Excerpt – Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec

On October 18, 2017 Bill 62 was passed at the sitting of l’Assemblée Nationale Québec with 66 for and 51 against. Officially titled An Act to foster adherence to State religious neutrality and, in particular, to provide a framework for requests for accommodations on religious grounds in certain bodies, the controversial bill aims to encourage religious neutrality within Quebec.

Bill 62 arrives from a long history of discourse on the presence and role of religion in Quebec society and government. More recently, the past decade has seen ongoing discussion about the place of religion in Québécois society, particularly following the proposed Charter of Quebec Values in 2013. The essays in Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec emerged from this active and often tense period of debate. Edited by Hillary Kaell, contributors to this volume revitalize an awareness of how people encounter, create, and employ religion in everyday life.

The excerpt below specifically looks at the debates on the regulation of the hijab, offering context to the renewed discussions and legislation surrounding religious neutrality in Quebec.

Slippery Slope of Islamophobia in Twenty-First-Century Quebec: Fear of the Muslim Veil?

From Chapter 7: Muslim Veiling and the Legacy of Laïcité, by Meena Sharify-Funk and Elysia Guzik

Some scholars have described the controversial cases connected to Muslim women in Quebec as a “slippery slope.” Each case adds to a growing sense of public concern, making subsequent controversies more likely. Cumulatively, these cases – a strong majority of which centre around the politics of Muslim veiling – contribute to a growing atmosphere of Islamophobia in which visible symbols of Islamic identity induce public anxiety.

In 2005–06, controversy about the veil entered into the arena of youth sports when Asmahan Mansour was expelled from a soccer tournament in Laval, Quebec, for refusing to remove her head scarf. Though the veil in question was designed for sport use, Jean Charest (the former premier of Quebec) condoned the expulsion. Soon afterwards, five Muslim girls were prevented from participating in a Montreal Tae Kwon Do competition due to similar headgear, designed to conform with Islamic expectations concerning modesty without interfering with vision or creating safety issues.

On 25 January 2007, public discourse articulating anxiety about Islam reached a new level when the town council of Hérouxville, Quebec (a small Quebec town of 1,300 persons) adopted a “code of conduct” for prospective new immigrants. In this “Life Standards” Charter prospective new immigrants were officially declared unwelcome if they exhibited an inclination toward any of the following practices: publicly stoning women, burning women alive, throwing acid on the faces of women, female circumcision, covering the face, school prayer, and wearing a symbolic weapon to school. The charter also informed prospective immigrants that they must reaffirm certain fundamental rights, such as a woman’s right to drive a vehicle, vote, sign cheques, dance, and “decide for herself.”

Although the BouchardTaylor Commission served to dampen debate about minority communities for a time, subsequent events have reignited and perpetuated the debate in largely unchanged terms. In November 2009 there was the story of Naema Ahmed, an Egyptian migrant who was asked to leave her French class in Montreal when she refused to remove her niqab and who was later expelled a second time after enrolling in another school. In April 2010 this was followed by a similar story about another niqabi woman. These events ignited a polarizing debate about head coverings; Chantal Hébert maintains that Quebec’s French media played a decisive role in shaping and fuelling this debate. On one side of the debate, many argued that in demanding a right to wear the niqab, largely depicted as a symbol of oppression, Muslims had gone too far and that the government was right to put an end to accommodation demands. This position resonated strongly, and most Québécois appeared to support it. On the other side, however, critics pointed out problems with focusing too narrowly on the practice of a small minority of Muslim women and argued that prohibiting niqabi women from accessing public services would only serve to isolate them and enforce a retreat from the public sphere, making integration more difficult. Critics were also concerned that the wave of popular sentiment against the public comportment of a very small minority of Muslim women was but a symptom of deeper discomfort with Muslim immigration and distinctiveness. They feared that curtailing the rights of the most conservative Muslim women might soon lead to additional measures against more mainstream, publicly and professionally engaged women who chose to wear a veil.

The prevalence of antiniqab public sentiment provided a favourable environment for legislative action and resulted in Bill 94 – the first piece of legislation on minority accommodation issues since the completion of the BouchardTaylor Commission’s inquiry. Minister of Justice Madame Kathleen Weil introduced Bill 94 to the National Assembly of Quebec on 24 March 2010 as a piece of legislation designed to “establish the conditions under which an accommodation may be made in favour of personnel members of the Administration or certain institutions or in favour of person to whom services are provided by the Administration or certain institutions.” The stated purpose of this bill was to clarify standard practices associated with the provision of public services, to establish face veiling as a contravention of these general practices, and to stipulate the grounds on which requests for exemption from this ruling might be denied. The principled grounds for rejecting all forms of face covering is presented in section 4 of the bill, which cites Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms “as concerns the right to gender equality and the principle of religious neutrality of the State whereby the State shows neither favour nor disfavour towards any particular religion or belief.” The pragmatic basis for the new ruling is provided in section 6, which contains both the clause stating that individuals must “show their face during the delivery of services” and the ruling that mandates a denial of accommodation requests when considerations of “security, communication or identification warrant it.” If passed, Bill 94 would require that all employees of the government and public services show their face at all times and that all people making use of government or public services (including users of public and some private schools, health care services, social services, and childcare services) would similarly be expected to have uncovered faces at the time of service delivery. Although the principal targets of the legislation are not mentioned in the text of the bill, the legislation is generally understood to be aimed at Muslim women who wear the niqab (full face veil) and would essentially prohibit niqabi women from accessing public services.

In the Parti Québécois government’s Secular Charter of Values (Bill 60, November 2013), values of religious neutrality, gender equality, and state secularism are upheld and said to provide a “framework for accommodation requests.” Following in the parameters of Bill 94, this piece of legislation specifically states, “in the exercise of their functions, personnel members of public bodies must not wear objects such as headgear, clothing, jewellery, or other adornments which, by their conspicuous nature, overtly indicate a religious affiliation.” This proposed legislation again ignited substantial debate, particularly insofar as it would prohibit individuals wearing religious headgear (including Jews and Sikhs as well as Muslim women) from working in such mainstream occupations as teachers, daycare professionals, nurses, or doctors, so long as their employer was publicly funded. Though initially popular, controversies surrounding Bill 60 ultimately stymied its implementation and contributed somewhat to the Parti Québécois’ electoral defeat in 2014. However, with the assassinations at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, a new campaign to revive the secular charter has been ignited. Additionally, as Charles Taylor remarked in a CBC interview, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments about banning the niqab during Canadian citizenship ceremonies play into the Parti Québécois’s implementation of the secular values charter.

Throughout these cases there is an insistence on defining limits to difference in which relaxed norms and sensibilities concerning cultural and religious diversity are being challenged. While the veil and niqab have not been the sole symbols of unacceptable difference – indeed, “oversized” crosses and Jewish kippahs have also figured into public debates – Muslim women’s head coverings are at the heart of the ongoing controversy and arouse the most consistent and vocal concern. The debates raised basic questions about the nature of secularism and its relation to freedom of religion and religious expression.