Quebec's War on Religion

Is it constitutional to ban public employees from wearing kippahs, hijabs, crosses and turbans? The Supreme Court will soon decide.

- BY LINDA BESNER PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHMOND LAM

IT WAS 2019, AND BOUCHERA CHELBI was afraid of being fired. Rumours were rippling through the Montreal public elemen- tary school where she taught English as a second language.

Quebec’s new right-of-centre ruling party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, or CAQ, had recently won its first term in office, and one of Premier François Legault’s key election promises was to pass legislation banning certain public employees from wearing religious symbols, like the Jewish kippah, Sikh turban, Christian cross or Muslim hijab. In the 11 years she’d been teaching in Quebec, she’d never heard a comment in school about her hijab. But suddenly, as the CAQ readied a bill banning her from wearing it at work, her colleagues were both angry on her behalf and a little bemused. “I don’t get it,” one told her. “What’s the point of this law?”

There were two, from the government's perspective: first, it allowed the CAQ to position itself as a defender of Québécois identity without leaning into separatism, which was increasingly unpopular in Quebec. Secondly, it let the party take decisive action on a long-simmering public debate. On the surface, the bill was a reincarnation of a 2013 effort by the Parti Québécois, known informally, and infamously, as the charte des valeurs—the Quebec Charter of Values. It would have banned government employees from wearing most religious symbols. (That bill died when the province’s Liberal Party won the 2014 provincial elec- tion.) But the new legislation drew on a much longer history. For decades, Quebec has been on a spiritual quest for a public life de- void of spirituality.

Since Quebecers threw off the stifling hold of the Catholic Church during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, secularism— or, in French,