Narration: Since the beginning of the 21st 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 Sovereignists 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 arose. The debate about religious symbols has increasingly come to embody this wider cultural concern.
The Reasonable Accommodations Crisis, 2006–2008
Narration: Starting in 2006, several news stories regarding religious accommodations shocked the public. They raised friction 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 refused to talk to women. The Quebec Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse ruled that the Société d’assurance automobile du Québec had to comply when a man asked 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 commentators and citizens.
In the Multani case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Sikh student had the right to wear his kirpan — a small ceremonial 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. We read a profile on him in Le Devoir from 2014.
Lisa Richmond: The profile said that you are difficult to categorize. You are a Montrealer, an Anglophone, Jewish background, Quebecer, lawyer, Francophile — a cosmopolitan man. And you describe yourself as le moins multiculturel de tous — the least multicultural of all.
Julius Grey: Yes, absolutely. Am I 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 — for instance, if somebody asks me English or French, I never choose. I say, as you wish. And I am very much an internationalist and so on. Now, another thing that I am very strongly in my own life is 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.
Narration: We asked Julius Grey for his views on Bill 21.
Julius Grey: Quebec is wrong because they’re picking on the wrong things. They’re 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 — and I use a word people don’t like these days — assimilate them. I’m in favour of that. But I think Quebec is wrong in the means and in the violations of individual rights.
And it’s — you know, there’s an English saying: you attract more people with honey than with vinegar. Quebec is intent on using vinegar to try to do what I think is right, which is to integrate totally so that immigrants lose their other identity.
Lisa Richmond: Can you say a little bit more about what you really mean when you say identity? Because we all have identities. And to assimilate is to come into another identity.
Julius Grey: We all have a personal identity, yes. What I don’t like is identity as a political slogan. In other words, people can have all sorts of identities, including Hasidim. They can have an identity that is an overwhelming part of themselves. 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 — I couldn’t become a Swiftie. There’s nothing wrong with it. But if I organize a political party based on shoving Wagner down everybody’s throat, then I’d be doing something wrong. Something very harmful.
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.
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, et cetera, he put in the Notwithstanding Clause, which is unfortunate, because you don’t need it. You’ve got section 1 anyway. Obviously there are limits to Charter rights, but you don’t need the Notwithstanding Clause — it gives premiers that sort of power, or the federal government actually, and Poilievre is threatening to use it on mandatory minimum sentences. So that’s one mistake.
The second mistake he made, I think, was multiculturalism. I think he did that because it was necessary in order to get everybody onside with bilingualism. But I don’t think multiculturalism was a good idea. I think a 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 their own cultural — whatever background — country of individual freedom and social democracy. That’s the other side. Certainly not from the right.
The third — the most controversial one, we don’t have to go into it, but I could get pilloried and 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. It doesn’t belong in the property sense, but it welcomes all people, and they’re all equal on it.
Lisa Richmond: So for the audience that’s going to be listening — briefly, just what was the issue with the Multani decision, how was it resolved, and by what principles? And then can you say why you think that particular decision had so much prominence?
Julius Grey: Quebec is a very — okay. Quebec is very strongly anti-violence today. It’s one of the things: no violence, no vehemence, politeness to everybody, and so on. Maybe other places are going the same direction. So they always had 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. A 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. 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 schools, where that knife was used for violence. They tried to look for cases and they couldn’t. And second, 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.
In the Amselem case, 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 of the kirpan in public school, or the purpose of the religious Jews getting their sukkah in the building — 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, conducive to integration.
Narration: Initially, there was great political reluctance to tackle the reasonable accommodations issue, even for the Sovereignist Parti Québécois. What made the debate go from anecdotal to political was a citizen’s movement in a small Mauricie town called Hérouxville. In 2007, at the initiative of a councillor named André Drouin, Hérouxville — population 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 the 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 Québec. I have a general legal background. I grew up in Ontario — so I’m a Francophone, first-language Francophone, but I grew up in Ontario. So I’m kind of — and we’re discussing cultural crossroads — that’s kind of been my life’s experience up till now.
