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Sunday’s relentless, driving rain may have reduced their numbers, but it did not dampen the determination or quell the anger of protesters who joined Montreal’s annual anti-racism rally, where the dominant theme was the rise in racist incidents since the Quebec government passed its secularism and immigration reform laws.

“We are discriminated against, we Muslim women, every single day,” Marwa Khanafer, a program officer with the human rights group Equitas, told the crowd gathered outside the Parc métro station. “And it is not normal.”

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Khanafer said Islamophobia is “enormously present” in Quebec and “has made itself felt even more since Premier (François) Legault has been in power. His actions and his words have normalized hate and violence against Quebec citizens who are Muslim. And this is not normal. This must not be normalized.”

The rally attracted several hundred protesters, well short of the thousands who attended the event last year. But those who spoke said their determination to fight what they described as a dangerous increase in anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and generally racist sentiment in the province has only intensified since Legault’s government passed two controversial laws last June: Bill 21 and Bill 9. The former bars some public-sector workers, including teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols on the job, while the latter allowed the government to throw out some 16,000 immigration applications and impose a “Quebec values” test on would-be immigrants.