Marginalized expertise of community organizations in Quebec's search for interculturalism.

Gilbert, Liette ; Viswanathan, Leela ; Saberi, Parastou 等

Abstract

Community organizations providing reception and integration services in Montreal have been on the frontlines of immigrant services delivery yet on the margins of the public debate of intercultural practices. Although the public debate led by the Bouchard-Taylor Commission can be seen as a significant effort in the reassertion of ideological principles of interculturalism, we contend that interculturalism is better expressed in the everyday work of community organizations. This article examines how the expertise of community organizations as 'partners' of the Quebec government in matters of immigration and integration services were marginalized in the 2007-2008 public debate and Bouchard-Taylor Commission's deliberations on 'reasonable accommodation' of cultural practices. This research is based on a close reading of the briefs presented by the community organizations to the Commission, Commission's documents, the websites of community organizations, newspaper articles, and interviews with service providers.

Keywords: community organizations, immigration and settlement services, interculturalism, Bouchard-Taylor Commission, marginalization

Resume

Les organismes communautaires oeuvrant dans l'accueil et l'integration des immigrants a Montreal sont en premiere ligne de service mais en marge du debat public sur les pratiques interculturelles. Bien que le debat public mene par la Commission Bouchard-Taylor en 2007-2008 peut etre vu comme un effort significatif dans la reaffirmation des principes ideologiques de l'interculturalisme, nous affirmons que cet interculturalisme est plus profondement vecu dans le travail quotidien des organismes communautaires. Cet article examine comment la longue expertise des organismes communautaires comme <<partenaires>> du gouvernement du Quebec en matiere de services d'accueil et d'integration des immigrants ont ete marginalises dans le debat public et les deliberations de la Commission Bouchard-Taylor sur les <<accommodement raisonnables>> des pratiques culturelles. Cette recherche est basee sur une lecture attentive des memoires presentes par les organismes communautaires a la Commission, des documents de la Commission, des sites internet des organismes communautaires, de nombreux articles de journaux, et d'entrevues avec les representants d'organismes communautaires.

Mots cles: organisations communautaires, immigration, services d'acceuil et d'integration, immigration, interculturalisme, Commission Bouchard-Taylor, marginalisation

Introduction

Community organizations in Montreal have been on the frontlines of immigrant services delivery yet on the margins of the public debate of intercultural practices. For decades now, community organizations providing reception and integration services have facilitated interactions between newcomers and governmental and societal institutions. (1) Their daily work serves as the incubation ground where the very first intercultural relations of newcomers and host society are cukivated. So more than just service providers, community organizations related to immigration and settlement services enact and lobby for intercultural dialogue and rapprochement as guided by Quebec's interculturalism policy. On an everyday basis, they serve as the collective and individual linkages to settlement and integration of new residents. They assist newcomers with settlement information, formation, employment support, intercultural mentoring, family-oriented and individualised activities in their new city. With a team of volunteers and in collaboration with other community organizations in the neighborhood, they help newcomers find an apartment, warm clothes, food or employment. They translate societal norms, conventions and expectations related to health, education and legal systems, among many others. Their mandate in the words of one organization La Maisonnee (2007) is "to make of each resident, existing, new or by birth, a full citizen."

The role and actions of these community organizations are largely overlooked when sitting in the shadow of the highly mediatized Herouxville affair. In 2007, Herouxville, a small Quebec town proposed a list of 'standards' for immigrants which produced a long and somber xenophobic chill on the intercultural imagination of Quebecers. As a reaction to both similar neoconservative trends across the western world and contentious cases of 'reasonable accommodation' in Montreal, the controversial measure dictated codes of conduct for newcomers and instantly attracted international media attention. Herouxville's infamous declaration prompted intense public discussions on the tensions between respect and assimilation of immigrant practices, the significance of Quebec's proclaimed interculturalism, and the idea and practices of reasonable accommodation in Quebec.

Through the establishment of the Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodement reliees aux differences culturelles (known as the Bouchard-Taylor Commission), the Government of Quebec sought to shift the public debate away from Herouxville, into a broader contextual analysis and province-wide public consultation. The mandate of the Commission was to examine the practices of cultural 'accommodation' (2) and their compliance to Quebec's core values as a pluralist and democratic society in which French is the common language of public life (Ministere des Communautes culturelles et de l'immigration, 1991). Depending on the interlocutors, Quebec's politics of settlement and integration of newcomers were either going way too far or not far enough. The undertones of the debate were themselves cast in a multitude of polarized relations: us and them; Quebecois 'de souche' and immigrants; assimilation and integration; Canada's multiculturalism and Quebec's interculturalism; tolerance and convergence; Montreal and regions; religion and secularism, among many others. This polarization with all its tensions and contradictions maps the unstable boundaries of the intercultural debate in Quebec and the daily realities that have challenged and informed community organizations for decades.

