That a left-wing politician would feel at ease attacking a fellow politician of the left over his religion reveals how poisoned Quebec’s debate over secularism has become

MONTREAL — When an Ontario woman confronted NDP leadership candidate Jagmeet Singh at a recent public meeting, accusing the Sikh politician of promoting Islamic sharia law, it was widely seen as an outrage, and a video of Singh’s dignified response went viral.

When a Quebec woman told reporters Monday that Singh represents an emerging “religious left” and that his turban and kirpan are a way of forcing his religion on people, however, it was just another salvo in the province’s long-running debate over minority religious symbols.

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The Quebec woman was no meeting-crasher but Martine Ouellet, the leader of the federal Bloc Québécois and an elected member of Quebec’s national assembly. That this left-wing politician, a darling of the province’s ecologists, would feel at ease attacking a fellow politician of the left over his religion reveals how poisoned Quebec’s debate over secularism has become.

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From the controversy over reasonable accommodation a decade ago through the 2013 Parti Québécois “charter of values,” to the government bill currently before the legislature that would prohibit women wearing burkas or niqabs from receiving public services, Quebec politicians have repeatedly singled out minority religions under the guise of promoting religious neutrality.

Photo by Jacques Boissinot/CP/File

In making her comments, Ouellet said her opposition to a politician openly displaying his faith is in line with Quebec opinion about the separation of church and state. “That’s what liberty is about, the liberty to be able to choose our own religion and not to promote one religion more than another,” she said in a Huffington Post video. “That’s how most of the people in Quebec think.”

She said that by wearing a turban, Singh has signaled that his “primary values” are religious. Canadian multiculturalists might accept that, she said, but in Quebec such religious displays should be limited to “the private sphere.”

It is an argument frequently heard in Quebec, and certainly not a new one for the province’s Sikhs. In fact, it was a Sikh boy who inadvertently helped launch the reasonable accommodation debate when his attempt to wear to school a kirpan, a small ceremonial Sikh dagger, went to the Supreme Court of Canada. The court ruled in 2006 that the school board had violated Gurbaj Singh Multani’s religious freedom, and he won the right to wear the kirpan provided it was concealed and secured.

Polls showed Quebecers largely rejected the court’s findings, and the case fuelled suspicion of the high court and a belief that accommodating minority religious symbols threatened traditional Quebec values. In 2011, four kirpan-wearing members of the World Sikh Organization scheduled to testify before a legislative committee were barred from entering the National Assembly, and the PQ’s charter of values included turbans among the religious symbols it wanted to prohibit public servants from wearing.

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When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named four Sikhs, including two who wear turbans, to his federal cabinet in 2015, it was widely interpreted as a reflection of Canadian diversity. But it did not take long after Jagmeet Singh, an Ontario MPP, entered the NDP leadership race for whispers to be heard that he faced an uphill battle in Quebec because of his religious headwear.

Writing in L’actualité in May, longtime NDP strategist Karl Bélanger predicted Singh would inevitably face questions “concerning his Sikh faith and its impact on his policies. … Anyone aware of the history of Quebec, its commitment to secularism flowing from the Grande Noirceur (when Maurice Duplessis governed the province), also understands the complexity of the question.”

By July, NDP sources were telling Le Devoir that Singh would damage the party’s chances in Quebec. And last Saturday, Quebec MP Pierre Nantel declared that Singh and his “conspicuous religious symbols” would not fly with Quebec voters. “It has been shown that people do not want to see conspicuous religious symbols; they are not believed to be compatible with power, with authority,” Nantel told Radio-Canada.

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Part of the hostility toward religious symbols is certainly a holdover from the days of Duplessis when the Catholic Church held sway over the province — although oddly, the crucifix hanging behind the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly has managed to survive.

The problem is that in today’s Quebec, it is largely practitioners of minority religions — Islam, Judaism, Sikhism — who consider so-called conspicuous symbols central to their faith. And the non-practising majority feels empowered to dictate how the minorities exercise their religion.

Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor described Quebec’s reasonable accommodation crisis as a “face-off” between groups that each saw themselves as minorities and expected the other to bend. “It must be understood that for French-Canadian Quebecers, the combination of their majority status in Québec and their minority status in Canada and North America is not easy,” the scholars wrote in their 2008 report. “It is a difficult apprenticeship that began in the 1960s and, which, obviously, is ongoing.” Nearly a decade later, there is still no end in sight.