Earlier this week vandals in a district of Montreal spray-painted what can be construed as hate messages on an Anglican Church and on a Turkish bath often frequented by Muslim women.
The message “ Go B (back) to your country- PQ” was spray-painted across the windows of the Hamman Andalusi & Spa.
PQ presumably was meant to mean Parti Quebecois, the separatist political party currently in power in the mostly French-speaking province.
They are proposing a Charter of Values which would ban public-sector workers from wearing religious garb like the Muslim hijab, Jewish kippah or Sikh turban.
Owner of the spa, Mahmoud Bichari, said in his 26 years in Montreal he had never experienced any type of overt racism, but he now blames the PQ and the proposed charter for increased tensions.
“There’s no question about it. It’s because of that,” Bichari said to a local reporter, “This is really disturbing”.
The Anglican church was also targeted in the same LaSalle district of the city. Although the message says “Go home Greek: PQ” the church is frequented mostly by people who immigrated from the West Indies.
Reverend Dorothy Samuel says the parishioners of St Lawrence, “left their home for certain reasons, and now they have to go through this here again.”
She also told a CBC reporter the incident could be related to the PQ proposed charter.
These incidents follow two other similar events, an altercation in Ste Foy near Quebec City where a Muslim woman was told to “change her religion” and another where a passenger on a Montreal bus filmed a man yelling at a Muslim woman about her hijab
Earlier the federal separatist Bloc Quebecois party, kicked out one of its members for criticizing the Bloc support of the PQ’s Charter.
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