Opposition leaders in Quebec are being accused of fuelling extreme right views in Quebec. In Saint-Eustache, where the Parti Quebecois was holding a pre-session caucus, PQ leader Jean-François Lisée responded by speaking out against violence directed at the Muslim community.
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Lisée argued that politicians need to be free to debate sensitive issues.
“People should always expect frank talk from me,” he told reporters during a scrum Wednesday.
Frank, perhaps, but also controversial. Members of his own party found the PQ leader’s firm position against allowing asylum seekers into Quebec cold and insensitive. Some Muslim community groups say Lisée’s remarks are also inflammatory.
“Jean-François Lisée has been playing a game where there is obviously anxiety in our society regarding minorities, regarding immigrants,” said Haroun Bouazzi, co-president of Association des Musulmans et des Arabes pour la Laïcité au Québec (AMAL), or Muslims and Arabs for Secularism in Quebec in English.
Bouazzi continued: “He has been pointing fingers to minorities, pointing fingers to women wearing scarves, pointing fingers to Haitian refugees.”
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Bouazzi blames Quebec’s opposition leaders — Lisée and the CAQ’s François Legault, for fuelling anti-Muslim and alt-right sentiment in Quebec.
Earlier this month, the car of Quebec City’s Islamic Cultural Centre president was firebombed. The centre was the target of a shooting in January where six men were killed during evening prayers.
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Both Quebec City and Montreal mayors fear the rise of anti-Islamic groups and say the fire was not an isolated incident.
“If there is a link, we will wait for the inquiry, but clearly when we looked at it, we said the worst thing is to not do something, it’s to be silent about it,” said Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre.
“What we know, things are going worse and worse,” said Bouazzi.
He added, “We have been seeing these groups organizing on the Internet first, on social media, and now we’re seeing that they are actually demonstrating, actually renting places. They have these different groups all over Quebec.”
Both Lisée and Legault were quick to distance themselves from rising alt-right groups like La Meute.
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“Violence in Quebec is absolutely out of bounds. You’ll never get anything through violence except a prison sentence,” Lisée said.
But Bouazzi said that instead of criticizing current immigration policies, these leaders need to be pushing the government to stamp out Islamophobia.
“First, we need education. We need a course at the secondary school for all Quebecers to actually understand what is racism, what is sexism, what is Islamophobia. We need the police to actually be… trained so that they understand what is a hate crime,” he said.