Lisa Richmond:

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the debate around laïcité and the place of religion in society has been central to Quebec politics. Some could say that it has taken the place formerly occupied by the debate on sovereignty as the central, polarizing question.

In the aftermath of the 1995 Quebec referendum, which sovereigntists lost by a very close margin, Quebec nationalism began to redefine itself along new lines. As immigration increased, often from countries that are not predominantly Christian, the issue of managing cultural and religious pluralism rose. The debate about religious symbols has increasingly come to embody this wider cultural concern.

Part 1. The “Crisis of Religious Accommodations”

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Starting in 2006, several news stories regarding “religious accommodations” shocked the public. They raised frictions between religious pluralism and mainstream “Québécois values”:

A YMCA gym in Montreal installed frosted windows after complaints by Hasidic Jews, who were offended by the sight of women working out in gym clothes.

The Montreal police directed its female officers to let men intervene with Hasidic Jews, as an accommodation to some men who refuse to talk to women.

The Quebec Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse ruled that the Société d’assurance automobile du Quebec has to comply when a man asks not to be served by a woman for religious motives.

Many of these accommodations were seen as violating equality between men and women, and thus greatly disturbed many pundits and citizens.

Lisa Richmond:

The Multani c. Commission Scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys decision by the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a Sikh student had the right to wear his kirpan (a small dagger) at school under certain conditions, which the school board had prohibited, because it was seen as a weapon.

The lawyer Julius Grey represented the plaintiffs in the Multani decision, and in another case touching on religious freedom, Amselem.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

So we read a profile on you in Le Devoir from 2014. So the profile said that you are difficult to categorize. You are a Montrealer, an Anglophone, Jewish background, Quebecker, lawyer, Francophile, a cosmopolitan man, and you describe yourself as “le moins multiculturel de tous,” “The less [sc. least] multicultural of all.”

Julius Grey:

Yes, absolutely, I’m against multiculturalism. Totally. I think it’s one of the great mistakes Canada made. […] I’m basically a person who does not like identities. I love all four languages that I know well, but I never choose—if someone asks me, “French or English?,” I never choose, I say, As you wish. And I am very much internationalist, and so on, Now I… Another thing that I am very strongly, in my own life, completely and utterly non-religious. I have no religion. If you ask me whether I’m Jewish, the answer is no. I have nothing to do with it.

Lisa Richmond:

We asked Julius Grey for his view on Bill 21.

Julius Grey:

Quebec is wrong because they’re picking on the wrong things. They are picking on what people wear, which interferes with individual rights. They’re excluding, say, a young woman who feels she has to wear a scarf, or a young man who has to wear a turban or a kippah, from public employment, which might in fact, in my view, and I use a word people don’t like these days, “assimilate” him. I’m in favour of that. So I think Quebec is wrong in the means and in the violations of individual rights. There’s an English saying, you attract more people with honey than with vinegar. Quebec is intent on using vinegar to try to, to do what I think is right, which is integrate totally so that the immigrants lose their other identity. […]

Lisa Richmond:

Can you can you say a little bit more about what you really mean when you say “identity,” because we all have identities and to be assimilated means to come into another identity.

Julius Grey:

We all have a personal identity. […] What I don’t like is identity as a political slogan. In other words, people can have all sorts of identity, including, you know, Hasidim. You can have an identity that is an overwhelming part of yourself. Each one chooses identity. I mean, in my case, for instance, there’s a portion of my identity which is rooted in Western classical music, where I simply don’t, I couldn’t become a Swifty. And there’s nothing wrong with it. But if I organize a political party based on shoving Wagner down everybody’s throat, then I would be doing something wrong, something very harmful. […] But the politicizing, the turning of identity into political influence, is particularly dangerous. In fact, of course, it’s not the members of the identity group that benefit from that. It’s the leaders. It’s the leaders who get the money, the leadership, the subsidies from the federal government who have all political parties courting them. […]

And so when it comes to Bill 21, I think Quebec had the right ideological idea, that there should be a common culture, that people should not maintain differences over the generations. There is a real problem with immigration with respect to the percentage of people speaking French across the country, but there is no problem with immigration as long as we don’t encourage multiculturalism. […]

I think Trudeau made three fundamental errors in the Constitution. It wasn’t his fault. I’m talking about the real Trudeau. It wasn’t his fault. He did his best. But because of the provincial opposition, etc., he did—he put in the notwithstanding clause, which is unfortunate, because you don’t need it. You’ve got section 1 anyway. You can’t—obviously there are limits to Charter rights, but you don’t need the notwithstanding clause giving provincial premiers that sort of power, or the federal government actually, and Poilievre is threatening to use it in minimal sentences. So that’s one mistake.

