FOLLOWING THE RECENT DECISION BY THE QUEBEC COURT OF APPEAL TO UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF BILL 21, WE ARE REPUBLISHING OUR EDITORIAL OF DEC. 15, 2021.
Last week, a teacher was removed from her job at an elementary school in Chelsea because she wears a hijab. The school board felt it had no alternative but to enforce the Legault government’s secularism law.
Secularism is supposed to mean the separation of church and state. It is supposed to mean that government policy is neutral on matters of religion, where justice is carried out with an even hand, with no regard to faith.
But this so-called secularism law shows the government is far from neutral on matters of religion. It is an instrument of state discrimination on the basis of religion. It says that if your religion has traditions of wearing distinctive clothing such as a hijab, a kippa or a turban, you are not eligible to work in public-facing government jobs in Quebec. If you adhere to a faith that has no such traditions, you are unaffected.
A Protestant, for example, can feel fully able to express his or her religious beliefs and still hold a public-facing government job. So can a Catholic, so long as crucifixes are worn under clothing, out of sight. For many Jews, Muslims and Sikhs, it’s not the case.
The suggestion that the current push for secularism in Quebec is a natural extension of the Quiet Revolution that supplanted the Duplessis regime is a self-serving myth. The application of this law is no less an example of state meddling in the religious realm than was Duplessis’ favouritism towards the Catholic Church and discrimination against other faiths, famously, Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Under the guise of secularism, this law really seems to be about the suppression of minorities in order to remove from public view unwanted cultural influences. In other places, at other times, gaining some level of public acceptance for such arbitrary and unjustifiable discrimination against fellow citizens has proven to be a prelude to much worse things to come.
If you can tell people of different faiths they cannot keep their government jobs unless they stop wearing clothing associated with their religious traditions, then why not tell people with dark skin they may ride only at the back of the bus. Come back George Wallace, your time has come, and it is here in Quebec in 2021.
Come back P.W. Botha, tell us who may and may not drink from water fountains reserved for white people. Come back Joseph McCarthy, we need interrogation on whether we are now, or ever have been, members of the communist party. Come back Maurice Duplessis, we need instruction on which religion is acceptable and which is not.
Is this the company the premier wishes to keep?
Given Canada’s abhorrent treatment of Indigenous peoples in our residential schools, we, of all countries, ought to be moving decisively in the opposite direction, away from discrimination of all forms and towards inclusion of everybody.
Instead, we have shown our children that there is something inadequate or unacceptable about a person who wears a hijab in public. Under the implementation of this law, we are teaching that it is wrong to deviate from some handed-down formula for who we should all be, what we should think, how we should look. We are ensuring that old fears and hatreds are passed on to our young.
And, of all places, this is happening in a school, the one place where we should have hope that a new generation can be raised to embrace people of all descriptions, to celebrate difference, and to see the good common to all people, regardless of their faith, clothing, accent, skin colour, sexual identity, political view or any number of other ways in which, thank goodness, we are all variations on the theme of humanity.
Teachers wearing hijabs, kippas and turbans show their students – our children – that we can all enjoy the privileges, rights and responsibilities of full citizenship in this country, whoever we may be. Legault’s law tells us we can’t.
This cannot be allowed to stand. This is where the line must be drawn.
Charles Dickson
