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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.