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Quebec business leaders have voiced alarm on PQ values charter as discouraging immigrants needed for economic growth.
As new studies revealed problems facing highly qualified Muslim immigrants in the east-central province, Quebec business leaders have voiced alarm on PQ values charter as discouraging immigrants needed for economic growth.
“There is a crisis in the North African community because of the high unemployment,” an Arabic teacher from Tunisia is making a living teaching Arabic and working for a grocery store even though he has a master’s in business administration, told Montreal Gazette.
“Friends of mine from Algeria are so discouraged they are going home.
“Quebec has encouraged North Africans who speak French and have high education to come here, and then we find out we’re being rejected by employers. Many are warning others not to come here.”
The new charter of values was unveiled by Bernard Drainville, the province’s Minister for Democratic Institutions from the governing Parti Quebecois (PQ), last September 10th.
The Minister argued that preventing public servants from exercising religious freedom at work is part of a broader secularism or “state neutrality.”
The proposed Charter of Values would prohibit public servants from wearing conspicuous religious symbols, including hijabs, turbans, yarmulkes and larger-than-average crucifixes.
Problems surrounding the new charter were first voiced after last month’s hearing in which the leader of a Muslim organization talked about a crisis among families of highly qualified North Africans who are being shut out of jobs in their fields.
Samira Laouni, the head of Communication pour l’ouverture et le rapprochement interculturel, warned that since the proposal of the Quebec values charter, the employment situation for Muslims has worsened.
Her opinion was shared by Quebec business leaders including Louis Audet, the chief executive of telecommunications firm Cogeco.
Last Sunday, Audet said that the incidents of harassment and abuse have been “humiliating.”
“As a society, we keep on taking certain decisions that do us enormous economic harm,” Audet told the Montreal Chamber of Commerce last week, The Star reported.
“I’m not a politician, but I can’t help thinking that the proposed ‘Quebec Charter of Values’ is a project that is damaging to our economy and, ultimately, to our ability to fund the social programs that our elected officials will want to put forward, regardless of which party is in power.”
Alarm
After the introduction of the new charter, more and more alarming stories have surfaced employment discrimination against Muslims.
In a Montreal North nursing home where most of the staff are North African, a Moroccan man cleaning floors said he had extensive experience managing dépanneurs in Morocco.
“I thought I would be able to find work in one of the dépanneur chains here. But no luck,” he told the Gazette.
Provincial-immigration figures for 2012 indicate that the single biggest block of immigrants, accounting for more than 15 per cent, came from the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.
Another trilingual Iranian woman, who dons a hijab, who earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Université Laval and also has two patents to her name hasn’t been able to find work in her field.
She is now teaching mathematics privately.
A huge number of university-educated Muslims were also working as taxi drivers.
The Atlas Taxi company stood as a stark example of companies that employed engineers, business-administration graduates and doctors as taxi drivers.
A research by Vahideddin Namazi for a Université de Montréal PhD thesis has showed that even after 15 years in Quebec, many university-educated Iranians were still driving taxis.
In a bid to avoid increasing troubles, a growing number of people have left Quebec province over the past few months.
A recent study based on federal migration statistics by Jack Jedwab, executive vice-president of the Montreal-based Canadian Institute for Identities and Migration, found that 28,439 people left Quebec to set up in another province in the first nine months of 2013.
The number is the highest of any year going back to 2000 and said to resemble those from times of recession.
The controversial charter is also facing criticism internationally.
Amnesty International, the prominent international Human Rights organization, slammed it for restricting two fundamental human rights: freedom of expression and freedom of religion.
Amnesty says that the charter would essentially violate Canadian and International law.
http://www.onislam.net/english/news/americas/468829-quebec-charter-adds-to-anti-muslim-job-bias.html
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