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Gurbaj Singh Multani at the long-term parking lot in Dorval where he works 40 hours a week while studying at Abbott.
"Kirpan kid" didn't hang on hearings;
Now a John Abbott student, boy spent a year out of school while family waged legal battle
DAVID JOHNSTON
The Gazette
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Gurbaj Singh Multani at the long-term parking lot in Dorval where he works 40 hours a week while studying at Abbott.
While the Bouchard-Taylor commission was handing down its
report yesterday, Gurbaj Singh Multani was eating a quick lunch at
the Thai Express Sushi Shop in Dorval, barely aware of the political
drama unfolding.
And as for the report that was made public over noon hour
yesterday, Multani says he didn't know anything about the scheduled
event until late Wednesday. He's been too busy to keep up with the
news, he explained.
"I've got exams," he said.
Multani spent yesterday morning at John Abbott College preparing
for his Calculus II exam today. After his sushi lunch, he hustled
over to his job as a car jockey at the Park'N Fly parking lot on
Highway 520 near Trudeau airport.
He's 19 years old now, movie-star handsome, and very much
full-bearded in the grown-up male Sikh attire.
But there was no facial hair, or artful juggling of school and
work, way back then in the fall of 2001, when he tripped in the
schoolyard of Ste. Catherine Labouré elementary school and his
kirpan fell to the ground.
A parent noticed the kirpan, then saw Multani, 12, picking it up
and putting it back in the sheath under his shirt.
She complained, saying there was no place for weapon-like objects
like the Sikh kirpan, a blunt dagger that represents the religious
resolve of Sikhs to defend good against evil - while at the same
time prohibiting its actual use.
And that was the start of it. The parent complained; the school
suspended Multani; his family won a court injunction lifting the
suspension; the whole thing went to court and Quebec Superior Court
ruled in favour of the kirpan; then the Quebec Court of Appeal
overturned the ruling; and then the Supreme Court of Canada, in
March of 2006, overturned the Quebec appeal-court ruling.
Through it all, the Multani case provided The Gazette archives with
its first instance of the use of the expression "reasonable
accommodation" in connection with the politics of ethnicity in
Quebec.
Since then, Multani has become a superstar within Montreal's small
Sikh community, not to mention a person of note in modern Quebec
social history.
As part of of a humanities course titled Culture and Media that
Multani took at John Abbott, the teacher used a textbook that had a
whole chapter devoted to, well, Multani himself, and the kirpan
affair.
Multani said he aced that part of the exam.
"Oh yeah," he laughed yesterday at the Park'N Fly between
customers. "I knew everything about that chapter."
He spent a year at home out of school as a 13-year-old in 2002-03
while his family and its lawyer, Julius Grey, fought to get him
reinstated in French-language public school, with the right to wear
a kirpan.
After it became clear that this wasn't going to happen, his family
put him in Greaves Academy, a private English-language school in
Notre Dame de Grâce. Multani graduated from Greaves and has spent
the last two years at John Abbott.
He started out in pure and applied science, but now wants to get
into commerce, so he has to return to John Abbott this fall to do
prerequisites before he can apply to his university of first choice,
Concordia University.
Since that day in 2001 when his kirpan fell out, Multani said he
has been struck by how generally open-minded and curious people are
about himself, the kirpan and Sikh faith.
"I just look back and see a lot of that early opposition to the
kirpan as simply ignorance," said Multani, who has an older brother,
and whose father is a truck driver.
When he started work two months ago at the Park'N Fly, his
colleagues couldn't help noticing his turban and facial hair.
"The supervisor on the night shift said to me, 'Do you wear one of
those things, too, (a kirpan) like that Sikh kid who got in all that
trouble?
"I said what do you mean 'like that Sikh kid?' - I am that Sikh
kid. I'm him!
"And he said, 'Holy s--t! It's a small world!"
Multani works 40 hours a week at the Park'N Fly, a heavy load for a
full-time CEGEP student - but not necessarily for immigrants.
He said he's looking forward to Concordia, and to a career in
accountancy.
A career in Quebec, he said.
"Oh yeah, I'm staying."