The government of Quebec, Canada’s second-most populous province, wishes to assure everyone that its newly proposed religious symbol ban doesn’t target hijabs, kippa, kirpans and the like. Rather, by outlawing the wearing of such accoutrements by certain government workers, it is ensuring that those who police streets, judge defendants, guard prisoners and teach children do not betray even a modicum of faith to those in their care – “a concrete affirmation that the Quebec state is secular”, as Quebec’s immigration minister, Simon Jolin-Barrette, put it recently.

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It is an almost laughable conceit. In reality, the proposed law, which the government tacitly admits contravenes Quebec’s own charter of rights and freedoms, is the fruit of over a decade of institutionalized animus directed towards Quebec’s religious minorities on the part of its political class. As such, it will disproportionately affect these religious minorities, who already face discrimination and outsized unemployment rates compared to their white, largely lapsed Catholic brethren.

The right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Québec came to power last fall after a tumultuous election fought in large part over the place and space given to immigrants and religious minorities in the province. On both, the CAQ and its leader, François Legault, have been unbending: there were too many immigrants coming to the province, and creeping, non-Christian religiosity was threatening Quebec’s institutions.

In 2016, the party published an ad picturing Legault’s two main political rivals next to a stern-looking woman in a chador along with the patently false contention that both were “in favour” of having such a woman teaching schoolchildren. That same year, elected CAQ member Nathalie Roy sought to ban the “burkini” from Quebec beaches – only to backtrack when she figured out the doing so would be unconstitutional.

Once elected, Legault promptly cut Quebec’s immigration quotas by 20%, even though the province’s booming economy and ageing workforce has sparked a province-wide labour shortage. He plans on instituting a “Quebec values” test for prospective immigrants; failing it, he has suggested, would mean expulsion. Legault also wished that those who came to Quebec were more “European”, as he put it during a trip to France last January.

The CAQ’s Bill 21, which Jolin-Barrette tabled this week, is a similarly bad-faith attempt to stoke irrational fears in the name of secularism. It forbids any government employee with “coercive powers” from wearing religious symbols, including police, judges, prison guards and, strangely, teachers. The law would do so in part to re-affirm the “importance to the equality of women and men”, a notion already inscribed in both the Quebec and Canadian charters of rights.

It forbids any government employee with 'coercive powers' from wearing symbols, including police, judges and teachers

It also contravenes the freedom of religion guaranteed in both charters – something of which the government is keenly aware. By pre-emptively invoking the “notwithstanding clause”, a legal manoeuvre that allows it to ignore sections of these charters, the Quebec government has essentially conceded the illegality of its own legislation. Moreover, though it ostensibly exists to reinforce the equality of the sexes, the proposed law is blatantly sexist. An observant Muslim man sporting a beard could teach elementary school. His hijab-wearing wife could not.

And because there is nary an offending hijab among the province’s provincial police force, its public prosecutor’s office or its administrative tribunals – a fact unearthed by the Journal de Montréal newspaper in January – the law would almost exclusively target these teachers, which according to government statistics is among the most popular chosen professions for immigrant women in the province. A grandfather clause allowing existing employees to wear religious symbols, Trumpeted by Jolin-Barrette, will only increase confusion and stigma. Citing concerns over its effect on the freedom of religion, one Montreal-area school board has already refused to enforce the law.

To be fair to Legault, his party is hardly the first in Quebec to scapegoat religious minorities for political gain. In 2006 the Action Démocratique du Québec, the CAQ’s ideological precursor, raucously denounced the alleged increase in demands made by groups to accommodate their religious practices. What followed was a collective crise de conscience regarding such demands, fanned by tabloid reports of Hassidic Jews insisting that a local YMCA frost its windows, and a Muslim group asking for pork-free baked beans from a Quebec maple syrup shack. (The owner of the shack made such a batch, which earned him death threats once the case was publicized.)

A subsequent government inquiry found there was no such increase, yet that didn’t prevent the Parti Québécois government from tabling its “Quebec values charter” bill in 2013, which would have banned all “conspicuous” religious symbols from the bodies of anyone drawing a government paycheque. (It failed to pass.) Even Quebec’s Liberal party, long the party of choice for Quebec’s myriad visible and religious minorities, introduced a law seeking to “foster adherence to state religious neutrality” in 2017 – which Quebec’s superior court promptly suspended for violating the charter’s freedom of religion statute.

The CAQ government claims Bill 21 will be a bulwark protecting Quebec’s cherished and longstanding secularism. Yet by fixating on religious minorities, it actually serves as a fig leaf for the government’s own nativist tendencies – and is a reminder how fear and antipathy tend to beget bad, dangerous laws.