The second mistake he made I think was multiculturalism. I think he did that because that was necessary in order to get everybody on side with bilingualism. But I don’t think multiculturalism was a good idea. I think society should not have groups. And Joe Clark once said, “Canada is a community of communities.” That sums up what I think Canada is not. I think it’s every citizen making up his own cultural, whatever background. Country of individual freedom and social democracy. That’s the other side. I’m certainly not from the right.

The third mistake, the most controversial one—we don’t have to go into it, but I could get pilloried in the, cancelled—is native autonomy. I don’t think any group should have autonomy in our society. And I do not believe land belongs to anyone. It belongs to all people. It doesn’t belong in a property sense, but it welcomes all people, and they’re all equal on it.

Lisa Richmond:

Can you tell us, so for the audience that’s going to be listening, briefly just what was at issue with the Multani decision and how was it resolved and then by what principles did the… And then can you say, why, why do you think that particular decision had so much prominence?

Julius Grey:

Well, Quebec is a very—. Okay. Quebec has a very strong anti-violence thing today. It’s one of the things—no violence, no, no vehemence, politeness to everybody and so on. Maybe other places are going the same direction. So they always had, say, codes in schools saying no knives, no weapons, etc. And of course, in the Sikh religion, a baptized Sikh has to have, among other things, a kirpan. Kirpan is something that looks like a little dagger, very small, not usually very sharp, but you have to have it on you. And they asked for it as a reasonable accommodation. Everywhere else in Canada, it passed unnoticed, but in Quebec, there was a real reaction. And the reaction was sincere and honest, I don’t blame people, were really angry. You’re bringing a knife into school. But the fact is, there were no cases, and we had it in our factum, where that knife in school was used for violence. And they tried to look for cases, and they couldn’t. Second, and it wasn’t a real knife. And the Supreme Court dealt with it. And it was one of those clashes where English Canada was largely for the accommodation, but French Canada was not. […]

When I represented the Amselem, the Orthodox Jews, and when I represented the Sikhs, I told them all, before, that I’m very happy to represent them and I believe in their cause, but I want you to know that I believe, unlike you, that the purpose for the kirpan in the public school, or the purpose for the religious Jews getting their sukkah in the Sanctuaire, which is a fashionable French condominium, is to integrate them, so the next generation doesn’t. And they accepted that. I don’t think they were pleased with the idea that their grandchildren would not, but they accepted it. And that was my view. […] But in pure theory, I think Quebec has the right idea but the wrong method, and English Canada has the wrong idea, but a method that is more, in my view, more conducive to integrating.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Initially, there was great political reluctance to tackle the reasonable accommodations issue, even for the sovereigntist Parti Québécois. What made the debate go from anecdotal to political was a citizens’ movement in a small Mauricie town called Hérouxville. In 2007, at the initiative of a councillor named André Drouin, Hérouxville (pop: 1,300) adopted a “code of conduct” (code de vie) emphasizing that Islamic religious practices were not welcome in town. The code stated, for example, that women were not to be stoned or burned with acid, and have the same rights as men, and that pork and alcohol could be consumed. The story was quickly picked up by the national media, and the village was mostly ridiculed and described as bigoted, intolerant, and xenophobic.

We spoke to legal scholar Stéphane Sérafin about this event.

Stéphane Sérafin:

My name is Stéphane Sérafin. […] I am a member of the Bar of Ontario and of the Bar of Quebec. So I have a bijural legal background. I grew up in Ontario. I’m a Francophone, first language Francophone, but I grew up in Ontario. I’m, we’re discussing cultural crossroads; that’s kind of been my life’s experience up till now. […]

The reasonable accommodations debate I think go back, I think, dates to, I can’t recall exactly the date, but think it’s 2008. It had to do with, it started primarily out of a place called Hérouxville, which adopted a, this was kind of a populist moment in Quebec, if you will. The news media, the traditional news media did not react very well to these individuals. Small-town Quebec adopted a code of conduct that was aimed at prohibiting Sharia law, prohibiting stoning, things that they associated with Islam, rightly or wrongly. And this kicked off the debate, because on the one hand, it was seen as an over-reaction, and in a way it was; at the time, at least, I don’t think there was anyone in Hérouxville who was actually Muslim. They were adopting this with no apparent real reason for doing so.

