Nagib Azergui used to be hopeful that the racism he experienced growing up in a Paris suburb was on its way out. In Emmanuel Macron, the country was getting a president who would heal divisions, an “anti-Trump leader.”
The head of France’s only Muslim political party now says he was wrong. Macron has called Islam a religion in crisis and has moved to shut down mosques accused of spreading hatred. Last week, his government introduced a draft law to fight “separatism,” a term he’s coined for groups that don’t integrate and are susceptible to extremism.
“Muslims are tired of being used by politicians as scapegoats to deflect attention away from real problems,” said Azergui, 41, an engineer of Moroccan descent from Nanterre.
Azergui can’t claim to represent the country’s Muslims—his group still only has about 1,000 members and in last year’s European elections it gained just 0.13% of the vote. But Macron’s policies have reinvigorated his goal of fighting Islamophobia and encouraging citizens of his religion to stop being “invisible.”
France’s president has cultivated an image abroad as a defender of liberalism since coming to power in 2017 in contrast to leaderships in the U.S., Britain and eastern Europe. Yet at home he’s been courting conservatives after a series of horrific attacks by Islamic radicals and that risks alienating a Muslim population that may be heterogeneous but also represents France’s second biggest religious group after Catholicism.
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Nagib Azergui is concerned the crackdown will backfire and drive more youngsters to extremism.
Photographer: Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images
As campaigning for the 2022 presidential election unofficially gets underway, there’s a growing sense of betrayal within France’s 5.6 million-strong Muslim community, the overwhelming majority of whom are integrated and reject terrorism.
Macron hasn’t said whether he’ll run again, but he’s clearly positioning himself as the law-and-order candidate in an election that’s likely to pit him against far-right leader Marine le Pen.
Attacks by extremists have left about 250 people dead since 2015, including a teacher beheaded in October for opening a classroom debate on freedom of speech and cartoons of Prophet Muhammed.
Part of the French president’s plan entails creating an “Islam of Enlightenment” and while he has repeatedly insisted that Muslims shouldn’t be stigmatized, his assertion that the religion is in crisis upset many Muslims in France.
As did his appointment of Gerald Darmanin, a hardliner, as interior minister in a recent cabinet shuffle. His prime minister, Jean Castex, meanwhile has dismissed the idea of making amends for France’s colonization of regions including in North Africa and the Sahel, from where many of its Muslims can trace their roots.
France’s Muslim community is broad and opinions are hard to pin down because of restrictions on collecting ethnic and religious statistics.
The country’s aspiration for universalism and integration makes it harder for those who identify with any religion from entering public life, said Hakim El Karoui, a fellow at Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne. Polls commissioned by Journal du Dimanche, a French weekly newspaper, and Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine targeted in a 2015 terrorist attack, last year showed that 60% of French deem Islam incompatible with the values of the Republic, with almost half of French Muslims under 25 sharing that view.
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Hakim El Karoui is himself a poster child of success in France.
Photographer: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
“Society puts Muslims in a double bind,” said El Karoui. “Speak up, but also, don’t show your religion in public.”
El Karoui is himself a poster child of success in France, and said Islam represents a link to his family’s roots. His mother is Protestant, his father a Muslim of Tunisian origin. He’s an ex-banker whose time at Rothschild coincided with Macron’s. Two of his uncles were ministers in Tunisia before the uprising that sparked the Arab Spring. El Karoui served as an adviser to former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
In his elegant office in Paris’s business district, El Karoui thinks France’s integration system ultimately works well, citing as an example a high rate of mixed marriages. He advocates the creation of a body that would raise funds to encourage Muslims to fund research and train imams.
“After every terrorist attack, discrimination against Muslims jumps,” he said. “What I’m telling them is: It’s not your fault, but now it’s in your interest to get organized.”
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Friday prayers at the Grand Mosque of Paris. President Macron’s assertion that the religion is in crisis upset many Muslims in France.
Photographer: Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP/Getty Images
The trouble is that when they try to do that, they can run into problems. Fatima Bent is the president of the feminist, anti-racist group Lallab. It describes itself as “pro-choice” on issues from abortion to the veil, but has been accused of being close to the Muslim Brotherhood. When it was set up in 2016, a bank even rejected its application to open an account.
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Fatima Bent’s organizing to help Muslim women share their stories.
