FARROW: Telling people they don't belong is no way to build a nation

Anna Farrow is a Montreal-based journalist for The Catholic RegisterThe Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) first won a majority government based partly on its promise not to hold another referendum on Quebec independence. But it has been engaging in nation-building all the same, using law-craft to steadily implement a monolithic concept of what it means to be a Quebecer — one that insists on the absolute primacy of the French language and is at its core, both anti-religious and exclusionary. It promises to do enormous damage to anyone who doesn’t meet the CAQ’s strict definition.Avenir means 'future' and the future of Quebec, as envisioned by Premier François Legault and his government, rests upon three pillars: language, laïcité — that is, secularism — and a common national identity that rests upon those first two.Quebec’s latest effort to defend its distinct identity is Bill 84, An Act Respecting National Integration, tabled by the province’s Immigration Minister Jean-François Roberge in January. .The proposed law attempts both to define Quebec culture and sketch out the means by which newcomers can integrate with that culture. They must, for example, learn French upon arrival in Quebec if they haven’t already mastered it, and agree to “participate fully, in French, in Quebec society.” The bill identifies secularism as one of the core and uniting values of the province.Bill 84 has come after two controversial CAQ-sponsored laws that address the pillars of language and laïcité: Bill 21, An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State, the so-called “secularism” law, was passed in 2019 and, three years later, a massive amendment to the Charter of the French Language, Bill 96, was adopted.Both laws invoke the “notwithstanding” clause in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect the legislation — and the Quebec nation, as conceived by the current provincial government — from judicial review.Bill 21 bars public-sector workers, including teachers, from wearing any religious symbols at work. It has been challenged on multiple grounds in the provincial courts and in January, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear an appeal despite the invocation of the notwithstanding clause. Arguments are likely to be scheduled sometime within the year. .The watchword of all secularism projects is “neutrality”, but Quebec secularism in its current form is not neutral. Rather, it is biased against religious institutions and people of faith. This essentially atheistic, socially progressive (i.e., left-wing) laïcité is not only the province’s new modus operandi but is being placed at the centre of the proposed “common culture” that all Quebecers must adopt to merit social inclusion.As Bill 84 puts it: “The common culture to which all are called upon to adhere and to contribute, is characterized in particular by the French language, the civil law tradition, specific institutions, distinct social values, a specific history, and the importance given to equality between women and men, to the laicity of the State and to the protection of Québec’s only official and common language.” The “distinct social values” to which the bill refers are not elaborated but were perhaps best articulated by former Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée. In a 2021 article in Le Devoir, Lisée trumpeted Bill 21 as “feminist, anti-discriminatory and avant-garde.” In contrast, he denigrated the “great religions” as “fundamentally misogynistic and opposed to equality between men and women.”.Lisée went further, connecting secularism to a broader progressive agenda, one that would allow Quebecers to achieve “independence from religion” and implement left-wing policies on “abortion, gay marriage, end-of-life issues” and others.The CAQ government has taken the tack that Lisée suggests, implementing a form of secularism that is not a simple separation of church and state but entails the removal of people of faith from civic participation and the conflation of a purported secularism with the leftist social values favoured by the Quebec state.In 2023, to take just one example, an evangelical Christian organization planning a “Faith Fire Freedom Rally” learned its contract with the intended venue, Centre des Congrés du Québec, a facility owned by the Quebec government, had been cancelled..The government’s stated rationale was the church group’s opposition to abortion (even though rally organizers such as Pastor Art Lucier had said the event would not be about abortion at all, but “about reconciliation, worship and fellowship.”) No matter. As Legault stated bluntly: “We’re not going to allow anti-abortion groups to put on big shows in public places.” And Legault meant it, as subsequent government actions demonstrated.Then in October 2024, Legault told reporters he had instructed his team to look for ways to ban praying in public — and had not ruled out use of the notwithstanding clause to achieve that goal, too. In March, Roberge announced a new government committee to investigate how to further strengthen secularism in the province, repeating the idea of banning public prayer and adding that the new committee would also “document the phenomenon of infiltration of religious influences.” The federal election has provided a glimpse into yet another possible expansion of Quebec’s brand of secularism. Whereas in the 2019 election, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said that Bill 21 was a provincial matter that should not be part of the national conversation, now Blanchet says its ban on religious symbols should be extended to federal workers in the province..“We’ve reached the point where we must defend, promote and put forward the value of the separation of church and state as two things that are not only different but fundamentally incompatible,” said Blanchet.The new Quebec values of an atheistic, hardline secularism and a national project and definition of Quebec citizenship founded on a difficult-to-access, narrowly-defined common culture will have the inevitable effect of placing further distance between the “two solitudes” of Canada.Anna Farrow is a Montreal-based journalist for The Catholic Register. The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

FARROW: Telling people they don't belong is no way to build a nation

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