After the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government tabled its secularism bill, Premier François Legault recorded a video address that intended to reassure people who felt the proposed legislation was going too far.
“I feel like saying ‘finally,'” the premier said in French with a joyful tone in the video released on March 31, 2019.
“It’s a debate that’s been going on for more than 10 years. It’s about time that a government put in place rules that are clear for everyone.”
The bill became law just a few months later. The CAQ sped up the legislative process by invoking closure, supposedly settling the debate on secularism in Quebec.
Five years later, the law known as Bill 21, which bars many public servants from wearing religious symbols while on the job, is facing a Supreme Court challenge, with opponents arguing it disproportionately affects religious minorities such as Muslim women.
The premier, who described the ban as “moderate” in that video, now says it doesn’t go far enough and recently indicated he wants to ban prayers in public.
All of this raises questions about what was actually accomplished with Bill 21, whether there’s even a need to strengthen the law and where the political conversation around religion in Quebec is heading.
What’s changed?
This fall, a group of 11 teachers at Bedford elementary school were suspended, accused of fostering a toxic climate and letting their religious beliefs dictate their work and treatment of students and staff. Shortly after, the Quebec government announced it was monitoring the school and at least 17 other schools for similar reasons.
Then, a little under two weeks ago, a story by La Presse described teachers at Saint-Maxime high school in Laval praying with students and allowing them to pray in classrooms and hallways.
Quebec’s government wants better laws to protect secularism. Is it necessary or is it just politics?
The investigations into those schools haven’t been completed, but the Legault government says it’s already seen enough and secularism in Quebec needs to be reinforced.
CBC News spoke with three experts on matters of constitutional law and secularism.
Two of them, Université Laval law professor Louis-Philippe Lampron and Stéphanie Tremblay, an associate professor in the religious sciences department at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), scoffed at the Legault government’s assertion that the secularism law — whose official name in English is the Act Respecting the Laicity of the State — needs to be bolstered.
They say there are plenty of laws and legal principles in place, and it’s just a matter of enforcing them.
Tremblay, who has written extensively about the effects of religion and identity on the relationship between majority and minority groups, pointed to the province’s Education Act.
The 1988 law states that a school’s educational activities “must respect students’, parents’ and school staff’s freedom of conscience and of religion.”
Lampron says secularism principles have been in place for decades thanks to the Quebec and Canadian charters as well as jurisprudence.
In a 1985 case involving Big M Drug Mart, a store in Calgary, the Supreme Court invalidated the Lord’s Day Act — a federal law from 1906 which prohibited businesses from selling goods on Sunday. The court ruled that the law was rooted in Christian beliefs and violated the Charter.
A case in 2012 pitted a Quebec couple against the Des Chênes school board. The couple believed the province’s mandatory ethics and religious culture program went against their family’s Catholic beliefs. Canada’s highest court sided with the school board and its ability to implement the government-mandated curriculum.
These cases, according to Lampron, highlight two important principles of secularism that apply to all of Canada, not just Quebec: the religious neutrality of the state and the limits of religious accommodation.
“You don’t need any more tools to be able to deal with people that are not respecting the basic principle that, if you are a teacher, you don’t have the right in Canada and in Quebec to force your faith onto your students or force your faith onto co-workers,” said Lampron.
The main function of the 2019 secularism law, Lampron says, was to “expand the scope” of religious neutrality in Quebec to include religious symbols — which have little or nothing to do with what was in the Education Ministry’s 90-page account of the Bedford situation, the La Presse story on Saint-Maxime or even the now-discredited allegations of religious indoctrination at another Montreal school.
According to Lampron, even if the situation at Bedford occurred before 2019, the Quebec government would have been in just as strong a position to sanction the teachers at fault.
“You wouldn’t have needed the Act Respecting the Laicity of the State,” he said. “They’d be in breach of the neutrality of the state principle.”
Testing out the secularism law
The CAQ government isn’t saying much about the changes it plans to make.
Pressed by reporters to provide details about the upcoming bill, Education Minister Bernard Drainville told them to “be patient.”
Drainville acknowledges that the Education Act, the secularism law and his ministerial directive that bans transforming school space into prayer spaces are legitimate tools.
“The levers to intervene are there,” he told Radio-Canada host Patrice Roy in an interview on Dec. 6.
But he argues that changes to the Education Act would send a clearer message about secularism.
Rachida Azdouz, an author and researcher at the Université de Montreal whose work focuses on conflicts rooted in cultural and religious values, thinks there could be value in strengthening the secularism law if it allows the government to intervene in ways that are not possible at the moment.
But she also believes the issues reported at Bedford elementary, for example, are multi-layered, and many of them can be addressed by applying the Education Act or even the Quebec Civil Code.
“What we’re seeing at Bedford and in other schools has nothing to do with the hijab, the turban or the kippa,” she said.
‘We already got it wrong once’
Both Tremblay and Lampron believe the CAQ is carelessly trying to score political points — an accusation that was also levied against the government in 2019.
Tremblay finds it strange that the CAQ would talk of modifying a law that is controversial and only five years old.
“When we hear things like strengthening laws that are as controversial as Bill 21, without really knowing what that means or what effect it would have or where we’re going with this, it’s easy to imagine that it can only accentuate the divisions that are already there,” she said.
What worries Lampron is how the premier’s recent statements about possibly banning public prayers — which is a constitutional landmine — appeared to, more than ever, single out the religion of Islam. Legault said his government’s plans would send a message to “Islamists.”
“When he was describing people being on their knees and praying on the street, he was referring to a Muslim prayer,” said the law professor.
When talking about secularism, “you should be talking about religions and not one religion,” Lampron said.
François Legault says he would like to outlaw prayer in schools, parks and other public spaces, following a report about behaviours at a Laval, Que., secondary school that include students praying in classrooms.
By talking about banning public prayers, Legault was mixing up public institutions and public spaces, said Azdouz.
“The situation is already confusing,” she said, adding that talking about tabling a bill on secularism before government employees produce their final reports on the 17 schools adds to the confusion.
If the province tables a bill to reinforce secularism, Azdouz says the government needs to find a way to settle the question once and for all, as it promised it would five years ago.
“Otherwise, every time we’ll have a problem, we’re going to adopt a law or expand the law,” she said.
“What we need now is to take a deep breath and have a clear portrait of what the situation really is … because we already got it wrong once.”
