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The Parti Québécois’ ill-fated Charter of Quebec Values provided some useful, if fairly transparent, cover for those politicians and pundits of dubious motive who rallied most fiercely around it.

By proposing to ban “conspicuous” religious symbols from the public sector — and only the public sector — advocates of the charter could, with a straight face, ascribe their support of it to the more widely palatable concept of the separation between church and state, which the charter, proposed in 2013, ostensibly sought to formalize.

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But enough Quebecers saw through that façade and viewed the charter for what it was: an obvious ploy by the PQ to drum up votes by playing to some Quebecers’ uninformed prejudices — mainly toward Muslims in Quebec, who would have been most affected by the Charter. It was a strategy so crass and unscrupulous that it was leavened only by the fact that it blew up so spectacularly in their faces, fuelling the party’s historic implosion in the 2014 provincial elections, a nadir from which it has yet to truly bounce back.