Mario Dumont is certainly no Pierre Trudeau, of whom it was more famously said, but it seems that he too haunts us still.
As leader of the lately departed Action démocratique du Québec, Dumont generated a wave of support that nearly carried the party to power – and himself to the premiership – five years ago by feeding old-stock Quebecers’ atavistic fears about their collective identity being undermined by cultural and religious accommodations made to immigrant groups. Most prominently targeted was the province’s burgeoning Muslim population.
After a career-ending repudiation in the last provincial election, Dumont has recycled himself as a TV talking head, but he’s still grabbing attention by stoking xenophobia. This week he stirred up a controversy over the growing encroachment of halal meats on Quebec’s food-store shelves.
Halal is meat derived from animals slaughtered in accordance with Islamic ritual method, which differs only marginally– at least as it’s done in this country – from standard slaughtering technique. It is much the same as Jewish kosher production, whereby the animals are killed by slitting their throats after being blessed by a rabbi.
Dumont charged on his show that the halal method has become standard practice at some Quebec slaughterhouses, and that not all the meat they produce in this manner is labelled halal when packaged for sale. His complaint was prominently amplified by the Journal de Montréal, which proclaimed in a screaming front-page headline the following day: “We are all eating halal.”
Oh, the horror!
The Parti Québécois, which in today’s incarnation eagerly seizes any excuse to exploit Quebecers’ cultural insecurities for electoral gain, promptly piled on, denouncing the halal propagation as an unreasonable accommodation incompatible with Quebec values. On the strength of his expertise as a veterinarian, its critic in the matter suggested that halal poses a health risk.
Not to be outdone in catering to prejudices, both the governing Liberals and the upstart Coalition Avenir Québec joined in with calls for a strict labelling requirement for halal, even though there is no discernible difference between halal and non-halal product sold in stores.
It is pertinent to note the quarter whence this uproar stems.
Not from any reports of food poisoning caused by halal consumption. Nor from any consumer complaints about the quality of halal meat. Nor even from denunciations by animal-rights activists that the chickens at the poultry-rendering plant that was targeted by Dumont’s rant suffer greater agonies than they did before the introduction of the halal method of slaughter.
Halal meat production is rigorously policed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in accordance with standards applied to all meat plants, and has been certified as healthy and not unduly cruel. At the plant in question, the only departure from standard slaughtering practice in halal production is the blessing of the birds.
(There was hand-wringing in the Journal report that some of the chickens, which are stunned into unconsciousness before their throats are slit, twitch as they bleed out while suspended from their feet. But this is a muscular reflex, not a conscious action by the bird. It has been reliably observed that chickens with their heads cut off still manage to run around for a time – the source of a cliché commonly applied, as it might be in the case of those pushing this snit, to people behaving irrationally.)
So no, this uproar did not stem from any reported, and much less confirmed, local problem. Rather it was imported from France, lifted whole-cloth from a similar gripe about unlabelled halal being sold in Paris.
It was originally raised by Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate of the extreme-right-wing National Front party, which has long made immigrant-baiting a stock in trade. It has also indulged in Holocaust minimization and glorification of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War Nazi occupation of France.
It is disturbing to see Quebec media and politicians taking cues from such a disreputable source, and shameful that they are fanning intolerance against an immigrant community on the pretence of standing up for Quebec values.
It would seem from this sorry episode that they regard gratuitous immigrant-bashing as a Quebec value.