In recent weeks, a fierce debate has ignited among the people of Canada in response to a new bill introduced in Quebec. The most widely controversial aspect of Bill 21 is a section that, in an attempt to support the “secularism” of the province, bans public servants from wearing religious symbols. However, the wording of Bill 21 and Quebec Premier François Legault’s history of xenophobia suggest an ulterior motive behind the bill: preventing religious minorities, particularly Muslims, from expressing their faith.
This contentious bill has opened up a bigger argument about what the separation of church and state should mean and how leaders today construe that phrase to fit their political agendas. For me, separation of church and state prevents secular governments from choosing one religion to be representative of a country as a whole, and from creating any legislation to restrict the free practice of religion. Bill 21 contradicts this idea because it targets individuals’ rights to express their faith peacefully while masquerading as a step toward a more secular Quebec.
In addition to the bill’s distorted definition of the separation of church and state, the blatant Islamophobia present in the bill is harmful to those that live in Quebec. The first line of the bill reads, “Under the bill, personnel members of a body must exercise their functions with their face uncovered, and persons who present themselves to receive a service from such a personnel member must have their face uncovered when doing so is necessary to allow their identity to be verified or for security reasons.”
This aspect of the bill disproportionately affects Muslim women, many of whom wear the hijab for religious reasons. The implementation of Bill 21 would force Muslim women who work in the public sector to choose between career and faith.
One might argue that Legault’s bill was not created to oppress specific people, but to apply the same restrictions to all. However, his history of xenophobic rhetoric tells another story. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, earlier this year, Legault said he wanted more immigrants from France and other European nations to come to Quebec at the same time that his administration was planning to cut all immigration levels by 20%. Is Legault only anti-immigration when the immigrants in question are minorities?
In addition to being hypocritical, this bill is also just impractical. Legault claims the bill aims to keep religion from interfering with an individual’s role in government. However, simply banning religious symbols will do nothing to change people’s existing beliefs — you cannot control what people think by restricting what they wear. Even if Bill 21 were not created with discriminatory intent, it still wouldn’t promote secularism. It only serves to make it more difficult for certain religious minority groups to participate in public service, deepening the influence of Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the religious majorities, on Quebec’s government.