The public consultation and deliberations of the Commission attempted to reach a wide range of people, organizations and institutions but failed short to fully recognize the expertise of community organizations that for decades have been working on the frontline of immigration and newcomer integration services and advocacy. Although the public debate led by the Commission can be seen as a significant effort in the reassertion of ideological principles of interculturalism, we contend that interculturalism is better expressed in the everyday work of community organizations.

This article examines how the expertise of community organizations as 'partners' of the Quebec government in matters of immigration and integration services were marginalized in the 2007-2008 public debate and Bouchard-Taylor Commission's deliberations on 'reasonable accommodation' of cultural practices. We consider that the marginalisation of community organizations/partners is highly problematic given their key role in immigration and integration services and more broadly their role in advocating for social justice in terms of redistribution of resources and claims of recognition. We consider the role of the community sector as key to social sustainability, defined by Polese and Stren (2000: 3), as the "policies and institutions that have the overall effect of integrating diverse groups and cultural practices in a just and equitable fashion." Justice and equity are at the core actions of community organizations that derive their mandate from the priorities of the state as well as from the needs of newcomers.

This paper is organized into two sections. After a short review of our methods and analytical framework, the background section details the development of interculturalism in Quebec, the role of community organizations in general, and more specifically in immigration services and integration processes, as well as the process undertaken by the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. The findings and discussion section examines how the expertise of community organizations was marginalized--evidenced in the limited recognition of that expertise, lack of state leadership to defend a clear message on immigration and integration issues, the need for additional funding and complete transfers of federal monies for immigrant services in Quebec. We conclude that despite the dissonance between the decisions of the Commission and the demands of the community organizations, as well as the marginalisation of these organizations in a top-down partnership in service delivery, there was notable congruence between the recommendations of the Commission and recommendations of the community organizations presented in their commission briefs.

Methods and Analytic Framework

The starting point for this inquiry was a research project conducted by one of us with 11 representatives of community organizations in Montreal a decade ago and the stark realization that the same issues of recognition, clarity and funding were still persistent--particularly in the light of Quebec's recent public debate on intercultural accommodation. In order to assess the extent of the recognition of the work of community organizations, we draw from our close reading of the briefs presented by the community organizations to the Commission, a review of websites of the majority of the community organizations who authored these briefs, as well a reading of the majority of the briefs (i.e., including individual briefs) presented at the Commission hearings that were held in Montreal. We also did a close reading of preliminary and final documents of the Commission's work in 2007-2008, including key commissioned research reports from academic scholars on interculturalism, media discourses, integration and immigration. In addition to the academic literature on interculturalism and the community sector, we also reviewed hundreds of newspaper articles, columns, and editorials in anglophone and francophone dailies in Montreal and Toronto from January 2007 to June 2008 to get a sense of the general public's understanding of the issues raised in and by the works of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. As a supplement to our textual analysis, we also conducted a long interview with representatives from two community organizations in May 2008.

Background

Interculturalism in Quebec

In his book Strange Diversity, James Tully (1995:11) describes interculturalism as the geographical overlapping of cultures, interdependent in the formation and identity, and "existing in complex historical processes of interaction with other cultures." For Tully, cultural entanglement has always existed but it has been heightened by the massive migrations of this century. Cultures are therefore, according to Tully (ibid.), "continuously contested, imagined and re-imagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through their interaction with others." This grounded theory of interculturalism differs from interculturalism policy as a model of management of diversity that promotes exchange and interactions between different cultural groups. The Bouchard-Taylor Commission (2008: 287) defines interculturalism in Quebec as a "policy or model that advocates harmonious relations between cultures based on intensive exchanges centred on an integration process that does not seek to eliminate differences while fostering the development of a common identity." Interculturalism in Quebec is a policy (not a law) guiding the development of a common civic framework that promotes intercultural dialogue or rapprochement between different cultural groups. In interculturalism, immigrant communities are expected to maintain their heritage while engaging with the institutions of the host society in French, the common public language. In 1981, Quebec's Ministere des communautes culturelles et de l'immigration produced an action plan entitled Autant de facon detre Quebecois [Many ways to be Quebecers] presenting interculturalism as the province's commitment to integration. As indicated by the title, the plan served to redefine Quebec nationalism as more inclusive of difference. In 1990, the government reiterated its intercultural commitment with Au Quebec pour batir ensemble: Enonce de politique gouvernementale en matiere d'immigration et d'integration [In Quebec to Build Together: Policy declaration on the question of immigration and integration]. The declaration clearly positions immigration as a key element of economic, demographic and cultural/linguistic development and affirms Quebec's commitment to adapt its services to insure accessibility and equity to immigrants via a network of community 'partners.' The declaration also served as a 'moral contract' or a 'common civic framework' establishing the non-negotiable elements of Quebec society as democratic, pluralistic and francophone, and thus promoting a new performative and nationalist Quebec citizenship (Juteau, 2002).

