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Many nights Gérard Bouchard woke with a start, his slumber broken by nightmares about all that could go wrong as he and Charles Taylor probed Quebec's uneasy relationship with minorities
What if public meetings became a venomous conduit for racists? What if extreme interest groups hijacked the microphones?
Mr. Bouchard worried the forums on reasonable accommodation of minorities could intensify ethnic conflict instead of turning down the heat.
"It was physically and psychologically exhausting because there was a lot of stress," Mr. Bouchard said from Harvard University, where he is the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies. "Each night, Charles and I would never know what the people who stood up were going to say. People warned us it was a bad idea and we would have paid dearly if the forums had gone off the rails."
Philosopher Charles Taylor, left, and sociologist Gerard Bouchard speak to the media after releasing their report in Montreal on May 22, 2008. The pair headed a commission that looked at the accommodation of minorities in Quebec and recommended the integration of immigrants and the protection of secular society.
Related Articles
Internet Links
- Bouchard and Taylor: Report's positive message 'a good start'
- Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences website
- Read the final report (PDF)
Mr. Bouchard sleeps more easily now. The Bouchard-Taylor commission published its report May 22 and the words "reasonable accommodation" quickly faded from prominence.
The powder keg of cultural conflict, fuelled by resentment, sporadic racism, political opportunism and a local media campaign to ignite it all, has nearly disappeared.
"I think these two men did a pretty impressive job," said Pierre Marc Johnson, a former Quebec premier who in 2007 completed a high-profile inquiry into the fatal collapse of a highway overpass.
"This thing about reasonable accommodation had gone absolutely haywire. They were courageous to accept this mandate, which was a minefield. Now just measure the result. Everything has calmed down."
For nearly two years, Quebec's balance of ethnic relations teetered on the edge of hysteria. As local media outlets exposed dozens of supposed outrages of accommodation, Mario Dumont, leader of the Action Démocratique du Québec party, launched a vociferous campaign to protect the cultural identity of francophone Quebeckers.
Anecdotes became rallying cries.
A sugar-shack operator in Mont-St-Grégoire received hate mail for removing pork from his pea soup to accommodate Muslims and Jews. A YMCA was pilloried for offering to put up frosted glass to shield scantily clad exercisers from the prying eyes of Hasidic teenage boys at a nearby school.
The pinnacle may have been when Hérouxville, a small town that had rarely seen an immigrant pass through, let alone settle there, drafted a code of conduct banning stoning and female circumcision.
Into the heated atmosphere stepped the two intellectuals. Mr. Taylor, 77, and Mr. Bouchard, 64, have dedicated their highly regarded careers to the study of ethnic diversity.
Mr. Bouchard, a sociologist, was less known outside Quebec. He is a sovereigntist with an ironclad belief that the province's independence movement must embrace diversity. He was influential among moderate sovereigntists, particularly after the 1995 referendum and Jacques Parizeau's infamous speech attributing the sovereigntists' defeat to money and the ethnic vote.
The brother of former Parti Québécois premier Lucien Bouchard, he is less warmly viewed among hard-liners, who accused him of selling out by failing to promote independence as a solution to the accommodation conflict.
"Some of the most bitter and insulting allegations were made against him," Mr. Taylor said. "I don't know how I would feel if people I thought were on my side in terms of party allegiance were getting on my case all the time."
Philosopher Mr. Taylor was a left-wing politician before he turned to academia full-time. He ran as a New Democratic Party candidate against Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the 1965 federal election.
While Mr. Trudeau saw Quebec nationalism as a danger requiring containment, Mr. Taylor believes it can create good, building communities and social cohesion. The two men remained friends and discussed the issue over decades.
Jim de Wilde, a political scientist, venture capitalist and public-policy lecturer who studied under Mr. Taylor in the early 1970s, observed that U.S. president-elect Barack Obama's rise has triggered a flood of discussion about identity in cosmopolitan societies.
Mr. Taylor started that discussion in Canada 40 years ago.
"He was just way ahead of his time in the discussion in terms of what Canada is as a state of mind and the possibilities of Canada and the uniqueness of Canada," Mr. de Wilde said. "He was one of the first people to recognize identity is complex."
But years of contemplation may not have prepared Mr. Taylor and Mr. Bouchard for the storm they faced and, in some ways, created in 2007 and 2008.
The 22 open-microphone hearings broadcast live on TV came close to going overboard on several occasions, Mr. Taylor acknowledges. Critics complained the commission gave xenophobes a provincewide platform to broadcast intolerant ramblings.
"But even people who said the most horrible things, they then sat down and allowed people to say the opposite," Mr. Taylor said.
"The hearings allowed people who were getting very worked up to be heard and they were given calm, rational responses, often by immigrants.
"I think it was worth it, and we got over it."
