After the ice storm, half the power to my house was cut off. I had no working furnace but I did have high-speed internet and hot water. This meant I had lots of time huddled near a space heater, and therefore lots of time to think about this and that.
Shivering under wool blankets, I got to thinking about every-day language usage and how it changes over time. I was born in Toronto and raised in the Annex. What was normal usage for kids on the playgrounds of the Annex in the 1980s has not necessarily stayed normal usage for us, their grown-up selves and/or their successors as local residents.
For those kids on the playground, the proper pronunciation of “nuclear” was “nucular”, most often used when talking about the prospect of “’nucular’ war”. I was the iconoclast then who insisted on “nu-cle-ar”. (I’ve often gone my own way.) Now, of course, almost everyone in the area has gone my way, and it’s as if the past never was. But I remember it well; I can hear it in my memory to this day.
Another verbal tic that seems to have ended up in the ash-heap of Annexian history is this: when someone would say something that one totally disagreed with, or when some practice of other people was noted that one found totally and utterly baffling, a common response was to shrug one’s shoulders and say something along the lines of, “Well, it’s a free country”. One doesn’t hear that phrase tossed about so much any longer.
“It’s a free country” is a shrugging-off phrase with a history. One can see it interrogated by a German observer of England in the late 1930s – that particular writer took pains to demonstrate how England was NOT a free country (to his mind), and most certainly not for the working class sorts who would tend to toss that line out in conversations with him, no doubt after some disagreement about politics or some such thing.
I noticed the disappearance of the phrase in part because it indicates a disappearance of the attitude underlying it – the ability to shrug one’s shoulders at the strange things that others think and do, and simply move on with one’s life.
I thought of it again when the news of the religious accommodation debate at York University came up – a student in a correspondence course apparently asked his professor to excuse him from a meeting requirement for his class, because his religious views precluded (so he said) social contact with members of the other sex. The professor demurred; the university administration overruled him; the professor ignored his dean’s order and went to the media about it. Armies of editorial writers and Facebook posters are outraged by the York University administration’s stance and are standing with the professor. (The student, incidentally, thanked the professor for his consideration even though he was ruled against, and complied by attending the required meetings with his classmates.)
The position of York’s administration is actually quite simple – the test for whether a religious objection should be accommodated is whether, first, the belief is sincere, and, second, the accommodation can be done without imposing undue hardship on the other students. There was no reason to believe the student was not sincere, and another student had been excused from the meeting requirement because he or she was living far away at the time. If granting the other student an exemption did not impose undue hardship on the other students, granting one more for these beliefs could not impose undue hardship either. By this view, within reason (i.e., it not hurting other students’ educational experience), it isn’t for York to judge its students’ religious beliefs.
Many Canadians apparently do not share that outlook. They do judge, and in their view, the university had no business humouring “religious” views of the student that they deem extraordinarily silly or possibly even demeaning. One political scientist who has taught at a few law schools put voice to this view in the pages of the Globe and Mail – “common sense has fallen to the wayside in dealing with anything that threatens to offend a campus member’s personal sensibilities”. (Emmett Macfarlane, “The fear of offending is sapping the universities of common sense”, The Globe and Mail, 10 January 2014.) “Common sense” in this case means not accommodating requests that touch on equality rights, or “certain basic societal values”, even if they would not have had an impact on other students’ lives at the university.
In the fall, there was a lot of discussion in English Canada about Quebec’s proposed secularism charter. Lots of it involved clucking our tongues and marveling at the intolerance on display in Quebec. I would suggest that the reaction to the situation at York shows that similar issues are live ones in the rest of Canada as well, even if we are not inclined to go as far in the direction of formal secularism as many Quebecers. That York student’s desire to opt out has struck many as unacceptable, as did the university’s view that it should be accommodated. Whatever conclusions we may eventually come to, it is clear that many English-speaking Canadians are not shrugging their shoulders at issues of “reasonable accommodation” any longer.