Interculturalism and its focus on Quebec's cultural interaction and convergence was a distinct response to Canada's policy of multiculturalism. While multiculturalism was perceived as relegating Quebec's unique Francophone experience in North America as one of the many cultures in Canada, interculturalism defended Quebec's distinct society, and its approach to immigration and integration. Yet, the differences between Canadian multiculturalism and Quebec interculturalism are said to be more rhetorically than substantively different (Weinstock, 2012; Rocher et al., 2007; Anctil, 2005; Nugent, 2006; Juteau, 2002); they are both models of management of cultural diversity, rejecting assimilation. Multiculturalism, according to Rocher et al. (2007) is more about respect of cultural diversity than integration, and emphasizes individual rights rather than social convergence. As Tully (1995: 8) argues, "the age of 'multiculturalism' [and we suggest interculturalism as policy] is seen as a kind of extension of the last three centuries of multi-nationalism with no fundamental change in constitutional thinking required." While interculturalism in Quebec has not been the radical break from the "stultifying forms of constitutional recognition that suppress and thwart the cultural identifies of those who demand recognition" (ibid.: 17), it has generated a heated public discussion on the terms of integration and inclusion of newcomers.

Community Organizations in Montreal

Community organizations directly working with newcomers have played a central role in incubating intercultural relations. For more than three decades, community organizations have provided reception and integration services for newcomers in Montreal (and more recently in the rest of Quebec) as 'partners' of the Quebec government. 'Partners' is the official language used by Quebec's Ministere de l'immigration et des communautes culturelles who provide funding to community organizations for their support of newcomers and their integration--and community organizations deliver free services of assistance, support and training to newcomers. Although the number of newcomers using the services varies depending on the organization's location, size and expertise, each organization assists between 3,000 and 7,000 newcomers a year (ALPA, 2007; La Maisonee, 2007; L'Hirondelle, 2007)--and do not discriminate between eligible and thousands of ineligible people in need (i.e., refugee claimants, residents for more that 5 years, people without papers).

Immigration service organizations emerged as a result of the needs among particular immigrant neighborhoods and their shared experiences of immigration. Often staffed by people who have experienced migration first-hand (and supported by local volunteers, themselves often newcomers as well in a more or less distant past), immigration service providers serve as the direct link between the society and the newcomers (and their social and survival networks). They are charged with the ambitious responsibility to facilitate the integration of newcomers by providing information, training, services and support to an increasingly growing number of immigrants. In the words of the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes refugiees et immigrantes or TRCI (2007: 7), the mission of community organizations "consists to support, establish and defend the rights of newcomers, particularly those who experienced difficulties of orientation or adaptation during their settlement or those facing exclusion and discrimination." They are in fact increasingly being exhorted to serve more people with the same limited resources. Community organizations have had to negotiate the government's bureaucratic and economic vision of immigration with the on-the-ground challenges associated with the growing cultural diversity of Quebec's population (Reichhold, 2010). The community sector has incontestably acquired an expertise of addressing issues related to integration and support of newcomers, intercultural practices and relations, as well as social and civic engagement. As Duval et al. (2005) remarks, partnerships further evolved when the state realized that community organizations were locally effective and flexible, and financially less expensive in service delivery.

The presence of community organizations has been critical but has generally been overshadowed by the dominant role played by the state (and historically by the Church). Paquet (1999) argued that the increasing power of the state as a result of the Quiet Revolution led to a process of social erosion that had a negative impact on the socio-economic aspects of Quebec but gave rise to a citizen-led local day of protest that called for the amelioration of public infrastructure in poor neighborhoods (e.g., claims for better housing, better health care services, more parks, and better schools). However, in the 1960s and 1970s, a broad community movement politicized community-controlled and community-managed services to the poor, the unemployed, and people with particular needs that were forgotten or ignored for the most part, by state interventions (Godbout and Collin, 1977). In the 1980s and 1990s, the community sector expanded, "promoting values of solidarity, autonomy, democracy and social justice and demanding a larger role in the management of public affairs" (Reichhold, 2010: 37). Orsini (2006: 26) contends that "the community movement [in general] has been at the centre of many of the innovative policies that mark Quebec's progressive approach to welfare provision" He, however, notes that despite the greater recognition of community organizations by the state, "groups are becoming hyper-specialized and defined primarily by the services they offer, not by the needs of citizens in their communities" (ibid.: 32). In the 1990s neoliberal context of fiscal reform, privatization efforts and 'out-sourcing' arrangements (see Ilcan and Basok, 2004), community organizations have had to focus almost exclusively on providing services to disadvantaged peoples, and therefore could devote very little of their time to engage in justice-oriented advocacy work or in public debates that would have a direct impact on their work (Ilcan and Basok, 2004). Under the pressures to act primarily as service providers, and 'partners' of the state, and in the face of increasing demand and decreasing funding, both the immigrant experience of 'clients or consumer citizens' and the privileged 'human' approach of community workers are potentially lost and eroded. In this context of autonomization, responsibilization and professionalization, the community sector's logics of emancipation increasingly turns to conformity and conventional service delivery (Germain and Boudreau, 2010; Ilcan and Basok, 2004; White, 1997), especially in a climate of competition for limited governmental funding.

