Faith groups welcome the demise of Quebec’s values charter
MONTREAL, QC—Quebec’s faith community breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Liberals won a majority of seats in a provincial election April 7, because the defeat of the Parti Québécois also meant the demise of its proposed secular-values charter.
Designed to enforce the neutrality of the state on matters of faith, the charter would have barred public sector workers from wearing clothing or symbols that identified them as belonging to a particular religion. Opponents said that contravened Canadian constitutional guarantees of free religious expression.
“We have standards for religious freedom in Canada, and the charter did not meet them,” says Joanne McGarry, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League in Toronto.
Glenn Smith, executive director of Christian Direction, an urban mission in Montreal that seeks to transform communities across Quebec, was not surprised most voters rejected the charter, even though the PQ had made it a centerpiece of its election campaign.
“This is a very pragmatic culture,” he says. “We have a little expression we use: ‘It doesn’t make good old-fashioned common sense.’ And so in spite of the polls saying that people were supporting the charter, it just never made sense as an electoral strategy.”
Quebec’s new premier, Philippe Couillard, says his government will bring in legislation that will seek to manage “religious accommodations” in Quebec while affirming freedom of religion and expression.
“We will have a proposal that is a consensus… But we’re not going to do anything—anything—that goes even close to job discrimination,” says Couillard.
Smith is hopeful that whatever this government proposes will be a lot less intrusive and a lot less controversial.
“I think what we’ll end up with,” he says, “is a bill that won’t allow people who can exert coercive power—judges, police officers, correctional officials—to wear ostentatious religious symbols. It won’t go nearly as far as what the PQ wanted, thank God.”
But Smith has no hope that Quebec can also avoid becoming the first province in Canada to pass a death-with-dignity law, since the Liberals basically supported what the PQ had proposed.
“I think the Liberals will just reintroduce it,” he says. “The only reason they didn’t let it pass was just political lobbying that they were doing at the end of the last session.”
“I think it would come back whoever was in power, because somebody’s always going to want to bring it forward,” says McGarry. “It’s going to keep on happening, if not in the legislatures, then in the courts.
“It certainly requires vigilance.”
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