Quebec is in many ways one of the more "liberal" provinces in Canada, yet its attitudes concerning immigration and multiculturalism often appear to be at odds with the rest of the country.
This became more apparent in 2007, with the town of Hérouxville's controversial code of conduct for immigrants, the Bouchard-Taylor reasonable accommodation hearings, and the rise of Marion Dumont's Action démocratique du Quebec (ADQ) party.
Dumont's insistence that Quebec should quit bending over backwards to accommodate ethnic minorities seemed to resonate with many Quebecers, and the ADQ rocketed from four to 41 seats in the March 2007 provincial election.
Some say when former Parti Québécois leader Jacques Parizeau blamed "money and the ethnic vote" for the loss of the 1995 sovereignty referendum, his comment helped fuel racism.
Likewise an open letter released by Dumont in January 2007 in which he said that Quebec needs its own constitution and that recent concessions granted to ethnic or religious minorities pose a threat to "old-stock" Québécois.
Being a minority in North America, Francophone Quebecers have long felt that their culture and language are in danger of disappearing, which may be one of the reasons why multiculturalism hasn't been embraced in Quebec with the same zeal as the rest of Canada.
Daniel Weinstock, professor of philosophy at the University of Montreal, says there's "a bit of schizophrenia" in Quebec between official Canadian multiculturalism and how it's actually put into practice on a day-to-day basis.
Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's "big M multiculturalism," says Weinstock, is seen by the majority of Quebecers and the punditry as a set of policies designed to drown out Quebec's distinctive status within the federation.
"Official multiculturalism gets very bad press in Quebec because it is seen as part of this nefarious strategy…. Multiculturalism isn't anointed with the kind of aura of political correctness that may be the case in other parts of Canada, so people feel sort of authorized to say things which perhaps they wouldn't otherwise say elsewhere."
This was evident during the reasonable accommodation hearings last year, when at times, especially in rural areas, outright prejudice against non-Francophone cultures was expressed.
But Weinstock, who was on the advisory committee for the hearings, says while there were certainly "unacceptable" things said, this was the exception rather than the rule. However, some media outlets distorted the debate by giving an erroneous impression of the situation and set out to "paint the commission in as negative a way as possible."
"I think the media turned it into a bit more of a circus really, or a sporting event, so it tended to breed the kind of strange phenomenon where you had people who were clearly coming [to the hearings] to get themselves on television."
Weinstock adds that as a result of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, in many western democracies that have immigrants from Muslim countries "you have a fringe of the population that has basically become much more amenable to a kind of overtly xenophobic anti-immigration rhetoric."
A case in point is Hérouxville's code of conduct, which was especially targeted at Muslims although the town does not have a notable immigrant community.
Lucie Lequin, chair and professor of French studies at the University of Concordia, says many rural areas of Quebec have never had an immigrant population, resulting in a "lack of knowledge and fear of the unknown.
"A lot of the negative comments we hear are out of fear from people who don't live in Montreal and do not know urban life."
Since the Quiet Revolution, when Quebecers threw off the shackles of a repressive Catholic Church, the province has seen massive social change. Abortion rates grew and marriage fell out of favour, resulting in a severe decline in the birth rate among French Canadians.
The government looked to immigration as a way to offset this trend, envisioning a Francophone society in which different cultures could be Québécois in different ways. This would also help keep the French language thriving.
However, according to Pierre Martin, professor of political science at the University of Montreal, it hasn't quite worked out that way.
"Immigrants coming to Quebec joined in a very large proportion the English speaking communities," says Martin.
"While this has been addressed to some extent in past decades with language legislation, it's still an uphill battle. The proportion of immigrants who integrate themselves into the French language is smaller than the proportion of the Francophone population in Quebec."
This contributes to Quebecers' insecurity regarding immigration, he says, although it has been balanced somewhat by the fact that non-Francophones are able to function in French, avoiding a dramatic regression of the language in the public sphere.
Martin believes that if the Bouchard-Taylor commission were to conduct hearings in rural areas in any part of Canada it would encounter much the same sort of sentiment as that expressed in rural Quebec.
"The observation that there would be some sort of vast differences between French Quebec and the rest of Canada in the treatment of immigrants is to my view unproven. There's no solid evidence that shows that Quebecers are vastly less accommodating than other Canadians."
In the Quebec of a hundred years ago, says Valerie Raoul, professor of women's studies and French at the University of British Columbia, the biggest cause for concern would have been whether newcomers shared the same Catholic background as their hosts.
Today however, many Québécois assume that those with any obvious strong religious beliefs may pose a threat to the province's hard-won secular way of life.
Raoul believes many English Canadians outside of Quebec "like to project their own racism off themselves onto the Québécois.
"My take on it is English Canada often likes to be able to say that Quebec is more racist or xenophobic than they are. And anything that happens in Quebec that appears to be racist or xenophobic gets a lot of attention in the Anglophone media."
To Quebecers, she says, the attitude that they may be more racist than those in the rest of Canada appears as yet another "put-down or power-play," as well as an indication of English hypocrisy.
Weinstock, who lives his life equally in English and French Canada, says "the degree of mutual incomprehension and mutual suspicion is depressingly high" between the two cultures.
Those in English Canada don't understand how it feels to have their linguistic and cultural identity threatened, while many Quebecers "still view English Canada as the enemy," he says.
"When you're in a political conflict with someone or a situation where you have to compromise, it's much easier to view the other side as being unreasonable, because that way you don't have to even think about how to accommodate them."
Feeds