As the local partners of the Government of Quebec designated to assist newcomers, services organizations follow the ideology of Quebec's policy of interculturalism and assist newcomer populations on the principle that integration is a bidirectional process where the burden of integration or adaptation does not rest solely on newcomers. Service organizations recognize that newcomers must adhere to the liberal pluralistic, democratic participative values of the 'host' society. They, however, see the need for existing institutions to recognize and transform their discriminatory practices in order to progress towards equity--and too often they observe that the complex multidimensional process of integration still rests almost fully on newcomers and on community organizations (TRCI, 2007: 7). Yet, although community organizations are the primary 'partners' of the state in settlement and integration of immigrants, and have accumulated "a very long expertise developed from multiple programs and projects adapted to their [newcomers] specific needs,' such expertise is often taken for granted and voices of community organizations have not always been heard--especially given that the government dictates the terms of settlement and integration (L'Hirondelle, 2007:10-11). Nevertheless, such expertise exceeds service delivery because, in the words of Accueil Liaison Pour Arrivants- ALPA (2007: 1) "for almost a quarter of a century, ALPA was and remains a privileged witness to the different waves of immigration, to the evolution of the integration policy and economic and social challenges facing Quebec."

Yet, this expertise has not always been recognized fully and community organizations have grouped under the TCRI. In addition to speaking from a more unified and loud voice (with the state or other institutions), the TRCI provides a forum of exchange with the different organizations to talk about shared experiences and policy changes. The TRCI is an umbrella organization created in 1979 and currently grouping 145 community organizations. Community organizations, given their expertise acquired from their commitment to assist people on the ground, want to participate in the public discourse. Claims from the community sector for the need for political leadership to better promote the benefits of immigration in order to avoid xenophobic attitudes have been recurrent over the years and predated the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. As a matter of fact, the TRCI (2007) had proposed the need for a public debate on 'integration' in June 2004.

Bouchard- Taylor Commission

In January 2007, the Municipality of Herouxville in Quebec unanimously adopted in a declaration of 'standards of life' [normes de vie], a code of conduct for prospective im/migrants who might wish to settle in the small rural community located between Montreal and Quebec City. Herouxville's code of conduct was allegedly prepared as a response to the perceived excess of multiculturalism and interculturalism (and the rights of equal recognition and freedoms contained in both the Canadian and Quebec Charters) as a threat to the national culture and identity (Drouin, 2007).

The Quebec Government, led by Jean Charest's Liberal party, initially brushed off the Herouxville controversy as a marginal incident. However, in the light of the national and international media outburst created by the declaration, the Charest government announced the formation of a consultation commission in February 2007. Charest appointed two well-known scholars, historian and sociologist Gerard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor, as co-chairs of the Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodation reliees aux differences culturelles. (3) Acknowledging Quebec's interculturalism and its cultural and linguistic minority status in North America, the mandate of the Commission was to assess accommodation practices in Quebec and to conduct an extensive consultation on the topic and to formulate recommendations to the government to ensure that accommodation practices will conform to Quebec's values as a pluralistic, democratic, egalitarian society (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008: 17). The Bouchard-Taylor Commission was a governmental strategy to quickly control and reframe contentious matters from immediate political and public arenas. It had the double effect to 'cool-down' the Herouxville affair and the accommodation controversy while also removing the debate out of the ongoing electoral campaign (appropriated by the Action Democratique du Quebec party who campaigned on excessive or 'unreasonable accommodation' of cultural difference. (4)

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission was comprehensive in its scope. It organized 31 focus groups with individuals from different milieus in Montreal and throughout the province. It held sessions in 15 different regions, for a total of 31 days of hearings. It also held four province-wide public forums in which over 800 people participated. Close to 900 briefs were prepared by participants representing socio-cultural, religious, and advocacy groups, social services organizations but the majority was submitted by individuals. Twenty-two citizens' forums were held (some of them broadcast live on television networks) attracting a total of 3,500 participants. The Commission also held 59 meetings with experts and representatives of sociocultural organizations. It also set up an advisory committee comprising 15 specialists from various disciplines and commissioned 13 research projects from academic experts. Between August 2007 and January 2008, the Commission also operated a website which received over 400,000 visits (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008a: 17). The Commission delivered its final report (in both French and English) in May 2008 for a total tab of $3.7M--less than the $5M budget initially allocated (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008).

