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QUEBEC — Eleven years afterthe Bouchard-Taylor report recommended the idea, Quebec now has secularism legislation that bans the wearing of religious symbols by certain public servants in positions of authority by overriding their fundamental rights.

And in a last-minute flip-flop, the Legault government announced it will establish surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms to ensure the bill is respected, a move the opposition immediately tagged as the arrival of a “secularism police force.”

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The move took the opposition and observers completely off-guard and follows weeks of the government dodging questions about whether the new ban on religious symbols included in Bill 21 would require strict enforcement or sanctions such as those which exist in the Charter of the French Language.

In its original form, the government said it would be up to the highest local administrators — whether in a school or police force — to apply it, and went no further.