MONTREAL—Montreal’s police officers are being forced back into uniform after a years-long protest that has seen them opt for wearing brightly coloured army pants, blue jeans and even baseball knee breaches.

The Quebec government tabled legislation Thursday morning that would make it illegal for cops and court officers to substitute, add to, cover or alter their official service uniform.

It comes nearly three years after police opted to ditch their normal work pants in a show of protest over reforms to their municipal pension plans.

The bill says that police officers and special constables in courthouses across Quebec are essential to the administration of justice, the maintenance of order and upholding decorum in courtrooms. It also says that their uniforms make them identifiable as well as giving them the authority to carry out their duties.

“There is an exasperation about this across the population and it feeds into a lack of confidence towards our institutions, such as the police service,” said Quebec’s Public Safety Minister Martin Coiteux.

He said there were also issues of safety and respect for the law behind his decision to bring the bill forward.

“In emergency responses, when it’s possible to be confused about identification and about who is who and who did what, it’s absolutely crucial and not wearing a uniform becomes a public safety issue,” he said. “There have even been cases where fines have been cancelled because people have argued that they didn’t know they were dealing with a police officer.”

Those who break the law could face a fine of between $500 and $3,000 for each day that they are in violation of the uniform rules. The penalties would be doubled for subsequent infractions.

And any unions or labour representatives found guilty of “assisting or inciting” their members to defy the law would receive fines valued at double those that would be incurred by individual officers or constables.

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre tweeted a link to news of the legislation, commenting in French that: “The police will have to abandoned their ‘clown pants.’”

A spokesperson for the Fraternité des policiers et policières de Montréal, the city’s 4,500-member police union, declined to comment on the bill.

Franck Perales, president and spokesperson for the special constables’ union, the Syndicat des constables spéciaux du gouvernement du Québec, told Radio-Canada that the bill would strip away bargaining power from employees designated as essential-service providers and barred from taking other job actions.

“At the negotiating table, there will no longer be anything inciting the government to sit down with us because they have taken away the last tool we had—our visibility,” he told the broadcaster.

The police protest movement began in July 2014 when the officers began wearing red hats and jeans or coloured pants to show their frustration over legislation that made changes to municipal pension funds across the province of Quebec. It was passed into law in December 2014.

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Police have put aside their protest and stepped back into their regulation gear on only a few occasions over the years. They included the 2014 funeral of a Quebec-based Canadian soldier killed in an October terror attack in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu; the 2015 funeral of singer Celine Dion’s husband and manager, René Angelil; and last February’s funeral service for three of the six victims of the mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque.

But officers were sharply criticized in the summer of 2015 when some of them wore camouflage army-style pants while working to direct traffic and control the crowds at the funeral of former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau.

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