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission was also an opportunity to veer off the contentious issue of accommodation from the Herouxville case by expanding the boundaries of the consultation from a narrow legal examination of 'reasonable accommodation" to a broader multi-dimensional reflection on Quebec identity, interculturalism, immigration, and secularism. As Cote (2008: 54) writes, "[f] or reasonable accommodation represented only an epiphenomenon masking the essence of the problem: generalized anxiety, malaise and indirect calling into question of Quebec society's integration model" Like previous public commissions, the Bouchard-Taylor consultation was presented as an opportunity for a population to debate their present and future representations of themselves and such representations are "crucial not only for policymaking, but to politics in the largest sense ... because they set out the terms of who we are, where we have been and what we might become" (Jenson, 1994: 39-40).

Although the public consultation gave the opportunity to express a wide range of views, deliberations were not always the most positive example of deliberative democracy in practice. Public forums frequently drifted into offensive xenophobic, islamophobic and overt racist remarks reflecting, in the opinion of the commissioners, much ignorance, stereotypes or prejudice. Having chosen a mode of expressive (rather than reflective) deliberations (Cote, 2008) and having broadened the scope of the consultation, "the format of the forums put the co-chairs between a rock and a hard place: if they let people make racist comments, they were criticized for being passive; but if they intervened in extreme cases, the were criticized for restricting participants' freedom of expression" (Seidle, 2009: 92). In the end, as Cote (2008: 62) argues, "[t]he consultation phase resulted at best in increased frustration for all segments of the population and at worst in furthering alienation of members of so-called minorities." Mahrouse (2010: 88) goes even further to conclude that "the Commission paradoxically perpetuated the racialised hierarchies and exclusions that it wanted to overcome."

In its final report entitled Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission (2008) concluded that there was no 'accommodation crisis' in Quebec, but it emphasized the need for reconciliation, most notably between facts and erroneous perceptions of social diversity. The 310-page report, released in May 2008, rectifies misinformed and misinterpreted practices and qualifies the debate as a crisis of alarmist perceptions driven by sensationalistic media coverage and electoral campaigning opportunism (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008) but "did not bring that much new material to the fundamental debate concerning diversity, nor did it contribute in a decisive manner to the resolution of specific difficulties" (Anctil, 2011: 36). In newsprint media, the Commission and its report were generally praised for its "civility and intelligence" (Levy in Valiante, 2008: A6) and was seen as "admirably pragmatic," strong in "simple common sense" (MacDonald, 2008: 17), and "educative and salutary" (Simpson, 2008: A23). Others received it as a "confused, if well intentioned, collection of irreconcilable philosophies and solutions" (Anonymous, 2008: A24). At the release of the report in May 2008, an editorial of Toronto-based national daily The Globe and Mail (2008: A18) gave Bouchard and Taylor a grade of "A++" for "their beautiful elucidation of Quebec culture and its problems in accommodating diversity" but gave them a "D-" for overreaching the resolution of these tensions and contradictions. The editorial defended that the "report is most effective in calling Quebeckers to their better nature, and giving common-sense suggestions for settling disputes" but that some practical ideas and recommendations related to open secularism were flawed and deficient (ibid.).

Ironically, after denouncing a crisis of perception of intercultural conflicts frequently inflated by media, out of the total 37 recommendations related to intercultural practices and mutual understanding, integration of immigrants, inequality and discrimination, and secularism, the details related to open secularism (and state neutrality in matter of religion) predominantly captured the media and political reactions to the detriment, for example, of sidelined socio-economic integration issues. The Commission reasserted Quebec's democratic, pluralistic, and francophone principles and insisted that accommodation should not be overly legislated but rather negotiated by civil society on a case-by-case basis in respect of existing provincial policies (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008). Overall, the report fed some media reactions and political squabbles but no substantive policy or change came out of the debate. Policy reactions were limited to a redundant amendment in the Charter regarding gender equality, various proposals across political parties for a binding social contract to be signed by immigrants (as alluded in the Herouxville declaration), an ambitious yet unrealistic governmental plan, La diversite: Une valeur ajoutee, to promote full participation of immigrants into Quebec society, and a motion to maintain a Catholic religious symbol in the National Assembly after the Commission's specifically recommended its removal. As Herrera and Lachapelle (2010:103) states, "[o]verall, the undertaking [of the Commission] was mostly a public-relations exercise to show Quebecois that the government understood their concerns about Quebec identity."