But on the other hand, and this is where the debate became more interesting, it did ask the question or bring up a question which had been ignored in Quebec until that point about, how far should we go in accommodating religious minorities? What does it mean to have a common, shared set of values to coexist in a community? What is that baseline, shared commitment that we should all have? What does that mean? And especially in, I think, a culture like Quebec’s, which is historically Catholic and historically has, and for all sorts of reasons also tied to the preservation of its language and culture, even after the Quiet Revolution in 1960, these questions, I think, resonated particularly strongly in Quebec. It’s not to say that those questions haven’t been asked elsewhere, but I think the cultural context was ripe for this to just take off after Hérouxville. And of course, we then got into the debate, which got polemical on both sides over how best to approach this issue of accommodating religious difference and other differences too.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

This burning-hot controversy coincided with the 2007 Quebec election. Jean Charest’s Liberal Party and André Boisclair’s Parti Québécois tried to sidestep the debate. Mario Dumont’s Action Démocratique du Québec fully embraced it, denouncing “des dirigeants d’organismes publics qui choisissent de mettre de côté nos propres valeurs communes pour satisfaire des demandes formulées par des représentants de communautés” (“leaders of public agencies who choose to set aside our shared values in order to accommodate requests made by representatives of communities”).

Lisa Richmond:

The ADQ surged from 18 percent to 30 percent of the popular vote, and from 4 to 41 members of the National Assembly. The Parti Québécois came in third, a resounding defeat for the party that had been the main flagbearer of nationalism since the 1970s. This result showed that there was a substantial political demand for “defending Québécois values” and that for a sizeable number of voters, this issue was more important than Quebec’s status within Canada, around which most of the PQ’s nationalism revolves.

The issue stayed at the forefront of the news after the election, because Premier Jean Charest formed the Bouchard-Taylor commission, chaired by professors Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, to consult Quebeckers, examine the controversy, and make recommendations. The Commission consulted with experts and with the public in assemblies held all over Quebec. Their report, released in 2008, concluded that there was no crisis of reasonable accommodation but a “crisis of perception,” and that the majority of Quebeckers had an unjustified “identity malaise.”

Here is professor David Koussens:

David Koussens:

You evoked this accommodation crisis. But the commission, Bouchard-Taylor, clearly said that it was a crisis of perception, that there were no crises of accommodation, that it was really built by media, by political groups. It was a crisis of perception. And when you look at the law, there is nothing about reasonable accommodation. There is nothing. We continue to do this reasonable accommodation on an everyday basis at the university, in hospitals, everywhere. And it works. And there is no problem. Of course, there are some small problems sometimes, of course, like everywhere in the society. But there is not a general problem of accommodation for now. It’s really interesting, because if the law worked, it’s that, it was very performative in making the people believe that it has resolved a crisis. But the crisis was a crisis of perception. So that’s really interesting.

Lisa Richmond:

Among the recommendations of the Bouchard-Taylor report, two captured the attention of the public and politicians and shaped the debate for the years to come: removing the crucifix from the National Assembly, and banning religious symbols for state employees in positions that “exercise a power of coercion and even of punishment,” namely, judges, Crown prosecutors, police officers, prison guards, and the Speaker of the National Assembly. Charles Taylor, co-chair of the commission and a philosopher who spent most of his career at McGill University, spoke to us about this era.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

So I’ll go back to now just, getting right to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. So I’d like to hear your personal story on that. You already had an established career, and you were approached to lead a commission that you knew would be—

Charles Taylor:

