State secularism law | Members of religious minorities heavily affected, study finds

Members of religious minorities in Quebec feel less safe, less accepted and less optimistic about the future since the adoption of the State Secularism Actreveals a new study.

Vincent Larin
The Press

The results of this survey conducted by the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) were collected from a Léger survey of the Quebec population as a whole and an AEC survey of minority religious groups.

According to the AEC, this is “the largest study of minority religious communities affected” by the State Secularism Actalso known as “Bill 21”, with regard to “their experiences and perceptions of the Quebec climate” since the adoption of this legislative text.

Adopted by the National Assembly in June 2019, the State Secularism Act prohibits people in positions of coercive authority, such as judges, police officers and prison guards, from wearing religious symbols while performing their duties. This prohibition also extends to certain other state employees such as teachers in the public network.

Degrading comments

While the members of three religious groups consulted as part of this study (Jews, Muslims and Sikhs) say that their situation has deteriorated since the adoption of Bill 21, this observation is much more marked among Muslim women.

No less than 78% of those who were consulted said they had noticed a deterioration in their feeling of “being accepted[es] as a member[s] part of Quebec society” over the past three years.

Moreover, two-thirds of Muslim women consulted for this study said they had witnessed or been victims of a hate crime or incident during this same period. “In the bus, someone spat on us”, “my friend’s hijab was ripped off in the metro”, can we read among some comments reported by people surveyed as part of the AEC survey.

No less than 83.3% of them also say they have felt a deterioration in their confidence about the future of their children over the past three years.

The court test

Muslim women and Sikh men are also those who have felt the impact of these changes the most since the entry into force of the State Secularism Act, in a proportion of about 75%. In comparison, only 6.7% of Quebec men and 7.6% of Quebec women say they have felt the impact of the entry into force of Bill 21 within those around them.

These two subgroups also report having experienced a marked decline in their sense of acceptance as full members of Quebec society, in a proportion of 78.4% among Muslim women and 86.7% among Sikh men.

At a time when the legal challenge to Bill 21 has not even made it to the Court of Appeal, 64.5% of Quebecers believe it is important that the highest court in the country, the Supreme Court, pronounces on the question of whether it is discriminatory, also notes the study of the AEC.

The methodology under the magnifying glass

The results of the ACS study were obtained by combining an online survey conducted by the firm Léger among the general population with another survey also conducted online among Muslims, Jews and Sikhs by the AEC. Léger then weighted the results of the two combined surveys using Statistics Canada data.

A total of 1,828 Quebecers — including 632 Muslims, 165 Jews and 56 Sikhs — were interviewed for the two online polls.

Research and methodological experts believe that it is impossible to assign a margin of error to an online survey, since the sampling method is non-probability.

What’s more, the use of the online survey software SurveyMonkey in the context of the AEC survey raises several questions, according to Claire Durand, full professor in the sociology department at the Université de Montréal.

“They are going to look for people who have already responded to this type of survey at one time or another. [SurveyMonkey]which is not representative of the population,” she explains.

With The Canadian Press