Findings and Discussion

Marginalized Expertise

The Commission (and the governmental action plan that followed) made cursory reference to the role of community organizations working closely with newcomers. This is, in our view, rather surprising given the central role played by such organizations. The Bouchard-Taylor report recognized that "frontline agencies are playing an essential role from the standpoint of adaptation, orientation and integration and the outcome hinges by and large on them" and concluded that the "government should without any doubt substantially increase funding for these agencies" (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008: 229). The Commission recommended the increase of "funding for community groups and other front-line organizations devoted to welcoming and integrating immigrants ... in order to overcome a serious deficiency" (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008: 268). The Commission's report therefore validated what organizations have been saying for years and legitimated demands and community services. However, beyond this recommendation, very little was said about the "essential, self-effacing, and effective work" of the organizations (ibid.: 229), their privileged expertise in guiding the increasingly muddled public debate of immigration, integration and accommodation (or harmonization in a preferred terminology of the Commission).

Nine organization members of the Table de Concertation des organismes au services des personnes refugiees et immigrantes (TCRI) presented a brief to the Commission in the National Audiences of Montreal. Community organizations working with newcomers presented their briefs at the National Audiences (see Table 1) but were numerically overshadowed by individuals' presentations. According to Seidle (2009: 2), "[i]n Montreal, a significant number of immigrants intervened" speaking about barriers encountered in employment and francization, yet showing their interest to be part of the public debate and their commitment to integrate.

That there were only 9 organizations out of the 150+ ministerial partners (Ministere de l'Immigration et des Communautes culturelles, 2012) might be attributable to the representative role of the TCRI, but also to community organizations' stretched resources (time, money and labor), demanding planning of service delivery, and a regrettable tradition of being unheard by the government. Moreover, none of the community experts were invited to play a particular advisory role. A great majority of the briefs presented emphasized the lack of recognition of their expertise, the lack of coherent integration and interculturalism guidelines, and the lack of funding (TRCI, 2007; L'Hirondelle, 2007; La Maisonnee, 2007).

Little Recognition of Community Organizations" Expertise

Community organizations' direct service work with immigrants, refugees and non-status people have been largely ignored in the public debate--and so was their broader advocacy work for social justice. In their brief, La Maisonnee (2007: 7) "considers that community organizations working at welcoming and integration of immigrants and their families to Quebec's society have developed an expertise in the field. Unfortunately, they are not present at the experts table of the Commission." For Reichhold (2010: 39), "community organizations in the immigration and integration sector, despite their number, remain a marginal force, based on their allocated budgets, even though some 500,000 newcomers a year use those organizations services to some extent"

Community reception and integration service organizations have been assisting newcomers with their everyday challenges of integration for years and therefore have been well aware of the key debates. However, in their briefs delivered to the Commission, community organizations admitted being surprised by the quick politicization, mediatization and general interest created by the issue of 'reasonable accommodation' because most mediatized cases were actually not cases of "reasonable accommodation" in the legal sense of the term but rather issues related to the negotiation of cultural differences in terms of management of diversity, accessibility of services, or challenges of social harmony (La Maisonnee, 2007). As the Commission also emphasized, the majority of mediated cases had relatively little to do with the legal notion of 'reasonable accommodation" allowing for the "just and equitable treatment before Canadian law, of people belonging to a minority experiencing discrimination" (Anctil, 2011: 28)--but was rather about clarifying the distortion of cultural perceptions of newcomers thrown onto the public space in an ideological debate emphasized by media sensationalism. The framing of the "social debate provoked by media and politicians engendered confusion of the notions of accommodation and social integration" (La Maisonnee, 2007: 6).

For newcomers, the debate was predominantly perceived as intolerance and racism contrasting the fundamental values defended by the state. For ALPA (2007: 3) stated: "the holding of this popular consultation has nothing to do with the judicial notion of reasonable accommodation seeking to relax a norm in order to avoid discrimination in a working place, but is rather about a distortion of the cultural perception of ones towards the others" For many community organizations, the Herouxville affair calls for the need for better education of the general public about the importance of immigration and refugee experiences and about the accommodation debate given that the majority of cases in the media were actually not about discrimination but rather about social relations--something that these organizations witness and mediate on a daily basis.

Lack of Leadership in Immigration Issues

According to the TCR/ (2007), current questions on immigration reveal the absence of a vision, a lack of coherence in governmental action, and derisory budget in the face of increasing demands for services. The Institut du Nouveau Monde (2007), a non-partisan organization working to encourage citizen participation, iorroborates this view and suggests that both the government and other institutions must express a clear commitment to the participation of citizens coming from all origins, and to better representation of so-called minorities in decision-making positions and public institutions. Moreover, provincial and municipal governments and related institutions must develop both a 'savoir-faire' and 'savoir-etre' in matters of interculturalism (Institut du Nouveau Monde, 2007).