Yes, that would be very controversial. Because to everyone’s surprise, it must be said, it was the beginning of the millennium, the year 2000, there was a series of cases of “reasonable accommodation.” And reasonable accommodations is a situation where somebody wants a job, you want to give it to them, there’s a problem, so you readjust. Somebody’s Jewish, doesn’t want to work Saturday, okay, so you say work Sunday. That kind of thing. […] But a series of these cases arose, and they raised a tremendous malaise. And the malaise was mainly outside Montreal, that’s where the great effect was. It’s always been in Montreal. There are more, there’s more mixing and therefore more mutual comprehension than outside Montreal. Mario Dumont, who was the political leader of the third party at that point, came from Rivière du Loup. And so there was extraordinary worry about this seemingly non-problem. Because when we looked into all the institutions that had to administer the problem, in the hospital, Muslims were dying, they wanted the bed turned towards Mecca and so on, that kind of thing. All the hospitals said, no, it’s not a big problem. We have problems with everybody, adjusting things. So there was no crisis in the institutions, widely, but there was this psychic crisis.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

When you mentioned crisis, also in the media it was called “the crisis of reasonable accommodation.”

Charles Taylor:

That’s right. It was called a crisis. And that’s why people thought the hospitals must be in a state of total chaos. This is totally untrue. So the crisis was in the views of the people, the sense of malaise.

Now, I, the commission, I accepted the commission because I realized this is very important, you know, to not come out of this with terrible legislation. And so I accepted. The government simply wanted to get out of the mess, because there was an election coming up, and they said, well, let’s not talk about that in the election. We’ll name these two figures and so on, one independentiste, and one non-independentiste. When we did this, we went around the province and heard people, I really got a sense, when people just took the mic and talked for three minutes, which was the rule, that there was a real fear here. And I think one question that came back and back, really for me summed it up. Est-ce qu’ils vont nous changer? Will we be changed by this? So it’s the very old and very understandable fear for the Quebec identity, which is of course woven around the French language, but it contains other things as well, the Quebec identity, it’s this fear around that which triggered off the reaction. […]

And so I really got this point. And I can see that it’s helped me understand other situations, too. The situation of Europe, all these workers came to Germany, and what do you have, you have all the Germans saying that we have to stress our Leitkultur, the leading culture has to be stressed. It’s exactly the same kind of reaction.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

But at the same time, if I may interject, German culture in Germany is not, does not have the same existential anguish about their survival compared to French culture in Quebec.

Charles Taylor:

Except that—it doesn’t, I mean, objectively speaking—but we find that subjectively, the same kind of thing happens. Can you figure this out? This is to me one of the saddest, but not surprising—. In Sweden—, there is not a population that has a higher moral view about international—. They give more of their GNP—. When a lot of Syrian refugees came into Sweden, the reaction was enough to create this new party which has upset the balance in Sweden. They’re not a majority, but they undercut the Social Democrats. So there is something about being always in company of people that we are familiar with culturally, and suddenly all the people coming in which creates this fear. And getting over that is one of the really big tasks of modern societies. […] And so we made this report, and it was meant to calm the situation, and it really didn’t.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Were you surprised by that? By the reception of your report?

Charles Taylor:

At that point I could see— The wave was strong enough that I didn’t believe, that I thought—. In the long run, I have to believe—. But I didn’t believe in the short run.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Did you feel trapped during the hearings at one point? Did you think, oh, my intention to appease the situation, it’s a lost battle?

Charles Taylor:

I’m feeling something from very strong emotion here. […] So we did something we thought was very clever. We took a set of functions, which we thought would really, really outrage people if people were allowed to wear signs in these functions, and they were really coercive functions. So the police, the—

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

judges, the Crown,

Charles Taylor:

the guy who is, you know, who

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

prison guards,

Charles Taylor:

Prison guards, etc., etc. And we sort of excepted that. They excepted that.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

When you mean “accepted,”

Charles Taylor:

1. Excepted.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Oh, “excepted,” okay.

Charles Taylor:

But in general, we said there would be to freedom to display one’s religion if I wanted to, under the usual safeguards that are absolutely understood in the modern rights doctrine since 1948. You can express your religion any way, unless it creates a great difficulty for others, creates an inequality, and so on.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Public order,

Charles Taylor:

Public order—. And everybody understands this. […] But with that conviction, there’s absolute freedom. Now, the two governments that took this up, the Parti Québécois first, and then the CAQ, said, “Oh, we’re quoting the, we’re following the advice of the—,” and they subtly changed the meaning of the term, right? So it was, instead of being coercition it was “authority.” And then we can, well, who has authority? Well, the teacher. So we got this . . .

