The Consensus Effect
The CAQ, Bill 21 and the Making of Public Opinion (Part 3 of 3)
Rights are enshrined in constitutions and charters in order to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Since its election, the CAQ government has practically made this tyranny its calling card. On October 3, François Legault told journalists that “if we are obliged to use the notwithstanding clause to put in place what the majority of Quebeckers want, we will do it.” But are Quebeckers as willing as the CAQ to bulldoze over people’s constitutionally-protected rights to impose a ban on religious symbols? Nothing is more uncertain.
Bill 21’s pre-emptive invocation of the notwithstanding clause, which effectively immunizes the legislation from challenges under the Quebec and Canadian charters of rights and freedoms, is one of its most contentious elements. During the Charte des valeurs debate, the constitutionality of the PQ’s proposed ban was so politically sensitive, and the legal obstacle so daunting, that the Marois government consciously avoided having the government’s lawyers assess Bill 60. Polls at the time showed that Quebeckers were not particularly keen about running roughshod over minorities’ constitutionally-protected rights.
CAQ Justice Minister Sonia Lebel was flippant about the possibility that its ban on religious symbols might unduly infringe on people’s rights: “There are always legal opinions that can go in any direction.” Lebel, it turns out, was wrong: the government’s lawyers assessed Bill 21 and unanimously concluded that it could not withstand a challenge under the Charter. The identitaire right was unfazed by this fact, reveling in the transgressive thrill of Bill 21. Mathieu Bock-Côté was rapturous in his praise of the decision to use the notwithstanding clause: “Our elected officials should remember that the vast majority of Quebeckers are behind them. We are collectively ending our political impotence and reaffirming our right to defend our identity. Finally!”
To silence criticisms of its cavalier use of this legislative ‘atomic bomb,’ the CAQ has tried to show that Quebeckers are no longer so attached to such constitutional niceties. Prior to deposing the law, the CAQ commissioned a survey by Léger which claimed that 60% of Quebeckers supported the move to shield Bill 21 against constitutional challenges. Neither the methodology nor the full results of the survey were made public, and the results were leaked in exclusivity to the CAQ-friendly Quebecor media empire.
The wording and content of Léger’s survey, not surprisingly, tilted systematically in the government’s favour. “When you load that many questions, it’s not ok,” said Jack Jedwab, president of the Association of Canadian Studies and a veteran analyst of public opinion. “You’re planting ideas or making suggestions to respondents.” The survey asked whether respondents supported a ban on “religious symbols” (as usual, without defining the term or testing people’s opinions for specific symbols), while avoiding potentially embarrassing questions about the consequences of the ban — perhaps because Bill 21 does not outline what sanctions will be imposed if teachers or other public servants defy the law.
The question on the notwithstanding clause in particular was a “whopper,” in Jedwab’s opinion. The survey merely told respondents that it would “have the effect of preventing certain court challenges,” thereby evading any mention of people’s rights or the constitutionality of Bill 21. “I expected some orientation but this is really stretching things,” Jedwab said. Léger’s own polling during the Charte debate posed the question in a more neutral way and came up with dramatically different results, with a solid majority (56–59%) agreeing that the Charte des valeurs should be submitted to the courts to verify whether it was constitutional or not before becoming law. (Léger, September 17–19, 2013; January 6–9, 2014)
How will Quebeckers react to the CAQ’s tacit admission that Bill 21 will unjustifiably infringe on people’s rights and could not be defended in court if allowed to be challenged? A clearer answer will have to await more honest polling, but it seems reasonable to assume that the vast majority do not take the matter of Bill 21 violating people’s Charter rights as lightly as the CAQ government and their identitaire cheerleaders do.
In his famous 1973 essay, “Public opinion does not exist,” Pierre Bourdieu argued that “nothing is more inadequate to represent the state of public opinion than a percentage.” This inadequacy arises from the way opinion surveys take responses to a given question and add them up, without distinction between answers based on deeply-held beliefs or spontaneous inclinations, and without consideration of how relevant the subject is to survey respondents’ lives. “One of the most pernicious effects of the opinion survey consists precisely of obliging people to answer questions that they themselves would never have asked,” Bourdieu remarked. By doing away with all the untidy complexity of actual public opinion, the numbers regularly featured in newspaper headlines (“60% of French people support …”) serve “to impose the idea that there exists something like the average opinion.”
Behind the veil of scientific objectivity, public opinion polls were in fact deeply political constructs. They conferred a form of benediction on state action that had once been derived from religious sources, which Bourdieu termed the “consensus effect”:
To put it simply, the politician is he who says, “God is with us.” Today, the equivalent of “God is with us” is “public opinion is with us.” Such is the fundamental effect of the public opinion survey: to propagate the idea that there exists a unanimous public opinion, and thus to legitimate a policy and reinforce the relations of force that it is based on or that make it possible.