Short of developing such intercultural consciousness and commitment, Quebec society will aggravate the existing profound malaise and misunderstanding around the issues of 'reasonable accommodation' and immigration--as revealed by the Herouxville case. Community organizations consider xenophobic apprehension to be fed in part by an important deficit of information regarding the process of selection of immigrants and the general propensity of immigration policies that favour inviting educated individuals and families to settle in Quebec in order to facilitate integration while contributing to growth. However, the greatest challenge of intercultural relations remains the same: finding means to address racism and discrimination. (5)

Immigration and integration services rest almost entirely on community organizations dispersed in various neighborhoods of Montreal and other regions of Quebec. Community organizations/partners supports far more than they are remunerated for. La Maisonnee, for example, support as many as 7000 cases but are remunerated for approximately 2000 cases (Hassani and Othman, 2008). Community organizations also draw from an important pool of volunteers to assist with services and activities. Being well aware of the challenges and conflicts (related to exclusion, discrimination or violence) that might arise, community organizations see themselves as instrumental to diffuse conflicts (ibid.).

Interculturalism in Quebec will be unattainable as long as the marginalisation and stigmatization of minority groups persist and equality is not realized. And such work is made increasingly difficult in a climate of economic austerity and growing demand for support. For the Institut du Nouveau Monde (2007: 4), the under-representation of particular organizations or groups of citizens was problematic because i) it underlines a state of incomplete integration into the host society, ii) it reflects a shortcoming of openness on the part of the Commission, and iii) it creates a deficit of participation and of resulting views and recommendations.

Need for Full and Additional Funding

Considering the key work done by immigrant-serving community organizations, their recognition by the Commission and in general remains marginal. Given that "per capita spending on immigrants has been falling for the past 10 years at a time when needs have been increasing" the Commission's recommendation to increase their funding is a step in the right direction even though it did not automatically translate into substantial additional funding (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008: 229). As a leader in the negotiation and definition of federal-provincial responsibilities on immigration, (6) Quebec has received transfers to finance activities and programs linked to settlement of newcomers since 1991. Part of the money is in return dispersed to a hundred community organizations in charge of providing free immigration and integration services, as well as francization programs.

There bas been a clear disinvestment in integration programs by the Quebec government since 2004-2005 (TRCI, 2007). According to the TRCI (2007), in 2006-2007 Quebec received $197,600,000 from the federal government, the Ministere des relations culturelles et de l'immigration dispersed only $100,000,000 for services. According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) transfers payment programs as part of the Canada-Quebec Accord Grant, only 61% to 71% of the federal transfers were distributed to immigration services by the Quebec government, as shown in Table 2. Following the Commission's recommendation, there bas been an increased in the proportion transferred in 2009-2010 but that proportion has slightly fallen again.

Immigration and integration community organizations/partners have urged the Quebec government to invest the full amount of federal transfers into programs for newcomers (TRCI, 2007; L'Hirondelle, 2007; La Maisonnee, 2007). For community organizations, the lack of funding translates directly into reduction of staff and services, and spending time to search for additional resources.

Conclusion

The lack of recognition of community organizations' expertise, the absence of a clear state vision/leadership and its policy implementation, and the lack of funding have constrained the everyday activities of community organizations working on the frontlines of newcomers' integration. All issues were discussed, albeit marginally, in the works of the Commission who reiterated the importance of the partnership between state and community organizations. While many organizations were sympathetic to the final recommendations of the Commission, very few of the recommendations came as a surprise to community organizations working directly with newcomers. In fact, the briefs of only four of them (ALPA, 2007; L'Hirondelle, 2007; La Maisonnee, 2007; and TCRI, 2007) presented to the Commission in Montreal collectively identified similar issues (sometimes in greater details). From their involved and committed positions, community organizations argued for the need to clarify the message about the fundamental values of the Quebec nation and to addressing the contradictions between the interculturalism message and discrimination against newcomers. They demanded governmental leadership in integrating immigration issues to the global vision of social and economic development of Quebec society and affirming newcomers as full citizens of the Quebec nation. Community organizations also recommended educational and training programs on the reality of Quebec society and immigration for newcomers, people working in the integration process, municipal and provincial elected officials and staff, public and para-public institutions, current and prospective employers, primary schools, and the larger population. They also emphasized the need to educate media in order to stop hate propaganda and stigmatization of minority groups. Such actions inevitably assume the recognition of the expertise of community organizations working in hospitality and integration, and to consider them as full partners on all questions related to social integration (starting by increasing funds and making federal transfers completely available for service delivery).

