Why did the parents of other children object to allowing the pupil to attend school wearing a kirpan?

An understandable concern for their children's safety is obviously one, although the pupil wore the kirpan to school for two months without anybody else realizing it, until it fell out of his clothing while he was playing in the school yard.

Some parents (and worse, some other pupils) hurled racist epithets at the boy the day he returned to school, though other parents were dismayed at this and took pains to say their opposition to the wearing of the kirpan was not racist.

And there's another factor as well, expressed by some commentators and members of the public as well as on the part of some parents at the school.

It's resentment at feeling as though the Charter of Rights and the courts give minority rights precedence over the rights of the majority and that society is expected to change to accommodate immigrants instead of their adapting to the country where they have chosen to live.

Such resentment is also present in the rest of Canada, as shown by the controversy over turbans in the RCMP. But French Quebec is more assimilationist than English Canada. Its idea of integrating immigrants is closer to the American "melting pot" than to the English-Canadian cultural "mosaic."

As for the safety issue, ask yourself whether you would want your child to attend school with another wearing a kirpan. The parents in LaSalle had to answer that question this week. And while a few of them kept their children out of school, more than 90 per cent of them didn't.

- Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist, based in Montreal. His E-mail address is dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca.