Flashback is part of a weekly section in our tablet edition called Sunday Reads and will feature articles from the Journal's archives, stories that reflect the changing face of Edmonton and northern Alberta over the 109 years of our history in the community.
This article, by former columnist Linda Goyette, was originally published on Nov. 12, 1989.
July 6, 2012: My first thought was that she looked like a kindly great-aunt. She stood on Rice Howard Way in sensible shoes and a plain coat, Canadian decency in uniform, and asked me to sign her petition.
"No, I won't," I said, struggling to find polite words to contradict a woman twice my age. "I think you should realize that not all Albertans agree with you."
It was hardly a stirring defence of the right of Sikhs to wear turbans in the RCMP. If anything it was downright cowardly. I was feeling sick about that when a young man who had just signed the petition addressed me furiously.
"They keep coming here and they refuse to be Canadian," he said. He began a lecture on the value of national traditions, police honor and how he wasn't a racist, but . . .
A few people, waiting in line to sign their names, punctuated his little speech with murmurs of agreement. The anger in their eyes astonished me. Auntie raised one eyebrow in victory, saying nothing. She'd won this round hands down, and I knew it.
This happened in early September when Alberta's Defenders of RCMP Tradition had collected only a few hundred signatures. More than 90,000 people have signed the petition since then, and the protest is spreading like stinkweed across the West.
The anti-turban aunties don't speak for all of us. Thoughtful Albertans have to deliver that message to the rest of the country as quickly and firmly as possible.
We should reassure the 250,000 Sikhs in Canada, particularly those in our own neighborhoods, that we wouldn't sign that miserable petition if we were dragged to Eckville and back.
We should write to Solicitor General Pierre Blais and tell him to stop quivering and shivering about the votes of the intolerant. If he had followed the advice of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster and authorized the turbans six months ago, he would have spared the Sikhs the indignity of this protest. He has stalled long enough.
Finally, we must contradict the street-corner petitioners, not with timid smiles and half-apologies, but with solid argument. What are they defending after all? A hat. A tall, wide hat. Are hat-defenders so formidable that we can't counter their rhetoric with common sense?
People usually oppose Sikh turbans in the RCMP for one of three reasons. I categorize these objections as the good, the bad and the ugly, although I disagree with all of them.
The good reason for objecting to RCMP turbans is that symbols of religion and the state should remain separate in Canada. People who adopt this position say they wouldn't want to see Mounties wearing a Christian cross, a Jewish yarmulka or a Sikh turban because these symbols suggest the state is not secular.
Well, fair enough. But Christians and Jews can observe their religion without wearing crosses and yarmulkas. A Sikh who cuts his hair to work for the RCMP is breaking one of the five conditions of his faith. Canadians who force him to abandon his traditional head-covering clearly contravene the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
If the rule is unfair, Sikhs just won't join the RCMP. All Canadians will be the losers. When the force needed Punjabi-speaking Mounties to investigate the Air India crash, they could find two in the entire country. So much for a good reason.
The bad reason for objecting to Sikh turbans in the RCMP is nostalgia. People in this camp defend the existing uniform as the symbol of a fine tradition - an untouchable Canadian artifact - probably because they're afraid of change itself.
They refuse to acknowledge that the RCMP has modified the uniform regularly since 1873. The only Mountie who never bothered to change his clothes for years was Nelson Eddy, the insufferable hero of Hollywood's worst movies.
Real RCMP officers abandoned pillbox hats in 1900 because Stetsons protected them better from the Prairie sunshine. This week, they're wearing United Nations berets in Namibia and peaked police caps in Stony Plain. Women in the force wear skirts, high heels and nylon stockings and nobody objects to that change.
Tradition? The bobbies of London have a proud history and their Sikh officers wear turbans. The Canadian Armed Forces, and the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force, allow turbans. So do police in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong.
The traditions of the British army didn't crumble when Sikh officers fought in the muddy trenches of France during the First World War and won nine Victoria Crosses for heroism. If stuffy British officers encouraged Sikhs to join the army on their own terms in 1914, what on earth are Canadians afraid of in 1989?
These days, Albertans see more Mounties in shapeless parkas than in scarlet tunics and wide-brimmed hats, so why is the turban the focus of so much rage? This brings us to the ugly reason for the RCMP petition. Raw racism.
Sikhs in Calgary report that the frequency of obscene gestures from motorists has risen since the anti-turban petition drive began. A Calgary company made a tidy sum selling buttons that show a Sikh in a turban and say "Ban this."
Phone calls here at the office have been disheartening. ("I'm not a racist, but . . ." That "but" is Canada's new three-letter obscenity.) Earlier this week, some amateur artist - anonymous of course - sent in a drawing of a Sikh RCMP officer wearing a hat on top of his turban and a Buddhist monk's yellow robe. "Do non-Sikhs or Tibetan llamas also grow beards and shave their heads?" the caption read.
Another letter ridiculed any RCMP officer with "a turban on his head, a sabre at his side and a bone through his nose."
Cheerful, isn't it?
Pierre Blais bows to this drivel when he postpones his decision, again and again. Alberta MPs Bobbie Sparrow and Louise Feltham feed it when they argue in Parliament against the uniform change.
Canadians who signed the anti-turban petitions this fall aren't all bigots, but the impact of their campaign is deeply racist. Wear your turban on Heritage Day, they are telling the Sikhs, but don't wear it with an RCMP uniform because that national institution belongs to us.
The petition is Alberta's disgrace. It's time to tell the soft-spoken woman on the street corner: You are wrong and I won't sign.
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