We see therefore a double contradiction in the actual marginalization of community organizations in matters of policy and decision making in the work of the Commission and in the increasing rescaling of state responsibilities, including the increasing reliance in recent years on community organizations in matters of settlement and integration. Such systematic marginalisation has serious ramifications for both immigrants' integration and the normalization of xenophobia, racism and discrimination. While the Bouchard Taylor Commission was a needed exercise of public debate, community organizations could have played a much greater role in guiding such discussion given their key role on the frontlines of immigrant hospitality and integration, a role motivated by their commitment to social justice, which cannot be dissociated from their everyday actions.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and our research assistants, Vivien Leong and Matt MacLean. Funding from SSHRC 410-20062178 is gratefully acknowledged.

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Liette Gilbert

Faculty of Environmental Studies

York University

Leela Viswanathan

School of Urban and Regional Planning

Queen's University

Parastou Saberi

Faculty of Environmental Studies

York University

Notes

(1) In 2010, 53 985 immigrants lived in Quebec (compared to 45 198 in 2008). The majority (69.5%) of these immigrants were admitted in the economic category compared to 20% through family reunification and 8.7% as refugees. Newcomers are fairly young (69.4% are under 35 years old), educated (65.7% have 14 years of education) and francophone (65.1% know French). Most of them have come from Africa (36.8% -and 20.7% from the Maghreb), Asia (25.4%), the Americas (21.1%) and Europe (16.6%). In 2006, a large majority (86.9%) settled in the metropolitan region of Montreal, a slight decrease from 2001 (88%). In 2010, unemployment rate for immigrants was significantly higher (12.5%) than for the total population of Quebec (8%) (Ministere de I'Immigration et des Communautes culturelles, 2011).

(2) The concept of 'reasonable accommodation' refers to a legal mechanism to defend individual rights related to cultural practices against individual and structural discrimination within a presumed inclusionary model of societal integration (Azdouz, 2003). Contrary to public misconceptions, a 'reasonable accommodation' is nota privilege given to a 'minority' member; it is either a legal redress of discrimination or a voluntarily negotiated agreement to attain peaceful coexistence. The discourse of 'reasonable accommodation' did not emerge with the Herouxville affair but rather date back to events in the mid-1980s and notably to the Multani/kirpan affair in 2002.

(3) Despite Bouchard and Taylor's respected academic credentials, many would have like to see foreign-born commissioners in order to better represent the challenges of integration and accommodation (La Maisonnee, 2007).

(4) The Action Democratique du Quebec made a sudden electoral advance in the March 2007 election by tapping into the populist sentiment in support of the Herouxville declaration. The party went from 4 elected seats in 2003 to 41 (mostly in rural Quebec), becoming the official opposition party in Quebec City. The political fortune of the party was however short lived and the party was relegated to 7 seats in the subsequent 2008 election (Nieguth and Lacassagne, 2009; Action Democratique du Quebec, 2011).

(5) In their brief presented to the Commission, La Maisonee (2007) raised some issues on the absence of follow up on two previous commissions, the 2005 Commission sur la participation civique des personnes issues des minorites noires a la societe quebecoise and the 2006 Commission sur la politique gouvernementale de lutte contre le racisme et la discrimination.

(6) Starting in the 1970s, Quebec led federal-provincial negotiations on the constitutional responsibilities of immigration with a series of agreements (Cloutier-Lang in 1971, Bienvenue-Andras in 1975, Couture-Cullen in 1978, and Gagnon Tremblay-McDougall in 1991). Table 1: Participation to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in Montreal Participants Briefs Briefs not Total presented presented in at national consultation audiences Individuals 28 214 242 Religious groups 17 7 24 Identity-based groups 11 10 21 Labour groups 14 6 20 Education advocates 11 2 13 Political organizations 8 4 12 Immigration service providers 9 0 9 Municipal government 4 4 8 Health and social services 4 2 6 advocates Others 11 8 19 Total 117 257 374 Source: Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodement reliees aux differences culturelles, 2008. Table 2: Ottawa Transfer Payments and Quebec Immigration Services Budgets Ottawa Transfer Quebec Immigration Proportion Payments (1) Services Budget (2) Services Budget/ Transfer Payment 2011-2012 258,5 m 174,5 m 67% 2010-2011 253,7 157,2 62% 2009-2010 234,2 166,3 71% 2008-2009 226,0 157,2 70% 2007-2008 206,4 131,1 64% 2006-2007 194,9 124,2 64% 2005-2006 188,4 115,8 61% (1) Source: Ottawa data: CIC details of Transfer Payment Programs/Canada-Quebec Accord Grant between 2005 and 2012. Data was presented as planned and forecast and numbers vary from reports to reports so lowest numbers were used. (2) Source: Quebec data: Immigration and Communautes culturelles du Quebec, Rapports Annuels de Gestion between 2005 and 2012.