After the English Montreal School Board, it is the turn of the Autonomous Education Federation (FAE) to announce that it has filed a petition with the Supreme Court of Canada to challenge the Education Secularism Act. State.
In a press release released Monday, the FAE indicated that it is particularly opposed to the use of the notwithstanding provision, which allowed the Quebec government to adopt the law without it being able to be challenged under the Charter Canadian Rights and Freedoms.
In February, the Quebec minister responsible for Secularism, Jean-François Roberge, tabled a bill aimed at renewing for another period of five years the derogatory provision which had been inserted into the law in 2019 to exempt it from attacks based on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in particular those claiming that it is discriminatory.
According to the FAE, we must be wary of the “ease with which parliaments suspend our fundamental rights by excessive use of derogation clauses”.
She believes that for a use of the notwithstanding provision to be valid, the Parliament which uses it should have to demonstrate that the objective is “real and urgent”, and that a citizen makes the request.
The group of teachers’ unions therefore wants the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, to look into the verdict rendered this winter by the Court of Appeal, which validated Law 21, affirming that it does not violate the linguistic rights of English-speaking school boards.
The Court of Appeal also affirmed that Quebec had the right to use the override provision in a preventive manner as it did in the case of Bill 21.
Law 21 prohibits state employees in positions of authority — including teachers — from wearing religious symbols such as the Muslim veil, Jewish kippah, Sikh turban and Christian crosses.
The federal government has already indicated that it would participate in a possible legal challenge to Bill 21 before the Supreme Court, while in Quebec, we have always promised to defend the secularism of the State “to the end”.