With the announcement of a new committee on secularism, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government is poised to tighten restrictions on religious expression, especially through the expansion of Bill 21—a 2019 law barring public employees from wearing religious symbols—and a potential ban on public prayer. The CAQ committee will assess how public institutions have implemented secularism since the bill’s enactment, and whether this implementation aligns with the province’s vision of secularism.
Quebec’s secularist policies have their roots in the Quiet Revolution, when the government reduced the role of the Catholic Church in public institutions both due to the church’s corruption and inefficiency during the Grande Noirceur and as a strategy to modernize Quebec’s economy and education system. Today, however, secularist legislation increasingly targets and disproportionately harms religious minorities while being justified under the guise of neutrality. Muslim women who wear the hijab are particularly injured by these policies, as exemplified by the banning of religious symbols and dress in public institutions.
Religious groups whose attire is integral to their faith—including Sikh turbans and kirpans, Jewish kippahs, or hijabs—bear the oppressive weight of Bill 21’s regulations. Given that wearing a headscarf is, for many Muslims, a compulsory act of faith, the ban dangerously undermines the freedoms of religious practice. By contrast, Christian symbols, such as the famous Mount Royal cross, remain neatly exempted from the ban, as the bill contains a clause permitting religious symbols in public spaces if they represent a component of Quebec’s cultural heritage. As a result, the province’s Christian history is given preference and is permitted to persist publicly, a further testament to so-called “neutrality” as a facade for religious discrimination and xenophobia.
With the CAQ’s latest committee, restrictions are set to tighten even further, including potentially expanding prayer restrictions beyond public institutions to all public spaces. Quebec Premier François Legault has cited instances of Muslim Montrealers praying during pro-Palestinian protests as justification for the ban, a rationale that, by portraying individuals who choose to practice their faith during protests as more disruptive, threatening, or extremist than their fellow protestors, isolates and racializes religious minorities.
Restrictions on public displays of religion will also only deepen the ostracization of religious minorities from public sector jobs, as they will be forced to either yield their religious expression or turn towards the private sector. As a result, the public sector will become increasingly homogenized and experience a stark drop in religious—and, by consequence, ethnic and racial—diversity. Such a blow to public sector diversity would not only disadvantage job-seekers but also undermine the quality of public services. Diverse employee backgrounds are imperative to ensuring public institutions comprehensively serve groups of all demographics.
Such barriers to entering the public sector pose a particular risk to Quebec’s non-Christian immigrant populations, exacerbating cycles of mistreatment rooted in Canada’s already racially-exclusive history of immigration policies. Education policies further exemplify this discrimination, as Quebec offers in-province tuition rates for students immigrating from France and Belgium, nations with which the province has built relations of reciprocal tuition benefits. However, Quebec has not formed equivalent relations with French-speaking African nations, effectively excluding students from these countries from accessing reduced tuition. Together, these patterns of mistreatment for religious minorities reflect how the CAQ government has privileged its white, Christian population at the cost of minority groups, all while framing their actions as neutral.
Quebec must end its use of secularism as a justification for discriminatory treatment of religious minorities and welcome diversity back into the public sector. Being exempt from Bill 21 and the proposed prayer ban, McGill has the opportunity to serve as a model for other institutions in Quebec by providing support for religious minorities within its faculty and student body. Particularly given the university’s international and religiously diverse demography, McGill must affirm its commitment to freedoms of religious expression on campus by reminding students that they are welcome. McGill has a responsibility to create spaces for religious minorities to safely and comfortably practice their religions, as well as to properly advertise and distribute existing resources through events and programming. In collaboration with student groups representing religious minorities on campus, McGill must offer support and allegiance to its future graduates, many of whom would be painfully disadvantaged by the work of this secularism committee.
