The kirpan compromise Quebec won't accept

Éditorial - It was a scene familiar from Belfast or Little Rock, Ark. A child walking to school passes through a gauntlet of jeering parents and students.

That was the hideous experience of Gurbaj Singh, age 12, in the Montreal borough of LaSalle earlier this year. Parents were upset that the boy had won a court injunction permitting him to attend school wearing a kirpan, a ceremonial dagger that is an article of faith for observant Sikhs.

Now the controversy between a local school board and the family of Gurbaj Singh is over. The Quebec Superior Court, in an eminently reasonable decision last month, has given lawful status to a compromise between the two parties. The kirpan, which is 10 centimetres long, must be concealed under clothing. Further, it must be carried in a wooden sheath. That sheath is to be encased in cloth sewn shut and stitched to a carrying strap. The knife-like religious object is beneath three layers, in other words, and Gurbaj is not permitted to remove it at school.

Yet the Quebec government announced this week that it will appeal the court's decision.

This is an appalling move. It is plain wrong on legal grounds. It sends a message of intolerance. And it is harmful to the child and his community because it reopens wounds that should have been left to heal.

Has Justice Minister Paul Bégin read the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms? Section 3: "Every person is the possessor of the fundamental freedoms, including . . . freedom of religion." Section 10: "Every person has a right to full and equal recognition and exercise of his human rights and freedoms without distinction, exclusion or preference. . . . Discrimination exists where such a distinction, exclusion or preference has the effect of nullifying or impairing such right." Section 40: "Every person has a right . . . to free public education."

Fine words, but evidently meaningless when put to the test. Mr. Bégin prefers to hide behind a discredited cliché: "The maintenance of security in schools requires zero tolerance for the carrying of knives."

No one has pointed to a single attack with a kirpan by a schoolchild anywhere in Canada. In Surrey, B.C., where Sikhs make up a majority of students at some schools, the school board does not object to kirpans. In Ontario, Gunther Plaut, presiding over a human-rights board of inquiry a decade ago when the Peel Region school board tried to ban kirpans, made a ruling very similar to the recent one in Quebec Superior Court. This matter is every bit as settled as the wearing of turbans in the RCMP, the provision of a day off for minorities on their Sabbath, maternity leave for women and ramps for disabled people.

Except in Quebec, apparently, where one angry parent argued, "I'm here because everyone is equal. You have to adapt to the rules when you come here." And where the government, it seems, subscribes to this long-outdated notion of equality, in which individual characteristics become washed out and devoid of colour and life. For a government still trying to live down the image of insular nationalism helped along by then-premier Jacques Parizeau's angry comment blaming "money and the ethnic vote" for his side's defeat in the 1995 referendum, this is the wrong road to follow.