The reassignment, to tasks other than that of teaching, of a Muslim woman wearing the hijab in a school of the Western Quebec school board created a veritable collective psychodrama, notably in English Canada.
Faced with this case, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, declared that the consequences of the Law on the secularism of the State are no longer “a theoretical issue”. We must explain to Justin Trudeau that the stakes of this law have never been theoretical. This is evidenced by the testimonies of seven parents who, along with the Mouvement laïque québécois, appeared before the Superior Court of Quebec to defend Bill 21.
Each in their own way, these parents pleaded that the religious neutrality of the teaching staff was a pledge of respect for their children’s freedom of conscience and their own freedom of religion. The school being at the service of the pupils and not of the teachers, secularism gives precedence to the freedom of conscience of the pupils vis-a-vis the illegitimate desire of certain teachers to expose in an ostentatious and permanent way their religious convictions in the class.
Muslim parents have argued in particular that wearing the hijab in class constitutes for them and their children an incitement to a fundamentalist religious practice which they condemned Islam. That, Mr. Trudeau, is where the real attack on freedom of conscience and religion lies.
No matter what Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, Bob Ray, says, no interpretation of the right to freedom of religion, no international declaration on this subject, leads to giving a believer the right to practice his religion at work. .
Because it is indeed religious practice that it is a question and not only of dress. In her testimony to the Superior Court, Ichrak Nourel Hak, the main complainant against Bill 21, has repeatedly stated that removing her hijab to teach constitutes a denial of “practicing one’s religion”.
Mme Hak also said she wears it out of personal choice. She therefore chooses to wear her veil rather than teach. Bill 21 respects this choice.
Send a message by sign
The statements of Chelsea teacher Fatemeh Anvari are also very revealing about the impact her hijab can have. She claimed to make wearing her veil a sign of ideological and religious struggle: “For me, [le hijab] carries meanings, ”she said. “It’s important for me to keep wearing it, because I know some ideologies don’t want me to wear it. It’s my resistance, ”she said.
It is therefore not a trivial piece of fabric as we are led to believe. It is a garment very loaded with meaning, which carries a clear message, and Mme Anvari wears it with the intention of carrying this message.
It is precisely this kind of militant proselytism that the Secularism Law wants to prevent in schools. If the hijab carries meanings, these meanings come into conflict with the duty of religious and ideological reserve that a teacher must adopt towards her students.
Justin Trudeau also declared that his government would not intervene in court in order to prevent such an intervention from being seen as “federal interference” in the laws of Quebec. We have all understood that he was waiting to do so after the Quebec elections next October.
His statement is misleading since the federal government is already actively participating in the legal challenge to Bill 21, if only through the Canadian Human Rights Commission, whose complaint against Bill 21 is 100% funded by federal public funds.
Bad Faith by Jagmeet Singh
The leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, for his part, wondered “how we can explain to our children that in a Muslim family, the brother could teach [mais pas la sœur] because of the clothes she wears? “. This question manifests boundless naivety, even shameless bad faith.
The answer is quite simple, Mr. Singh. If a Muslim can teach and not his sister who wears the hijab, it is because their religion, and not secularism, imposes different social standards on men and women.
A democratic state does not have to endorse such sexist and discriminatory standards against women. The equality of citizens is one of the raison d’être of the Law on the secularism of the State which applies to all without distinction of sex, ethnicity or religion.
Ultimately, some argued that the reassignment of Fatemeh Anvari leads to erasing diversity. Diversity would therefore be a matter of clothing. A school with Muslim staff who do not wear religious symbols would therefore be less diverse than the same school with the same staff displaying their beliefs.
If this was the conclusion reached by the Court of Appeal in its review of the Blanchard judgment on Bill 21, it will be necessary to ensure that all teachers ostensibly display their beliefs or their atheism through permanent distinctive clothing, for example by wearing a t-shirt proclaiming that “God does not exist”. The Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh of this world would perhaps then understand the benefits of secularism.