MONTREAL — A new Quebec government draft “secularization” law imposing an even more far-reaching and divisive dress code on teachers and other school workers “amounts to an attack on the fundamental rights of workers” and “reinforces discriminatory dress codes for school staff,” said Caroline Senneville, president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions. The CSN is one of Quebec’s three main union federations.
The law, Bill 94, was brought before the Quebec National Assembly by the Coalition for the Future of Quebec (CAQ) government of Premier Francois Legault March 20.
The law would expand Law 21, adopted over serious objection in 2019, that bans teachers and principals from wearing “religious symbols” at work, such as the head-covering hijab and face-covering niqab worn by some Muslim women, the kippa skullcap worn by Jewish men, Christian crucifixes, turbans and other symbols of religious belief.
Law 21 was forced through using the so-called notwithstanding clause, an anti-democratic section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that allows the government to adopt legislation even if it violates protections guaranteed by both the federal and Quebec human rights charters. The Ontario government used this notwithstanding clause to pass legislation barring school workers’ right to strike in 2022.
Teachers unions, as well as Muslim, civil liberties and other organizations, have asked Canada’s Supreme Court to strike down the law as unconstitutional.
Under Bill 94 the ban on wearing religious symbols would apply to all school support staff and volunteers in public schools and school service centers. This includes lunch and after-school care monitors, secretaries, volunteer librarians, cafeteria workers, janitors, sports trainers, psychologists and more.
Attacks right to worship, expression
Thousands of workers wear public expressions of their religious belief and would be excluded from jobs in the education system and other government jobs — a discriminatory violation of their right to worship.
Targeting Muslim girls, the law would force students to “have their face uncovered” when they are at “a school, a vocational training center or adult education center, or a private educational institution.” It would also apply to parents picking children up from school.
It’s a woman’s right “to wear what she wants to wear,” Shaheen Ashraf, a board member of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, who herself wears a headscarf, told CBC News. “The message that is sent to us is ‘don’t participate in my society, stay home, don’t pay my taxes, don’t be a good citizen, just isolate yourself.’”
The legislation also includes a provision requiring teachers in French-language schools to speak only French with students and staff. There are a substantial number of English-speaking workers in Quebec, and Arabic is the third-most common language.
“The English Montreal School Board strongly opposes the CAQ Quebec government’s proposed law to vastly expand the ban on religious symbols at work,” it said in a March 24 press release. “Bill 94 will impact every educator and student in Quebec negatively.”
The law was drafted in response to a trumped-up charge by Legault that a group of teachers at the Bedford public school in Montreal “tried to introduce Islamic religious concepts into a Quebec public school” last October.
Eleven teachers had their teaching licenses suspended. The government also claimed it found problems with maintaining a “secular environment” at 17 schools.
Goal is to divide working people
The claim by the Quebec government that the goal of its secularization laws is the separation of religion from the state is undermined by the fact it dispenses 160 million Canadian dollars a year of state funds ($112 million) to subsidize 50 private religious schools in Quebec. These are 27 Catholic schools, 14 Jewish, four Muslim, two Protestant evangelical, two Armenian and one Greek Orthodox.
The government’s intention to continue expanding its so-called secularization campaign was made even clearer by Jean-Francois Roberge, the minister responsible for secularism, March 13. He announced the establishment of a committee to investigate whether the ban on religious symbols is being respected in hospitals, universities and other institutions, and to consider banning praying in public and during demonstrations.
“The Quebec government, acting in the interests of the bosses who are trying to save their crisis-ridden profit system on our backs, aims to weaken our ability to fight back by dividing working people along religious, national and language lines,” Philippe Tessier, Communist League candidate for the Montreal riding of Bourassa in the April 28 federal election, told the Militant April 4. “They hope to push back the kind of working-class solidarity expressed during last year’s strike for higher pay and better working conditions by 600,000 Quebec public sector workers.”
Tessier, a member of the Teamsters union, works as a conductor for the Canadian National Railway.
“The Communist League urges working people to reject these assaults on free expression aimed at dividing the working class, and to build solidarity with all those fighting to defend democratic freedoms, including the right to strike, to fight for permanent residency for all immigrants and an end to deportations,” he said.
“This is part of building a mass working-class party to replace this dog-eat-dog capitalist system with a workers’ government that will fight to build a socialist society in Canada and throughout the world.”