The Canadian Supreme Court is debating the legitimacy of a Quebecois secularism law this week. The court is sitting for a four-day hearing, which began on Monday.
The law blocks civil servants like judges and police officers from wearing religious symbols while carrying out their duties. The government of Quebec wants to extend the measure to schoolteachers and childcare workers. It would thereby mirror secularism law in France.
The measure is being challenged by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Critics say it disproportionally affects religious minorities, including Muslim women and Sikhs.
This is true, but it is also an artefact of the historical contexts of these religions relative to Christianity. In a context of sectarian conflict, Christians have gradually adapted and contained their expressions of belief and identity to the private sphere, leaving the public sphere as an increasingly neutral domain.
Assertive secularism laws may encourage these same processes among religious minority groups in Western countries. Or they may instead further marginalise these groups – and especially women – from the mainstream of society.
The nuances of the secularism debate are of great importance in the multicultural era. Unfortunately, this is not the debate that is going to take place in Montreal.
Rather, the Quebecois government has invoked the so-called “notwithstanding clause”. Quebec has (in)famously used this clause to protect measures legislated at the provincial level from the oversight of federal parliament and the Supreme Court, for instance when the Supreme Court ruled against its measure to show street signs in French only.
The clause provides a 5-year exemption from federal oversight and is renewable. The Supreme Court hearing will determine whether the notwithstanding law can be used to apply a different, stronger definition of state secularism than pertains in wider Canada.
Such measures as Quebec’s are arguably going to become necessary in increasingly ethnic and religiously plural societies. In the long view, a strictly secular state would help avoid the entrenched partisanship of multiethnic societies like Lebanon, where the battle of ideas that should characterise the public sphere too easily gives way to sub-national loyalties.
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