The Quebec Court of Appeal will deliver a long-awaited judgment on the constitutionality of the State Secularism Act on Thursday afternoon. Quebec’s highest court made the announcement Tuesday on its website.
It has been almost three years since the Quebec government appealed the decision of the Superior Court of Quebec regarding its “Bill 21”. At the time, Judge Marc-André Blanchard upheld the main provisions of the law, but offered exemptions to English-speaking school boards, citing violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The magistrate then wrote that the preventive use of the exemption provision by Quebec seemed “excessive, because too broad”, but “legally unassailable in the current state of the law”.
The Quebec government recently proposed renewing the use of this provision for five years. “It preserves, at the moment, social peace, it promotes living together,” argued the minister responsible for Secularism, Jean-François Roberge, at the beginning of the month.
The Superior Court’s decision on the merits held that the religious neutrality law violated section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which grants constitutional rights to linguistic minorities in the management of their schools. At the time, the government of François Legault appealed the case, citing that there were not “two Quebecs”.
“In Quebec, we protect the rights of English speakers to receive services in English. But now it has become clear that it would protect different values for English-speakers and then French-speakers,” the Prime Minister argued.
Equally dissatisfied, but for the opposite reasons, the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Autonomous Teaching Federation had also filed disputes before the Court of Appeal. In the winter of 2022, the trial court heard eight separate appeals.
Exemption provision
Since the filing of Judge Blanchard’s imposing judgment – 240 pages – the exemption provision has been on everyone’s lips. In his farewell speech to Parliament in January, former Attorney General of Canada David Lametti even insisted on reopening the Constitution and putting an end to the preventive use of this “clause”, which allows a provincial law to be exempted from certain elements of the Charter.
The derogation provision was notably used to shield “law 96” reforming the Charter of the French language in Quebec, but also in Ontario, where the government of Doug Ford used it to impose a collective agreement on workers in the middle of the education and prohibit them from resorting to strikes.
Asked this month about the possibility of the federal government restricting the use of the exemption, Jean-François Roberge said that “it would be a very, very, very, bad idea”. “ [La disposition de dérogation] is part of the balance. Balance in Canada is extremely important,” he said.