[lbo-talk] No sharia law in Ontario

[Marvin Gandall]

(It's almost always an unwelcome development when the established parties
roll back social democratic reforms, but the promise yesterday by Ontario's
Liberal government to end a system of religious arbitration introduced by
the NDP in 1991 can't be characterized as such. The announcement is the
result of a long and internationally-publicized struggle by women's groups,
notably from within the Muslim community, to thwart efforts by the
province's Muslim clerical and lay establishment to use sharia law to settle
divorce and custody disputes. In the end, the governing Liberals, facing a
revolt by women from within their own caucus, concluded they could only
withhold access to religious arbitration by Muslims if they withdrew it from
Jews and Christians who had previously won the right to bypass the public
courts from Bob Rae's short-lived NDP government. The Liberals had enlisted
a former attorney-general in the Rae government, Marion Boyd, to blunt
opposition to the extension of the system, but her recommendations to ensure
that religious rulings be consistent with human rights principles and
statutes were mocked by opponents who said they wouldn't prevent, but only
sanction, the continued victimization of women by male religious
authorities. The NDP also now opposes the system it had originally endorsed
as its contribution to "diversity" and "multiculturalism".)

McGuinty faced rebellion in his caucus
By Ian Urquhart
Toronto Star
September 12 2005

The Liberal government at Queen's Park inherited the political problem of
sharia and has been wrestling with a solution for the better part of a year.

But when the problem threatened to consume the government, Premier Dalton
McGuinty felt that he had to take action to put it behind him. Hence came
yesterday's hasty announcement that the government will prevent the use of
any religious law - sharia (Muslim), Jewish or Christian - to settle
divorces and custody disputes in a binding fashion.

It was the Arbitration Act - a law introduced by Ontario's NDP government 14
years ago - that opened the door to religious arbitration of family law
disputes. The motivation for the move was to offer consenting couples an
alternative settlement mechanism and thereby relieve pressure on the
province's overcrowded courts.

Since then, Jewish, Christian and Ismaili Muslim couples have made use of
the religious arbitration system with little fuss or fanfare.

But the troubles began for the Liberal government last year when Muslim
leaders proposed using the umbrella of the Arbitration Act to introduce
sharia - a code of living based on the Qur'an.

Sharia has been effectively demonized in the western world as a set of laws
that condones stoning, cutting off of hands and, above all, discrimination
against women.

To deal with the ensuing uproar, the government asked Marion Boyd, a
feminist and a former NDP attorney-general, to review the use of religious
arbitration in the province.

It was hoped that her NDP and feminist credentials would inoculate the
government against any political fallout if she stopped short of calling for
an outright ban on binding arbitration.

Boyd's report, issued late last year, was carefully nuanced. She called for
amendments to the Arbitration Act to ensure that the outcome of any
religious arbitration is consistent with Canadian law. And she noted that an
outright ban would not stop people from turning to religious arbitration
panels on an informal basis.

For this, Boyd found herself denounced as "naïve." Far from inoculating the
government, her report seemed only to give new impetus to the opponents of
sharia.

Even Boyd's former colleagues in the NDP caucus at Queen's Park came out
against her report and, by extension, against the law that they themselves
had introduced.

Nonetheless, Attorney-General Michael Bryant began preparing amendments to
the Arbitration Act that would encompass Boyd's recommendations.

But Bryant encountered ferocious opposition from the Liberal women's caucus
at Queen's Park. Some women MPPs on the government side even threatened to
vote against the amendments if Bryant brought them forward.

In the face of this opposition, the matter was pulled from the cabinet
agenda last spring and a decision put off until this fall.

Last week, McGuinty and Bryant met to discuss the issue and agreed that, in
the circumstances, the best approach would be to ban all religious
arbitration of family law disputes, not just sharia. If it had just
prohibited sharia law, the government would have faced a constitutional
challenge that almost certainly would have succeeded.

The matter was supposed to go to cabinet at its next meeting on Sept. 21.

But pressure continued to build on McGuinty and the government, including
co-ordinated protests last Thursday at Queen's Park, on Parliament Hill, and
in front of the Canadian High Commission in London. McGuinty was portrayed
in the protests as a dupe of the ayatollahs.

In an attempt to cool out the protestors, Bryant issued a statement that
concluded: "We will ensure that the law of the land in Ontario is not
compromised, that there will be no binding family arbitration in Ontario
that uses a set of rules or laws that discriminate against women."

But the critics were not mollified. On Saturday, 10 prominent women -
including Margaret Atwood, June Callwood, Shirley Douglas, Michele
Landsberg, and Maureen McTeer - released an "open letter" to McGuinty in
which they accused his government of undermining the "cornerstone of liberal
democracy" - the separation of church and state.

McGuinty had had enough. The next day, without waiting for cabinet approval,
he issued his own statement promising to amend the law to prohibit all forms
of binding religious arbitration.

For a government already dealing with an inherited deficit and the mess in
the electricity sector, this was one more problem it didn't need.