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After repeatedly denouncing Quebec’s secularism legislation, which bars new teachers and principals from wearing religious symbols, the English Montreal School Board will be applying the law after all.

The board is under pressure to enforce the new rules now that the Commission scolaire de Montréal, Quebec’s largest school board, has done an about-face and says it will follow the new law immediately. In June, the CSDM angered the Legault government by saying it would delay application of the new rules for a full year because they were “impossible to manage.”

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At a board meeting Wednesday night, the EMSB was expected to debate whether to comply with the secularism legislation. However, moments before the start of the meeting, EMSB vice-chair Joe Ortona announced the item had been struck from the agenda.

“A majority of the commissioners felt that there were still a lot of questions in terms of what exactly this law means for the school board, how it would need to be applied and what the ramifications are,” Ortona said. “We still had many unanswered questions, so the item was deferred back to the HR committee for it to be brought back at a later time.”