Interculturalism ten years after the Bouchard-Taylor Commission
More than ten years after the tabling of the report of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission (2008), which identified “interculturalism” as being the uniquely Quebec perspective, public debates around identity and diversity remain well and alive. With the main objective of finding a way of living together that is compatible with ethnocultural diversity, the Liberal government’s recent Bill 62 on the religious neutrality of the state was born of this context. While it is in part a legislative response to the Commission’s work, it is even more directly, and in a much more controversial way, affiliated with something else: the Parti québecois’s Bill 60 (or the Charter of Quebec Values). Indeed, Bill 62 reproduces a significant part of the Charter, although in a more diluted way. Thus, as shall be further discussed in the article, despite the apparent disagreements among the main parties in Quebec, a kind of discursive continuity seems to be emerging, with interculturalism seen as the main line of defence of the “us” (identity) against the “others” (diversity).