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Do you think it was done on purpose to create a collision with Ottawa?

Charles Taylor:

No, no, no.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Or more as a wedge issue for the electorate?

Charles Taylor:

They wanted a wedge issue. They wanted a wedge issue, you see.

Part 2. The Charter of Quebec Values (2013-14) and Bill 21 (2019)

Lisa Richmond:

After being outclassed by Mario Dumont’s ADQ in the 2007 election and losing its official opposition status, the Parti Québécois knew it had to pivot to regain the nationalist momentum it had lost. Commentators called this the virage identitaire (the turn to identity). It was a recognition that the main focus of Quebec nationalists has moved away from sovereignty toward cultural identity, and integration of immigrants. When Pauline Marois came in as leader, she made it her mission to get back the nationalist voters who had tried out the ADQ in 2007, through a more affirmative discourse on national identity, including laïcité as a bulwark against radical Islam and “unreasonable” accommodations that threatened so-called “Québécois values.”

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

When the Parti Québécois won a minority government in 2012, a priority was to act on the identity agenda. This culminated in possibly the most controversial piece of legislation in twenty-first century Quebec so far, the Charte des valeurs québécoises (Charter of Quebec Values). Championed by Minister Bernard Drainville, this bill proposed to ban the wearing of visible religious symbols for all state employees during their working hours. Notably, the bill did not include the removal of the crucifix in the National Assembly, for reasons of heritage (patrimoine).

The Charter was hugely controversial, and was criticized by most media commentators as “intolerant.” It consistently secured the support of a thin (and quiet) majority of Quebeckers, however, around 50 to 55 percent. Several sovereigntists, including former premiers Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, publicly criticized the Charter, while federalists such as former Supreme Court judge Claire L’Heureux-Dubé and the CAQ, the Coalition Avenir Québec, backed it. The Charter exposed that the debates around state multiculturalism and Quebec sovereignty are distinct from one another, and that ideological coalitions were shifting in Quebec politics.

Charles Taylor:

Charles Taylor:

So when that happened, they did the Chartre Québécois. And that finished the chance of a very serious opposition.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

It was then that it was identified as a kind of wedge issue. And therefore, yeah, we see it was materialized during the project of the Charte des valeurs québécoises.

Charles Taylor:

And it’s a real tragedy because, you know, I’m not an independentist, but I admired Lévesque and that generation. They had a really broad view. They would have never adopted, they would have been horrified by this kind of —-. I knew Lévesque personally, and Jean Godin, and all the leaders of the Parti Québécois, up to and including Lucien Bouchard, were of this —. So in a certain sense, the Parti Québécois, c’est renié, they just taken, they’ve moved away from their really central traditions. Okay, So that shows you this is very powerful.

Lisa Richmond:

We also spoke about this era with Guillaume Lamy, author of a book whose title in English would be Laïcité and Quebec Values: Sources of a Controversy.

Guillaume Lamy:

I’m Guillaume Lamy. I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Religion, Laïcité, and Law at the University of Sherbrooke. And I am completing my second year of research on the historical debates about secularism in Quebec since the nineteenth century. […]

For almost forty years in Quebec, we had a major political divide, surrounding a single question. Are you against independence of Quebec? That was the single question you need to ask to classify almost everybody on the political spectrum. But since 2007, this political divide got some competition. Another one, concerning diversity, built up, and now we are talking about more than one issue, and we can classify the political spectrum into maybe more than two groups, but four. Now, you can be an independentist and be favourable to the secularism and the building of the secularism. Or you can be independentist and against. And on the other side, you can be federalist, and one on the other camp. Since 2007, there is a soar, or a surge of debates about diversity politics. […]

For so many decades, there was one subject that you will have to avoid at any cost to stay friendly with others. It was the independence of Quebec or not. But now, if you talk about the Bill 21, you will have the same effect, because we are so divided on this kind of politics. And there is, I think, no way of reconciliation, because when we have a previous cleavage on independence, there was a common ground possible between. . . . It’s strange to say that, but when we have a group advocating for independence, and the other one to stay, there is a middle ground, called “autonomy.” You can mix these opposites through a third way. And when we debate about economics, more taxes or less, we can have a common ground, because it’s quantity. It’s what we have. But when we talk about what we are, can we make compromises? Can we ask a woman to wear a headscarf two days a week at [her] job [but not on the other three days]? […]

