What is reasonable?

I got to thinking the other day about the Reasonable Accommodation arguments that have been the subject of a great deal of ink in Quebec recently.  I did a bit of digging into the issue and many of the characters involved and what I see alarms me quite a bit.

The RA debate has as its genesis a bylaw passed in a small town called Hérouxville.  At least that is the general wisdom.  But is that the real story?

Hérouxville is a parish with a population of around 1300 just north of Quebec City.  It is a community without immigrants.  It is described as white, francophone and primarily catholic.  But for some reason Hérouxville is ground zero in the RA debate.  Why?

During the year preceding the Hérouxville bylaw there was a series of meetings between the RCMP, QPP, CSIS, and various anti-terrorism organizations from the US and Israel.  These facts were confirmed by one of the participants in a speech he gave in 2009 at University of New Brunswick.  A group concerned with terrorism meets to discuss a non-issue in Hérouxville?  According to information in the same speech the QPP and RCMP made sweeps through Herouxville.  Why?  What were they looking for?  Or for whom were they looking?

Alain Dubuc of La Press may have hit close to home when he characterized the issue as follows: "it's the revolt against the big city, its ideas, its lifestyle, its influence".  He went on to note: "For small towns such as Hérouxville, the real threat to their identity has little to do with veil-clad Muslim women, it is the urban world that is gradually drifting away from the traditional model."  Is that the issue?  Or is it something more sinister?


Time will tell.