Canadians experienced a shudder of distaste when the Parti Québécois introduced its secular charter in May 2013.

The law proposed stripping civil servants of the right to wear large Christian crosses or hijabs or yarmulkes. The superficial equality of treatment didn’t conceal the disproportionately hurtful impact the rules would have on Muslim women and observant Jews.

Many Canadians in Quebec and elsewhere felt it was a cruel way for a government in a multicultural state to treat its minorities. The proposed laws died with the PQ’s defeat by the provincial Liberals last spring.

Canadians are among the least religiously observant people in the world and we are extremely tolerant of religious diversity.

The PQ charter appeared to be an arbitrary attack by the powerful on the vulnerable. The Quebec government might have had the legal right to impose its will but it didn’t have the moral right to do so.

The brutal assassination of key members of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by Yemeni-trained terrorists raises some of these same issues again in a new way.

PQ leadership contender Bernard Drainville this week announced he wants to reintroduce the ban on Muslim religious symbols in the province to demonstrate that “it’s not for the extremists to make the law in Quebec.”

Stephen Harper, among many, has called the slaughter an act of war by international jihadism that endangers Canadians’ democracy and speech right.

The prime minister universalized a very specific terrorist act and promoted it into a war. This rhetoric can easily be confused with the fictitious and intellectually contemptible notion that a global clash of civilizations is taking place between Muslims and Christians.

Despite the efforts of Harper and Drainville to bring this horror home, the Charlie Hebdo massacre is very much a French phenomenon.

First, there’s Charlie Hebdo itself, a modern incarnation of the obscene and bloody-minded French revolutionary pamphlets that preached republicanism, secularism — and generous use of the guillotine.

It employs the weapons of humour and blasphemy to denigrate and undermine the role of religion in French politics and culture. In effect, its mission is to turn newcomers into good little secular French leftists.

Oddly, its position is not much different from that expressed by the very conservative former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who said: “If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community. And if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France.”

Charlie’s political position deserves every possible physical and constitutional protection in a democracy. And all journalists must stand in absolute solidarity with the Hebdoists. Nous sommes tous Charlie.

But Charlie Hebdo’s mission and values are foreign to us in every sense. Canada and Toronto are richly multicultural.

The identity of our city and country is continuing to evolve as newcomers make their mark and take a full place in our politics and culture. We don’t feel sufficient anxiety as a nation to need to suppress anyone’s uniqueness as long as it falls within our laws and our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Some journalists, including some of our own, argue the Star has a journalistic obligation to reprint the French magazine’s latest depiction of the Muslim prophet, Muhammad. This would show that terrorists can’t cow us and that we are willing to share the peril our colleagues at Charlie Hebdo courted.

But committing blasphemy for reasons of principle seems an oddly childish act in a society as secular and as safe as our own. And this publication has no desire to try to shape its readers into good little French leftists.

More than a million Canadians say they are of the Muslim faith; more than 600,000 are Ontarians. Many recent immigrants have issues with underemployment and concerns about the future prospects of their children.

They are doubly vulnerable in a period of protracted economic sluggishness because they are both a small and a very visible minority. And they feel that events far away have put them under suspicion.

We could run the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. There is a strong news rationale for doing so. But there are important reasons of principle not to do it. Just as we would not publish racist or pornographic images, we will exercise our judgment not to print the cartoons.

We will not print them because we have too much respect for fellow Canadians of Muslim background. We will not send a message that their way of being Canadian is less acceptable or less valuable than that of any other citizen. We will not do it because it is not the Canadian thing to do.

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And we won’t do it because we have too much respect for ourselves. The Toronto Star has campaigned against arbitrary and cruel acts of power for more than a century.

We stand by our legal right to free speech. But we won’t exploit it to commit a moral wrong.

John Cruickshank is publisher of the Toronto Star.

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