You know, before we started that debate on laity and identity and diversity, we had a debate on identity. But it wasn’t the same. The debate over independence of Quebec included a portion of identities: the identity of Quebec against the identity of Canada. The French-speaking against . . . that’s not totally new, but in the eighties, in the sixties, when the other is the dominant one, from a French-Canadian perspective, we were a minority, so we were the weak one in the equation. So it was easy to attack an identity. It was way easier, because the English-Canadians, they had the money, they were the majority in the parliament, in the federal parliament. They have the culture, they have so many resources, so it was easy to make that debate from a minority perspective.

But now, since we are debating about religions and minorities, it’s the majority of Quebec debating the minority identities, and this changes the climate of the debate in so many ways. And especially, when you have a majority of French-speaking. . . . I will sum up like that. I think the French-speaking in Quebec are very favourable to Bill 21 and the laïcité bill. That’s maybe more than 70 percent, maybe 80 percent of the French, French-born-speaking. When we have that kind of majority, trying to impose secularism, the headscarf ban, and everything, public prayer, the opponent are minorities, and they speak a different language that is not the one of the superiority of Parliament, they use the rights and the courts, and this is way more messy than a standard political divide, like, between right economics and left economics. You will have some groups that will present themselves as victims of the majority with very rude words. And the majority will have to defend against that kind of accusation. And this is harsh. This is way more hard, even for a majority.

If, I know a lot of nationalists, they are totally behind that kind of politics, banning headscarves. They judge this is one of the greatest laws in the twenty-first century. It is for them the equivalent of the Charte québécoise de la langue française, Bill 101. But from the minority perspective, from the Muslims that that are opposed to the headscarf bans, this is the worst law of the twenty-first century, and this will give them, or produce in them, some dramatic memories, of the government, the political parties, and of this period of time where, for the majority, some member of the minority are the problem, or a problem to solve.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

After eighteen months in power, the Parti Québécois called an election in the spring of 2014 and lost to Philippe Couillard’s Liberals. The election was shaped by Pierre Karl Péladeau, CEO of the Québecor media group, announcing that he was running for the PQ while raising his fist in the air, “faire du Québec un pays” (to make Quebec an independent country). The election became another sort of referendum on independence, and the Liberal Party was able to win based on the majority of Quebeckers rejecting this proposal. The Charter died with the Marois government.

Lisa Richmond:

In 2018, the Quebec Liberal Party was defeated by a new political force, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec. It presented itself as a centre-right nationalist party, defending Quebec’s identity within Canada and promising to table a new bill on laïcité as well as lowering the rate of immigration into Quebec. Legault capitalized on the unpopularity of Premier Couillard, seen as disconnected from Quebeckers and extremely hostile to nationalism. His accusation that the defenders of laïcité were fuelling the “embers of intolerance” (braises de l’intolérance) was abundantly used against him.

In 2019, Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette put forward Bill 21 on laïcité, essentially a watered-down version of the Charter. Religious symbols would be prohibited for state employees in certain positions of authority only, and for public school teachers; there was a grandfather clause for employees who were already working for the state; and the crucifix in the National Assembly would be removed.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Six years after the demise of the Charter, the political mood was very different. The bill was more moderate, and the CAQ government’s discourse was about “putting this issue behind us once and for all,” capitalizing on the fatigue that many felt about this recurring issue in the political debate. Most polls showed that about two-thirds of Quebeckers were in favour of the bill, as were 46 percent of Canadians as a whole.

As the bill was put forward, Premier Legault addressed the nation through a formal video, celebrating that the laïcité debate was “finally” over. He ended the speech with a memorable sentence that instantly became associated with the bill: “Au Québec, c’est comme ça qu’on vit” (In Quebec, this is just how we live).