The reasonable accommodations debate in Quebec — I can’t recall exactly the date, but I think it’s 2007 or 2008. It had to do with, it started primarily out of a place called Hérouxville, which adopted — this was kind of like a bit of a populist moment in Quebec, if you will. 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 kind of kicked off the debate, because on the one hand, it was seen as kind of like an overreaction. And in a way it was — at the time, I don’t think there was anyone in Hérouxville who was actually Muslim. So they were adopting this code with no apparent real reason for doing so. But on the other hand — and this is, I think, where the debate became more interesting — it did raise a question which had been kind of ignored in Quebec until that point: 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 a culture like Quebec’s, which is historically Catholic, and historically tied — for all sorts of reasons — to the preservation of its language and culture, even after the Quiet Revolution in 1960, these questions 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 right for this to just take off after Hérouxville.
Narration: This burning 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 chose to set aside our shared values in order to accommodate requests made by representatives of communities.
The ADQ surged from 18% to 30% of the popular vote and from four to 41 members of the National Assembly. And the Parti Québécois came in third — a resounding defeat for the party that had been the main flag bearer of nationalism since the 1970s. This result showed that there was a substantial political demand for “defending Québécois values,” and that for a sizable 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 Quebecers, examine the controversy, and make recommendations. The commission consulted with experts and with the public in assemblies held all over Quebec. And their report, released in 2008, concluded that there was no crisis of reasonable accommodation, but instead a crisis of perception, and that the majority of Quebecers had an unjustified identity malaise.
Here is Professor David Koussens.
David Koussens: You evoked this accommodation crisis, but the Bouchard-Taylor Commission clearly said that it was a crisis of perception — that there was no crisis of accommodation, that it was really built by media, by political groups. So it was a crisis of perception. And when you look at the law, there is nothing about reasonable accommodation. There is nothing. So we continue to do 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 — like everywhere in society. But there is not a general problem of accommodation.
So it’s really interesting: if the law worked, it’s because it was very performative in making people believe that it had resolved a crisis — but the crisis was a crisis of perception. That’s really interesting.
Narration: Among the recommendations of the Bouchard-Taylor report, two in particular captured the attention of the public and politicians and shaped the debate for the years to come. First was removing the crucifix from the National Assembly, and second, 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, who was co-chair of the commission and is a philosopher who spent most of his career at McGill University, spoke to us about this era.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: Getting right to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission — 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 difficult.
Charles Taylor: Yes. Because to everyone’s surprise, around the beginning of the millennium, there was this series of cases of reasonable accommodation. And reasonable accommodation is a situation where somebody wants a job, you want to give it to them, there’s a problem, so you readjust. Somebody Jewish doesn’t want to work Saturday — okay, well, 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 a really great factor. In Montreal there’s always been more mixing and therefore more familiarity with difference, entre autres.
Mario Dumont was a sort of political leader of the third party at that point. And so there was extraordinary worry about these seemingly non-important cases. Because when we looked into all the institutions that had to administer the problems — the hospitals, oh, Muslims are dying, they’re turned towards Mecca, and so on, that kind of thing — all the hospitals said: we have no big problem. We have problems with everybody adjusting things, but we’ve not really had demands that are non-adjustable.
So there was no crisis in the institutions, although it was widely believed that there was. There was this psychic crisis. When it was mentioned in the media, it was called the crisis of reasonable accommodation. That’s right. That’s why people thought it must be total chaos. And this is totally untrue. So the crisis was in the views of the people, this sense of malaise.
I accepted the commission because I realized this is very important — you can’t come out of this with terrible legislation. And so the government simply wanted to defuse a mess, because there was an election coming up. Well, let’s not talk about that. They named two figures — one independentist, one non-independentist — and said, have a go.
But when we did this, I really got a sense, when people just took the mic and talked for three minutes, that there was a real fear here. And I think one question that came back and back, and for me really summed it up, was: 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 of course is woven around the French language — but contains other things as well — it’s this fear that triggered off the anxiety.
