People rally against Quebec’s Bill 21, which prohibits some public sector workers from wearing religious symbols at work, after a teacher was removed from her position because she wears a hijab, in Chelsea, Que., on Dec. 14, 2021.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
When then-premier Pauline Marois unveiled her sovereigntist Parti Québécois government’s proposed Charter of Quebec Values in 2013, she got an earful from an unlikely critic.
In a missive published in Le Journal de Montréal, former PQ premier Jacques Parizeau denounced the proposal to ban all public servants in Quebec from wearing religious symbols on the job, declaring that such a sweeping ban was neither necessary to protect Quebec’s secular identity nor helpful to the party’s ultimate goal of separating from Canada.
The former premier, who had notoriously blamed the Yes side’s narrow defeat in the 1995 referendum on “money and ethnic votes,” noted that Quebec society had grown progressively more secular since the Quiet Revolution without the banning of religious symbols in the public sphere. Moreover, he warned, the charter risked creating a backlash among the very voters the PQ needed to win over if it was to ever realize its independence dream.
“What about Muslim women in all this? From what one hears, they are divided enough. But obviously a movement has arisen in solidarity with those women who feel threatened, or even excluded, by the proposed charter,” wrote Mr. Parizeau, who died in 2015. “Meanwhile, in Ottawa, all the parties proclaim their support for minorities in Quebec. Federalism is presented as their true defender.”
Ms. Marois’s minority government was defeated at the polls in early 2014 and its proposed charter died on the order paper. The debate over secularism in Quebec did not end there, however. It continued to gnaw at the political class for several years, culminating in the 2019 adoption of Bill 21 by Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government.
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While Bill 21 decreed a more limited ban on religious symbols – covering public employees deemed to be in a position of authority, including police officers, Crown prosecutors and teachers – the reaction to the law among minorities confirms Mr. Parizeau’s worst fears: they have grown even more attached to their Canadian identity.
That, at least, is the finding of a new study published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science that looks at racialized immigrants’ sense of belonging to Quebec compared their attachment to Canada, based on in-depth polls conducted in 2012, 2014 and 2019. While non-white immigrants in Quebec were already more attached to their Canadian identity in 2012, their sense of belonging to Canada had grown even stronger by 2019.
What’s more, non-religious and racialized immigrants not directly targeted by the religious symbols ban also became more attached to Canada over the period that spanned the tabling of the PQ’s proposed values charter and the adoption of Bill 21. Indeed, their sense of belonging to Canada increased more over the period than it did for religious immigrants.
“In the battle waged between the federal and Quebec governments for the loyalty and hearts of their constituents, Quebec appears to have lost ground to Canada among minority groups,” write Antoine Bilodeau of Concordia University and Luc Turgeon of the University of Ottawa.
Prof. Bilodeau and Prof. Turgeon concede their study has its limits; they do not establish a direct causal link between the secularism debate in Quebec and the increase in racialized immigrants’ sense of belonging toward Canada. “Nevertheless, for now, in the absence of other explanations, we can only conclude that the debates about banning religious symbols by law that took place between 2014 and 2019 contributed to a deterioration in the relationship between racialized immigrants and the Quebec political community, or, more precisely, contributed to widen the gap in their sense of belonging to Canada’s advantage.”
It is not possible to separate the debate over secularism in Quebec from the wider one over immigration that has exploded on Mr. Legault’s watch. His CAQ government has pursued a policy of maintaining immigration levels far below those in the rest of Canada, arguing that Quebec’s secular and francophone identity would be otherwise threatened.
The policy has paid political dividends, with the CAQ winning a second majority government in 2022 despite being nearly shut out of Montreal, where the bulk of racialized immigrants live. The CAQ does not need their votes to hold on to power. Mr. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, has vowed to never hold an independence referendum. The study’s findings are likely moot for him; he does not even pretend to care about what minorities in the province think about him or his policies.
Still, Quebec’s all-stick, no-carrot approach on secularism and immigration only serves to further alienate the fastest-growing segment of the province’s population, without whose support the sovereigntist movement’s hopes of winning a future referendum seem doomed.
Mr. Parizeau saw it coming back in 2013; he must be rolling in his grave now.