What a bad surprise: more than 15 years after the “crisis” of reasonable accommodation, the question of prayer rooms in schools is resurfacing.
Expect noise, bitter debates, a lot of torn shirts.
If it were about solving real problems – and there are plenty of them in our education system – it would seem like a necessary evil.
But this is not at all the case here.
Some of our politicians, again, are sadly raising scarecrows.
What ignited the powder are Muslim students who found themselves praying, for lack of premises, in the stairwells and parking lots of two Laval high schools.
Seeing this, schools have opened empty classrooms at lunchtime to accommodate students until permanent solutions are found. A fine example of a reasonable accommodation that does not bother anyone.
The stories were reported by Cogeco Nouvelles, then found their way to the National Assembly. Education Minister Bernard Drainville was quick to say that prayers have no place in school and that he will issue a directive banning them from classrooms.
The deputies also unanimously adopted a motion tabled by the Parti Québécois affirming that prayer rooms in schools go “against the principle of secularism”.
However, we believed that this question had been settled – and not precisely in this sense.
In 2006, the Human Rights Commission concluded that the École de technologies supérieure (ETS) had “failed to fulfill its duty of reasonable accommodation” by not providing a prayer room to Muslim students who requested it. asked.
We are here in the famous principle of reasonable accommodation, which stipulates that an institution must try to accommodate minorities if this does not imply excessive constraint for it.
In the case of the ETS, the Commission specified that providing premises exclusively to Muslims would represent “undue hardship”.
The ETS has therefore created a multi-confessional room in which students can gather in the way they want. Today, such premises are common in universities, hospitals, airports. We cannot say that it shakes the foundations of our secular society.
Of course, there can be clashes. In the case of Laval schools, it was reported that girls were not welcome in the prayer halls. This is obviously inadmissible, but this is the kind of problem that should be resolved by the intervention of the school administration. Not in the National Assembly!
Minister Bernard Drainville said Wednesday that praying is “a fundamental right”. But he asked the students in the same breath to do it “silently”. He will have to explain to us in which charter of rights, and in which article, he drew such a restriction.
Québec solidaire, for its part, distinguished itself in figure skating by voting for the motion of the Parti Québécois… then specifying immediately afterwards that the party is in favor of places of meditation, but not of prayer. An unconvincing semantic pirouette.
We are also surprised that the Liberal Party also played in this film.
Bernard Drainville tells us that our schools must be secular. We all agree. But secularism does not imply erasing all traces of religion from the citizens who frequent our public institutions.
Students gathering in classrooms do not threaten the separation of church and state. They exercise no political or administrative power. What exactly are we afraid of? The Minister’s reasoning does not hold water.
The current controversy is reviving the idea of creating an “accommodation office” that would help schools and other institutions map out their interventions in this unfortunately so mined terrain.
In the meantime, if the Quebec state were really concerned about secularism in education, it would consider the question of subsidies to private religious schools, in which education and religion are often inextricably linked.
This is what we call a real problem.