And I really got this point. And I can see that it’s helped me understand other situations too. I mean, the situation in Europe — workers came to Germany, and what do you have? You have Germans saying we have to stress our Leitkultur — the leading culture has to be expressed. It’s not the same kind of reaction.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: But at the same time, if I may interject — German culture in Germany does not have the same existential anguish about survival compared to French culture in Quebec.
Charles Taylor: No, it doesn’t. I mean, objectively speaking. But you find that subjectively the same thing can be happening. This is to me one of the saddest, but not surprising, examples. In Sweden, there is not a population with a higher moral view about international affairs — they gave more of their GNP to development aid. When a lot of Syrian refugees came into Sweden, the reaction was enough to create a new party, which has upset the balance of their parliamentary majority. So there is something about always being in the company of people familiar to you, and suddenly a lot of people are coming in, which creates this kind of fear. And getting over that is one of the really big tasks.
So we made this report, and it was meant to calm the situation, but 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 thing was strong enough that I didn’t believe, in the short run at least… I have to believe in the long run. Yes. But I didn’t believe in the short run.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: Did you feel, during the hearings, at one point, that your intention to appease the situation was a lost battle?
Charles Taylor: Yes, there was a very strong sense of that. But we did something we thought was really clever. We took a set of functions which we thought would really enrage people as they were — people in positions of coercive authority — and said that in those functions, yes, they should not be allowed to wear religious signs. The police, the judges, the crown… the prison guards, et cetera. And we sort of accepted that.
But in general, we said there should be freedom to display one’s religion, under the usual safeguards that are absolutely understood in modern rights doctrines since 1948. You can express religion in any way, unless it creates a great difficulty for others, creates inequality, or raises a public order issue. And everybody understands this. And with that restriction, there’s absolute freedom.
Now, the two governments that took this up — the Parti Québécois first, and then the CAQ — said, oh, we’re following the advice of the commission. And they suddenly changed the meaning, the point. So it was, instead of being about functions showing coercive authority, it was about all authority. And then — well, who has authority? Well, a teacher. So we got to where we are.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: Do you think it was done on purpose, to create a wedge issue for the electorate?
Charles Taylor: They wanted the right issue. They wanted the right issue.
The Charter of Quebec Values, 2013–14, and Bill 21, 2019
Narration: After being outclassed by Mario Dumont’s ADQ in the 2007 election and losing its official opposition status, the Parti Québécois knew that it had to pivot to regain the nationalist momentum it had lost. Commentators call this the virage identitaire — the turn to identity. It was a recognition that the main focus of Quebec nationalists had moved away from sovereignty to cultural identity and integration of immigrants. When Pauline Marois came in as leader, she made it her mission to win 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.
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 21st-century Quebec so far — the Charte des valeurs québécoises, the 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 Quebecers, however, at around 50 to 55%. Several Sovereignists, including former premiers Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, publicly criticized the Charter, while federalists such as former Supreme Court Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé and the CAQ — the Coalition Avenir Québec — backed it. The Charter exposed the fact that debates around state multiculturalism and Quebec sovereignty are distinct from one another, and that ideological coalitions were shifting in Quebec politics.
Charles Taylor: So when that happened — it got the PQ to go forward, and that finished the chance of very serious opposition. It was then that it was identified as a kind of wedge issue. And therefore we see it materialized during the project of the Charte des valeurs québécoises under Drainville. And it’s a real tragedy, because — I’m not an independentist, but I admire Lévesque and his generation. They had a really broad view. They would have never adopted it. They would have been horrified by this. I knew Lévesque personally, and I knew the leaders of the Parti Québécois up to and including him. So in a certain sense, this shows you just how powerful these currents are.
Narration: 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, postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Religion, Laïcité and Law at the University of Sherbrooke. And I’m completing my second year of research on the historical debates about secularism in Quebec since the 19th century.