Source: Fatima Bent
Bent said she worries most about police violence, which quietly affected Muslims in the suburbs, or “banlieues,” for a long time before entering the public eye more recently. She’s critical of a law provision once pushed by Macron that would have made it harder to share videos of police abuse.
Muslim voters are disappointed by the parties on the political left, which they have tended to support, Bent said. That’s when they don’t abstain.
While Azergui tries to get people behind his Union of French Muslim Democrats, which he founded eight years ago after former President Nicolas Sarkozy began a debate on national identity and immigration, Bent is betting on local initiatives. She’s organizing to help Muslim women share their stories.
“I can’t believe we’re still asked whether Islam is compatible with secularism when we have millions of French Muslims at peace with these two identities, and living peacefully,” Bent said. “The government’s rhetoric is dangerous, it’s widening the rift of ‘them’ against us.”
According to the draft law on “separatism” published on Dec. 9, there will be stricter punishments for those who promote hatred online and threaten civil servants, including teachers. It neither explicitly mentioned Islam nor Muslims.
Doctors who provide “virginity certificates” will also be targeted and scrutiny of the funding of religious associations increased. Home-schooling for kids older than three, meanwhile, will be restricted in a bid to prevent clandestine religious schools. Macron also wants to end the ghettoization of city suburbs and support their residents, though he has yet to unveil firm proposals to do so.
Azergui is concerned the crackdown will backfire and drive more youngsters to extremism. He defends an interpretation of France’s secularism, known as “laicite,” whereby all faiths are respected but kept private, though he’d like women to be allowed to wear veils wherever they want.
Since 2004, the wearing of religious signs has been prohibited in French schools, a ban backed by 44% of Muslims, according to a recent Ifop poll. While the veil may be worn elsewhere, women who do so and take on public responsibilities are often criticized as promoting a sexist symbol, including by government members.
“When Macron speaks about separatism, he deliberately focuses on Islamism rather than on Corsican separatists, or wealthy people building a life on the margins,” said Azergui. “We’re an easy target.”
EDMONTON – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her government’s $8.6-billion plan to fast-track building new schools will include a pilot project to incentivize private ones.
Smith said the ultimate goal is to create thousands of new spaces for an exploding number of new students at a reduced cost to taxpayers.
“We want to put all of the different school options on the same level playing field,” Smith told a news conference in Calgary Wednesday.
Smith did not offer details about how much private school construction costs might be incentivized, but said she wants to see what independent schools might pitch.
“We’re putting it out there as a pilot to see if there is any interest in partnering on the same basis that we’ll be building the other schools with the different (public) school boards,” she said.
Smith made the announcement a day after she announced the multibillion-dollar school build to address soaring numbers of new students.
By quadrupling the current school construction budget to $8.6 billion, the province aims to offer up 30 new schools each year, adding 50,000 new student spaces within three years.
The government also wants to build or expand five charter school buildings per year, starting in next year’s budget, adding 12,500 spaces within four years.
Currently, non-profit independent schools can get some grants worth about 70 per cent of what students in public schools receive per student from the province.
However, those grants don’t cover major construction costs.
John Jagersma, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges of Alberta, said he’s interested in having conversations with the government about incentives.
He said the province has never directly funded major capital costs for their facilities before, and said he doesn’t think the association has ever asked for full capital funding.
He said community or religious groups traditionally cover those costs, but they can help take the pressure off the public or separate systems.
“We think we can do our part,” Jagersma said.
Dennis MacNeil, head of the Public School Boards Association of Alberta, said they welcome the new funding, but said money for private school builds would set a precedent that could ultimately hurt the public system.
“We believe that the first school in any community should be a public school, because only public schools accept all kids that come through their doors and provide programming for them,” he said.
Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said if public dollars are going to be spent on building private schools, then students in the public system should be able to equitably access those schools.
“No other province spends as much money on private schools as Alberta does, and it’s at the detriment of public schools, where over 90 per cent of students go to school,” he said.
Schilling also said the province needs about 5,000 teachers now, but the government announcement didn’t offer a plan to train and hire thousands more over the next few years.
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi on Tuesday praised the $8.6 billion as a “generational investment” in education, but said private schools have different mandates and the result could be schools not being built where they are needed most.
