First France; Are Alberta and BC Next?

From the Ottawa Citizen ($ req'd)[thanks to Jack for the pointer]:

Senior French conservative politicians said yesterday that polygamy may have been a factor in the wave of riots that swept the country over the past three weeks.

Bernard Accoyer, leader of the Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) in the National Assembly lower house of parliament, said on French radio that children from large polygamous families had problems integrating into mainstream society.

Gérard Larcher, the Employment Minister, told the British newspaper the Financial Times that such families sometimes lead to anti-social behaviour by youths who lack a father figure and make employers reluctant to hire them.

... “There is clearly a problem with the integration of immigrants and, more importantly, their children,” Mr. Accoyer told RTL radio. “In order for us to be able to integrate them, there must not be more of them than our capacity to integrate them. That’s the issue. It’s like polygamy … It’s certainly one of the causes [of the riots], though not the only one.”

He said polygamy led to “an inability to provide an education as it is needed in an organized, normative society like in Europe and notably France.”

From time-to-time there have stories of polygamous communities in Alberta and British Columbia. Are the young males in these communities equally likely to riot? I doubt it. I expect the real reasons for the riots in France lie elsewhere.