In the decades-long cultural war waged by Quebec’s identitaire right, this consensus effect has served as one of their most effective weapons. Since the election of François Legault and the CAQ, the media have consistently minimized, ignored or downplayed how divided public opinion is over the CAQ ban and the modalities of its implementation.
The November 2018 CROP poll was predictably seized upon by the Journal de Montréal’s roster of identitaire columnists as a cudgel to beat down the left. Mathieu Bock-Côté said the poll was proof that the left’s “multiculturalist” ideology is “massively rejected” by ordinary Quebeckers. Not to be outdone, Richard Martineau spent two columns bemoaning the “legendary arrogance of the left,” whose “incessant attacks” on the CAQ’s religious symbols ban demonstrated that they “are quite disconnected from the Québécois people.” Opposition to a policy with so much popular support could only come from a “completely disconnected elite” that disdainfully “looks down upon the people.”
But it was not just right-wing commentators who trumpeted a simplistic reading of the CROP poll results. In the news media, the verdict was swift and unanimous: CROP had proven that Legault’s policy represented the will of the Québécois people.
“Laïcité et signes religieux : le gouvernement Legault a l’appui de la population” (ICI Radio-Canada)
“Signes religieux: Legault aurait l’appui d’une majorité de Québécois” (HuffPost Québec)
“Laïcité: une majorité de Québécois derrière la CAQ” (La Presse)
“Laïcité: une majorité de Québécois appuie la CAQ, révèle un sondage” (Métro Montréal)
“Signes religieux au Québec : un sondage révèle que le gouvernement Legault serait sur la bonne voie” (Radio-Canada International)
The news articles accompanying the headlines were even more emphatic about the CROP poll’s political significance. The CAQ’s stance had “the support of a large majority of the population,” the Canadian Press stated in a widely reprinted article. The poll confirmed the Legault government’s assertion that “its proposed law reflects ‘the consensus of Quebec society’,” Agence QMI reported, since it showed “Quebeckers overwhelmingly approve of the ban on religious symbols.” Radio-Canada, which sponsored the survey, went the furthest, stating that the proposed ban had received “unequivocal backing, even when it came to teachers.” (emphases added) The highly-publicized CROP poll was like manna from heaven for the newly-elected CAQ government.
The ambiguities of CROP’s actual findings were buried under an avalanche of news stories declaring that le peuple had spoken. The fact that more than four in ten Quebeckers were opposed to public employees being forced to choose between their faith and their job simply did not register as important in the dominant media frame, nor did the opinion of nearly one-third (28%) of Quebeckers who spontaneously expressed opposition to the law. CROP President Alain Giguère contributed to the distorting media spin, telling Radio-Canada that the poll had authorized the Legault government “beyond the shadow of a doubt” to go ahead with its religious symbols ban. And while the CROP poll (or rather, a severely truncated version of its results) received wall-to-wall coverage, the Vox Pop Labs survey released just three days later attracted virtually no media attention, despite its much larger sample size and more rigorous methodology.
We should not be fooled by the right’s attempts to intimidate us with such facile numbers, in order to short-circuit debate on Bill 21 and stifle criticism of the thinly-veiled racism behind it. While the CAQ incessantly proclaims the gods of public opinion to be on its side, popular enthusiasm for such discriminatory bans is not nearly as strong as they claim. Far from representing an unassailable consensus, Quebeckers’ opinions are in reality highly unstable and context-dependent. Many Quebeckers have not made up their minds on the issue of religious symbols, and could be persuaded to oppose the CAQ’s proposed secularism law in the course of debate. A closer look at the polls on the question of religious symbols shows that the much-ballyhooed “consensus” is the product of precisely the kind of one-dimensional interpretations of polls that Bourdieu warned against.
Contrary to what the title of his essay seemed to imply, Pierre Bourdieu did not reject the idea of public opinion as such or deny the potential value of opinion polling research. The fundamental problem with opinion surveys and their representation in the media was that they tended to flatten out the complex “system of forces, of tensions” that actually constitute public opinion.
It is within that system of forces and tensions that the anti-racist movement must now fight, to mobilize the opposition that is latent in the Quebec public and to elaborate a popular critique of racism as a weapon of the ruling class, as a tool used to divide and distract us in order to secure their domination. The corporate media may have complacently acquiesced to the identitaire right’s definition of political reality, but the anti-racist movement cannot afford to make the same mistake.