“Using that money to build public schools is more efficient, it’s smarter, it’s faster, and it will serve students better,” Nenshi said.
Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’ office declined to answer specific questions about the pilot project Wednesday, saying it’s still under development.
“Options and considerations for making capital more affordable for independent schools are being explored,” a spokesperson said. “Further information on this program will be forthcoming in the near future.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
OTTAWA – Health Minister Mark Holland urged a committee of senators Wednesday not to tweak the pharmacare bill he carefully negotiated with the NDP earlier this year.
The bill would underpin a potential national, single-payer pharmacare program and allow the health minister to negotiate with provinces and territories to cover some diabetes and contraceptive medications.
It was the result of weeks of political negotiations with the New Democrats, who early this year threatened to pull out of their supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals unless they could agree on the wording.
“Academics and experts have suggested amendments to this bill to most of us here, I think,” Independent Senator Rosemary Moodie told Holland at a meeting of the Senate’s social affairs committee.
Holland appeared before the committee as it considers the bill. He said he respects the role of the Senate, but that the pharmacare legislation is, in his view, “a little bit different.”
“It was balanced on a pinhead,” he told the committee.
“This is by far — and I’ve been involved in a lot of complex things — the most difficult bit of business I’ve ever been in. Every syllable, every word in this bill was debated and argued over.”
Holland also asked the senators to move quickly to pass the legislation, to avoid lending credence to Conservative critiques that the program is a fantasy.
When asked about the Liberals’ proposed pharmacare program for diabetes and birth control, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has often responded that the program isn’t real. Once the legislation is passed, the minister must negotiate with every provincial government to actually administer the program, which could take many months.
“If we spend a long time wordsmithing and trying to make the legislation perfect, then the criticism that it’s not real starts to feel real for people, because they don’t actually get drugs, they don’t get an improvement in their life,” Holland told the committee.
He told the committee that one of the reasons he signed a preliminary deal with his counterpart in British Columbia was to help answer some of the Senate’s questions about how the program would work in practice.
The memorandum of understanding between Ottawa and B.C. lays out how to province will use funds from the pharmacare bill to expand on its existing public coverage of contraceptives to include hormone replacement therapy to treat menopausal symptoms.
The agreement isn’t binding, and Holland would still need to formalize talks with the province when and if the Senate passes the bill based on any changes the senators decide to make.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia’s NDP are accusing the government of prioritizing landlords over residents who need an affordable place to live, as the opposition party tables a bill aimed at addressing the housing crisis.
NDP Leader Claudia Chender took aim at the Progressive Conservatives Wednesday ahead of introducing two new housing bills, saying the government “seems to be more focused on helping wealthy developers than everyday families.”
The Minister of Service Nova Scotia has said the government’s own housing legislation will “balance” the needs of tenants and landlords by extending the five per cent cap on rent until the end of 2027. But critics have called the cap extension useless because it allows landlords to raise rents past five per cent on fixed-term leases as long as property owners sign with a new renter.
Chender said the rules around fixed-term leases give landlords the “financial incentive to evict,” resulting in more people pushed into homelessness. She also criticized the part of the government bill that will permit landlords to issue eviction notices after three days of unpaid rent instead of 15.
The Tories’ housing bill, she said, represents a “shocking admission from this government that they are more concerned with conversations around landlord profits … than they are about Nova Scotians who are trying to find a home they can afford.”
The premier’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also included in the government’s new housing legislation are clearer conditions for landlords to end a tenancy, such as criminal behaviour, disturbing fellow tenants, repeated late rental payments and extraordinary damage to a unit. It will also prohibit tenants from subletting units for more than they are paying.
The first NDP bill tabled Wednesday would create a “homelessness task force” to gather data to try to prevent homelessness, and the second would set limits on evictions during the winter and for seniors who meet income eligibility requirements for social housing and have lived in the same home for more than 10 years.
The NDP has previously tabled legislation that would create a $500 tax credit for renters and tie rent control to housing units instead of the individual.
Earlier this week landlords defended the use of the contentious fixed-term leases, saying they need to have the option to raise rent higher than five per cent to maintain their properties and recoup costs. Landlord Yarviv Gadish, who manages three properties in the Halifax area, called the use of fixed-term leases “absolutely essential” in order to keep his apartments presentable and to get a return on his investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