For almost forty years in Quebec, we had a major political divide surrounding a single question: are you for or against the independence of Quebec? That was the single question you needed to ask to classify almost everybody on the political spectrum. But since 2007, this political divide got some competition. Another one — concerning diversity — built itself up. And now we are talking about more than one issue. We can classify the political spectrum in maybe more than two groups, but four: you can be an independentist and be favourable to laïcité and the building of secularism, or you can be an independentist and against. And on the other side, you can be a federalist in either camp. And since 2007, there has been a surge of debate about all the politics of diversity.
For so many decades, there was one subject you had to avoid at any cost to stay friendly with others — the independence of Quebec or not. But now, if you talk about 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 had the previous cleavage on independence, there was a common ground possible between — strange to say — when you have a group advocating for independence and another advocating to stay, there is a middle ground called autonomy. You can mix these opposites into a third way. And when we debate about economics — more taxes or less — we can have a common ground because it’s a matter of quantity.
But when we talk about who we are — can we make compromises? Can we ask a woman to wear a headscarf two days a week at a job? Before we started this debate on laicity, identity, and diversity, we had a debate on identity, but it wasn’t the same. The debate over the independence of Quebec included a portion of identity — the identity of Quebec against the identity of Canada, the French-speaking against — that’s not totally new. But in the 1960s, in the 1980s, 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. And it was easy to attack an identity. It was way easier, because English Canadians had the money, they were the majority in the federal parliament, they had the culture, they had so many resources. So it was easy to make that debate from a minority perspective.
But now, since we are debating about religion and minority identities, it’s the majority of Quebec debating the identities of minorities. And this changes the climate of the debate in so many ways. Especially — I will sum up like this — I think French-speaking Quebecers are very favourable to secularism, to Bill 21, to the laicity bill. That’s maybe more than 70%, maybe 80% of French-speaking Quebecers. When you have that kind of majority trying to impose secularism — scarf bans and everything, public prayer — the opponents are minorities, and they speak a different language, not the language of the legislature. They use rights and the courts.
And this is way more messy than a standard political divide between right economics and left economics. You will have some groups that present themselves as victims of the majority, with very pointed words. And the majority will have to defend against that kind of accusation. And this is harsh — this is way harder, even for a majority.
I know a lot of nationalists who are totally behind that kind of politics, banning scarves. They judge this is one of the greatest laws of the 21st century. It is, for them, the equivalent of the Charte de la langue française — Bill 101. But from the minority perspective, from the Muslims who are opposed to the scarf ban, this is the worst law of the 21st century. And it 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 members of the minority are like a problem to solve.
Narration: 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 Québécois 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 Quebecers rejecting this proposal. The Charter died with the Marois government.
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 Quebecers and extremely hostile to nationalism. Couillard’s accusation that the defenders of laïcité were fuelling the embers of intolerance 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 of Values. 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.
Six years after the demise of the Charter of Quebec Values, the political mood was very different. The bill was more moderate, and the CAQ government’s discourse was about putting this issue behind them “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 Quebecers were in favour of the bill, as were 46% 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 his 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.
The bill was immediately challenged before the courts by opponents. The government used the Constitution’s section 33 — also known as the Notwithstanding Clause — to partially protect the law from judicial review pre-emptively. The Quebec Court of Appeal did not strike down the bill in its decision in 2024, because of section 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. Everybody knows it. An appeal out of Quebec 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. 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.
Recent Developments
Narration: 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 into 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 Notre-Dame Basilica — made them a political issue, to the point that the government indicated it wanted to legislate to stop them.
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 part 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 leaders access to their classrooms. After this, the Ministry of Education launched an inquiry into other schools in Montreal 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 2025. Its title speaks of increasing the coherence of laïcité in Quebec, and it 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.
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. And so-called street prayers would now require prior authorization from the city council. The bill would restrict the autonomy of independent schools by requiring 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 exemptions for religious organizations was left out of the bill.
Conclusion
Narration: As we have seen for the better part of twenty 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 analyse these opposing views in the next episode. Thank you for listening.
