It’s rare for a controversy at Queen’s Park to ensnare both the premier and the Speaker of the house: the jobs are filled by MPPs and almost always from the same party, but their job descriptions are so different that it takes some work for a dispute to be broad enough to involve both the head of the government and the servant of the legislature. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what happened this week, as leaders of all parties (official and otherwise) challenged the determination by Speaker Ted Arnott that wearing the keffiyeh at Queen’s Park constitutes a “political message” in attire that’s forbidden by the longstanding rules of legislature.
The disagreement might have been put to rest quickly on Thursday morning when NDP leader Marit Stiles moved for unanimous consent to reverse Arnott’s decision, but Eglinton–Lawrence MPP Robin Martin voted no, defying Premier (and leader of her party) Doug Ford and thwarting any resolution until at least next week.
What’s going on here?
First, it’s undeniable that the rules of Queen’s Park are not internally coherent or consistent. They are, instead, a mishmash of rules and norms that have accumulated like barnacles over generations, and it’s up to MPPs and the Speaker to interpret them as best as they can. An MPP who wore a shirt with the words “Christ Is King” on it could be told to leave the chamber — but every day at Queen’s Park nevertheless starts with the recital of the Lord’s Prayer. Anyone who wants to accuse the institution of having all sorts of rules that functionally discriminate against minorities in this province would not need to try very hard.
That being said, the rule Arnott is currently enforcing isn’t new, and it hasn’t traditionally been controversial.
“From time immemorial, we’ve considered the chamber to be a debating chamber where people express themselves orally,” Arnott told TVO Today in a phone interview Thursday. “We’ve discouraged anything that includes a political message.”
This rule is, in fact, enforced quite broadly. In order to express a political sentiment in dress, MPPs need to get the unanimous consent of the house first — including for such utterly uncontroversial things as wearing pins denoting various causes, like cancer awareness, or sports jerseys.
It can also include items like the poppy. While a 2016 law, among other rules, specifically sets aside time in the week before Remembrance Day for MPPs to wear a poppy and pay their respects in the house, there are examples in the Hansard (the written record of debates at Queen’s Park) of MPPs having to ask for unanimous consent to wear a poppy outside that period.
The keffiyeh, however, is also a form of cultural expression for Palestinian people and others, and this is arguably where Arnott’s job becomes difficult: a piece of clothing can both be a form of cultural self-expression and also very much a form of political expression, particularly for minorities trying to assert their rights.
To illustrate this tension with a hypothetical not associated with charged current events: a Speaker may look the other way at an MPP or a member of the public who enters the house wearing a Scottish tartan, but someone who did so on September 18, 2014 — the day of the last Scottish independence referendum — would be making a political statement and therefore testing the Speaker’s indulgence. (For the record, the legislature was not sitting that day.)
If the above reads as if Speakers have a lot of latitude in their enforcement of the rules, in practice, that’s true — but only up to a point. That freedom of action narrows considerably if an individual MPP makes an issue of the conduct of one of their colleagues. According to Arnott, that’s what happened earlier this year.
“It was drawn to my attention in the house [that an MPP was wearing a keffiyeh] — one member drew my attention to it,” Arnott said. He declined to identify the MPP, saying, “A lot of MPPs come to me in confidence. I’m not at liberty to say.”
Given her opposition to Stiles’s motion, TVO emailed Robin Martin’s office to ask whether she was the MPP who brought the keffiyeh to Arnott’s attention. Martin’s office had not responded as of publication time.
Following the MPP’s complaint, Arnott in February reminded MPPs in the chamber about the rule against political dress; he began enforcing the policy against the keffiyeh sometime after that.
It’s important to note here that other Speakers in other assemblies have not followed Arnott’s determination: both the federal House of Commons and other provincial legislatures have allowed members to wear the keffiyeh, notwithstanding current events in the Middle East.
Earlier this month, after both private citizens and NDP staff were told by legislative security to remove their keffiyehs, Stiles wrote to the Speaker to urge him to reverse the policy. The matter became public on Wednesday and quickly saw the party leaderships at Queen’s Park come to a consensus urging Arnott to reverse course.
Arnott, speaking to the house, said, in effect, that it’s not his job to rewrite the rules of the legislature after he’s been specifically asked to enforce them — that’s the job of MPPs themselves.
“As Speaker, I am the servant of this house,” Arnott told MPPs on Thursday morning. “While I made my decision in this regard after considerable research and reflection, if the house believes that the wearing of the keffiyeh in this house at the present time is not a political statement, I would certainly and unequivocally accept the express will of the house, with no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Had Stiles’s unanimous consent motion passed, the issue would now be decided. With Martin’s dissenting vote on Thursday, the matter will continue to simmer all weekend on social media and in other forums; it won’t be revisited until Monday at the earliest. Unanimous-consent motions, however, can by definition be thwarted by any single MPP. That could potentially be Martin again or another dissenter. Nepean MPP Lisa MacLeod has voiced her support for both Martin and Arnott, saying in an emailed statement that “true to his unimpeachable character, Speaker Arnott chose parliamentary convention over political weather veins [sic].”
The controversy has divided members of the house and also at least some members of the Progressive Conservative caucus from their leadership at a time when the party is contesting a Milton byelection that most observers expect will be a competitive race between the Liberals and PCs. According to the 2021 census, 30,000 of the community’s 124,000 residents are Muslim. The government would obviously prefer to have this issue put to rest before the vote on May 2. There are alternatives to a unanimous-consent motion — but they take longer and use up time on the legislative calendar the government would prefer to use for other priorities, including passing its budget and its most recent housing bill, both of which are still working their way through the legislative process.
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