François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government is preparing to table another bill aimed at tightening the province’s secularism laws.
The legislation, expected Thursday, builds on a years-long effort to limit religion in the public sphere — a concept known in French as laicité.
The coming bill has already drawn criticism from religious groups and civil liberties advocates.
Here’s how the province arrived at this latest chapter.
The secularism debate has been simmering in the province well before the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) came to power.
In 2007, the Liberal government under Jean Charest ordered a report on how to address the accommodation of religious minorities.
The commission came after heated debates in the media over whether, for instance, a YMCA in Montreal’s Mile End district should frost its gym windows at the request of a neighbouring Hasidic synagogue, or whether publicly funded daycares should serve halal meals.
The commission, led by two academics, Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard, held hearings across the province.
Their report, released in 2008, recommended what was described as an “open secularism” that would reinforce state neutrality and limit visible religious symbols for state agents in positions of coercive authority, such as police officers.
The minority Parti Québécois introduced a “Charter of Values” in 2013 that went further than those recommendations, but it never passed into law.
The party lost the election the following year.
The next government, the Liberals under Philippe Couillard, tried to settle the issue in 2017 with Bill 62, which required face coverings to be removed when accessing public services.
Portions of that law were subject to a constitutional challenge — and opposition politicians, including Legault, argued it didn’t go far enough.
When Legault won a majority in 2018, one of his first priorities was a secular charter that went further than the Liberals’ religious neutrality law.
The CAQ made good on that promise with Bill 21, the secularism law passed the following year.
The legislation prohibited public school teachers, government lawyers, judges and police officers from wearing religious symbols while at work. (An exemption was made for those who were already in their roles.)
The CAQ tried to shield the law from legal challenges by using the constitutional notwithstanding clause to override certain sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Legault said back then the debate over religious accommodation had been playing out for long enough and that it was time to “turn the page.”
“I think it’s good for what we call the vivre ensemble,” he said.
But in the years since, the government has not closed the book on the secularism debate.
This year, the Legault government has adopted Bill 94, which extended the province’s ban on religious symbols to everyone who interacts with students in schools, as well as another bill requiring immigrants to embrace the common culture of the province.
Bill 94 came after a 2024 report about a Montreal elementary school, which found that a group of teachers had created a toxic environment at the school.
A subsequent investigation into 17 other Quebec schools found few breaches of the secularism law, but did note that some teachers were adjusting course material so as not to offend religious beliefs.
Bernard Drainville, the education minister at the time, said the bill would ensure schools respect the “values of Quebec.”
Jean-François Roberge, Quebec’s minister responsible for secularism, is expected to table another bill on Thursday.
The latest legislation is expected to expand rules around limiting religious practices in public institutions, including a ban on prayer rooms in universities and CEGEPs and a gradual end to public funding of private schools that select students based on religion.
The bill would also seek to ban public institutions from exclusively offering a diet based on a religious tradition and would expand the requirement to have faces uncovered throughout the public and subsidized daycare system.
Ban on public prayer among measures in latest Quebec secularism bill
Stephen Brown, president of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, said the bill amounts to “political opportunism” and serves as a distraction from other pressing issues, including a conflict with the province’s doctors and a shortage of affordable housing.
He pointed out it comes less than a year from the next provincial election, with the CAQ slumping in the polls.
“Unfortunately, once again, it’s the same group of minorities that are serving as the foil,” he said.
Frédéric Bérard, a constitutional lawyer, questioned whether the latest legislation was necessary, given what’s already in place.
“They’re trying to create a crisis that does not exist to address a problem that does not exist,” he told CBC News.
Roberge, who hinted at the bill in a video on X this week captioned “Secularism 2.0,” said the bill is intended to respond to changes in the province.
“I think it’s really important that our laicity model evolves with Quebec society,” Roberge said.
“We made really good work in 2019 with Bill 21, and now Quebec has changed too.”
