On December 12, the French language news channel TVA reported that the administrators of two Montreal mosques had barred women from the construction site outside their doors.

According to the story, a clause in the contract “written in black and white” effectively banished five women from the site during Friday prayers. One woman worker who defied the order “was forced to work alongside a man,” according to a construction company spokesperson, adding that the mosque representatives threatened and intimidated company employees.

For TVA and its parent company, the media giant Quebecor, the story had the right elements: nefarious Muslims foisting their retrograde views on put-upon (and pure-laine) construction workers and on Quebec society by extension. Less than three hours after the story went online, Richard Martineau of Journal de Montréal, also a Quebecor entity, hoarked up a bit of canned froth to stoke the outrage.

“Where do we live, exactly? In Morocco? In Saudi Arabia? In Iraq? In Syria? In Algeria? In Iran? No. We live in Quebec,” Martineau wrote.

The story turned out to be completely false. The mosque representatives never asked women to vamoose for Friday prayers. There were no threats — only hearsay offered by a few middle-managers. The reporter in question, Marie-Pier Cloutier, claimed to have seen a copy of the contract. According to Quebec’s construction authority, no such contract existed.

It took TVA three days to pull the story from its website, and a bit longer than that to apologize to those “affected” by the story. A subsequent TVA investigation of the story blamed a miscommunication between the municipal body requesting the work and the workers doing it.

Martineau’s 400 pissy words disappeared into the ether without retraction or clarification. An isolated incident, in other words.

Except it’s not isolated. The mosque story is only the latest example of Quebecor’s high-profile campaign of baiting religious minorities in Quebec — a campaign that has been bread and butter for the media-and-cable giant helmed by businessman and erstwhile Parti Québécois leader Pierre-Karl Péladeau.

The question of ‘reasonable accommodation’ of religious and cultural minorities was manufactured almost entirely by Quebec media in general, and Quebecor titles in particular. The question of ‘reasonable accommodation’ of religious and cultural minorities was manufactured almost entirely by Quebec media in general, and Quebecor titles in particular.

Between TVA, the cable news network LCN and its string of Journal tabloid newspapers, Quebecor holds considerable sway over Quebecers. Over the past decade, Quebecor often has used this influence to peddle a fearsome narrative: that minorities, religious and otherwise, seek to bend Quebec society to their own primitive whims.

If, beginning in 2006, a reader relied solely on Quebecor-owned properties for his news, he’d have to be forgiven for thinking that all Muslims demand pork-free beans when visiting sugar shacks and Halal food for their daycare-aged children. He’d believe that Muslim women swim fully clothed when they aren’t voting with their faces covered, or barring men from attending government-funded prenatal courses — while Muslim men butcher their wives and daughters for being insufficiently pious.

According to this narrative, religious minorities want to do away with Christmas trees, wear knives to school, bar non-Kosher food from their hospitals and compel health clubs to frost their windows to shield the eyes of their youth from displays of sweaty flesh.

In many of the cases cited above, Quebecor media titles breathlessly broke these stories. In other cases, they just as breathlessly torqued them. (‘Veiled Women Bathe Totally Clothed!’, ‘Reasonable Accommodations At The Sugar Shack!’, ‘Frosted Windows To Please The Hassidic Community!’ ‘Jewish General Hospital: An Ambulance Driver Thrown Out Because Of A Ham Sandwich!’) In every case, the end result was the same: the suggestion that everyone who isn’t white and Catholic is making almost endless demands on Quebec society.

The question of ‘reasonable accommodation’ of religious and cultural minorities was manufactured almost entirely by Quebec media in general, and Quebecor titles in particular. Why did it break in 2006? Not coincidentally, this was the year Quebec’s populist right began to emerge in the form of Action démocratique du Québec. Ostensibly economic populists, the upstart party seemed obsessed with supposed instances of government indulging the impulses of religious minorities — and Quebecor was more than happy to play along.

“What began as local cases became veritable ‘affairs’ whose legal developments society monitored closely,” wrote the authors of a report on why ‘reasonable accommodation’ became a thing in Quebec.

“[T]opics of controversy previously focused essentially on the problem of religion’s place in public space and the accommodation of minority religious practices. From that point onward, debate encompassed the much broader question of the integration of the immigrant population and minorities.”

Little has changed 12 years on, and for a good reason. As the majority at home but a minority on the continent, French Quebecers are justifiably worried about the future of their language and institutions.

For over a decade, Quebecor has sold this fear back to its victims. And business is good.

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