Lisa Richmond:

The bill was immediately challenged before the courts by opponents. The government used the Constitution’s article 33, also known as the notwithstanding clause, to (partially) protect the law from judicial review preemptively. The Quebec Court of Appeal did not strike down the bill in its decision in 2024, because of article 33. The Supreme Court of Canada indicated that it would hear the appeal, and the verdict is expected to be delivered in fall 2026, around the time of the October provincial election. The judicial review involves higher considerations than the law itself: The federal government is asking the Supreme Court to restrain the use that provincial legislatures can make of the notwithstanding clause. Four other provinces are taking Quebec’s side in the matter. Here is Stéphane Sérafin:

Stéphane Sérafin:

The Supreme Court judges, I think, know that they’re sitting on a bomb. Okay. […] Everybody knows it. An appeal, out of Quebec, on Hak, dealing with Bill 21 that curtails the use of Section 33 to strike down parts or all of Bill 21 would be explosive. For all the reasons we discussed earlier, right, because this bill is not just a piece of legislation. It is fundamentally tied to Quebec’s self-understanding as a distinct society, as a nation.

Part 3. Bill 9: 2024-25

Lisa Richmond:

The intent of Bill 21, as stated by the government, was to “turn the page” on the laïcité debate and put it to rest after almost fifteen years of polarization. Yet in the last two years, events have propelled laïcité back in the news.

In the fallout of the attacks in Israel of October 7, 2023 and the renewed Israel-Hamas war, protests and sometimes antisemitic intimidation became more visible in the streets of Montreal. From April to June 2024, a pro-Palestinian encampment occupied McGill University’s campus in downtown Montreal. In relation to the conflict, “Islamic street prayers” became more frequent in Montreal. The intimidating aspect of these mass demonstrations, including in front of the Notre Dame Basilica, made them a political issue, to the point the government indicated it wanted to legislate to stop them.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

At the end of 2024, the media started reporting on a situation at Bedford Elementary School, a public school in Montreal. A group of teachers at the school, who were Muslim, were accused of using physical violence against students, humiliating special-needs students, and refusing to teach parts of the curriculum relating to science, ethics, and sex education. An inquiry also found troubling evidence that these teachers were engaging in intimidation of colleagues, refusing to obey school leaders, and denying the leaders’ access to their classrooms. After this, the Ministry of Education launched an inquiry into other schools in Montreal that were suspected of similar problems.

In reaction to these events, the Quebec government commissioned a report from former Liberal MP Christiane Pelchat and professor Guillaume Rousseau on how to enhance laïcité in Quebec. The report was released in August of 2025. The report’s title speaks of increasing the “coherence” of laïcité in Quebec, and went far in its proposals to do so. Whereas Bill 21 only legislated on state institutions, the Pelchat-Rousseau report went further, recommending that the state have no contact with religious groups or institutions, withdraw public funding for independent religious schools, and withdraw tax exemptions for religious organizations. This report therefore marked a break with previous initiatives, moving from laïcité of the state to a policy that also concerns civil society.

Lisa Richmond:

In November 2025, minister Jean-François Roberge put forward Bill 9, which acted on some of the Pelchat-Rousseau recommendations: The Bill bans face coverings in all education, from daycare to university, as well as prayer rooms in public institutions that are not also “living spaces” (such as prisons or care homes). So-called “street prayers” would now require prior authorization from the city council. The bill would restrict the autonomy of independent schools by asking that they not teach religious content during school hours and by limiting their ability to hire teachers or select students based on religion. The proposal to withdraw tax exemption for religious organizations was left out of the bill.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

As we have seen, for the better part of 20 years, the debate on “religious accommodations,” “Québécois values,” and laïcité has dominated the Quebec political scene, and this is set to continue in the coming years. This issue has become a major political divide, with several distinct views on either side of the debate on the wearing of religious symbols. We will analyze these opposing visions in the next episode.

Thank you for listening. This podcast is a project of Cardus, a public policy think tank based in Ottawa and Hamilton, Ontario. To learn more about Cardus, please visit our website at cardus.ca. The narration was written by Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, Lisa Richmond, and Jean-Christophe Jasmin. Hosted by Jean-Christophe Jasmin and Lisa Richmond. Produced by Francis Denis. We acknowledge with gratitude our interviewees: Francis Denis, Nadia El-Mabrouk, Xavier Gélinas, Julius Grey, David Koussens, Guillaume Lamy, Guillaume Rousseau, Stéphane Sérafin, Charles Taylor, and Hicham Tiflati.