Bedford Elementary School in Montreal, on Oct. 11.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Some of the biggest political battles ever fought in Quebec have revolved around the role of religion in public schools. And a new one is now unfolding amid revelations that teachers at a multi-ethnic Montreal elementary school have, for years, failed to teach mandatory science and sex-ed curriculum and intimidated colleagues who took issue with their rigid teaching methods.
A Quebec Ministry of Education report released earlier this month on the “toxic climate” at École Bedford in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood has created a firestorm of controversy by detailing the activities of a “dominant clan” of 11 teachers, mainly of North African origin, who allegedly ran roughshod over their superiors and deprived students of ministry-mandated course content they deemed incompatible with their religious values.
The ministry undertook its investigation after a Montreal radio station last year claimed that some teachers at École Bedford took part in Muslim cleansing rituals and prayers, refused to allow special-education teachers of the opposite sex into their classrooms, prevented girls from playing soccer and spurned teaching art, ethics, history, science and sex-education curriculum to their fifth- and sixth-grade pupils.
Education Minister Bernard Drainville this week retracted the teaching permits of the 11 educators, pending a broader investigation. They had already been suspended from their jobs at École Bedford by the Centre des services scolaires de Montréal, which oversees the city’s French-language public schools. Mr. Drainville further ordered investigations into several other Montreal public schools where reports of similar violations of the Education Act have arisen.
Coalition Avenir Québec Premier François Legault has ordered Mr. Drainville and his Minister Responsible for Secularism, Jean-François Roberge, to examine “all options” for strengthening secularism in public schools. “In Quebec, we decided, long ago, to take religion out of our public schools,” Mr. Legault wrote on X on Tuesday. “We will never accept going backwards.”
The measures being contemplated could include amendments to Bill 21 – the controversial 2019 legislation that bans teachers from wearing religious symbols, while exempting those whose employment predated the law – to cover teaching practices and extracurricular activities carried out on school property.
Truth be told, though, it was not that long ago that Quebec officially purged religion from its public school system.
For most of the province’s history, francophone children attended publicly funded Catholic schools, where catechism classes were mandatory, while most anglophone kids went to Protestant schools, where little or no religious curriculum was taught. The arrangement was even enshrined in the 1867 Constitution.
Complications arose as post-Second-World-War immigration changed the ethnic and religious composition of many Montreal neighbourhoods, and as baby-boomer Quebeckers started leaving the Catholic Church in droves during the 1960s and 1970s. The adoption of Bill 101 in 1977 created further dissonance as the children of immigrants, most of whom were non-Catholics, were required to attend French-language public schools, almost all of which were Catholic institutions.
A 1998 constitutional amendment enabled Quebec to scrap its confessional-school system for a linguistic-based one. But this legacy was not erased overnight. Hundreds of French-language public schools are still named after Catholic saints. And most of those built before 1998 still bear Catholic symbols.
Most Quebeckers do not have a problem with that. They see Quebec’s Catholic heritage as part of what makes it a distinct society. Though few of them are practising Catholics, they still value the traditions of their abandoned faith.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Legault and PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon have been one-upping each other in recent days in their defence of Quebec’s secularist values. After all, l’affaire Bedford also feeds into concerns, stoked by both leaders, that immigration is threatening Quebec’s identity.
“There is a specific problem in our schools, and it involves religious and ideological infiltration. And in the case of École Bedford, it has to do with Islamist infiltration,” Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon declared. “The number of schools where 75 per cent of students were not born in Quebec is quite high in Montreal. We should study how to achieve more mixing of students to avoid the formation of microcosms.”
Mr. Drainville, a former PQ cabinet minister best known for tabling a charter of Quebec values in 2013, is now on the receiving end of PQ attacks as he seeks to come up with a political response to the École Bedford controversy. Mr. Drainville’s charter served as the inspiration for the CAQ’s Bill 21.
Mr. Plamondon is now calling for an end to Quebec’s long-standing system of subsidizing religious private schools, and is promising a four-year moratorium on “economic” immigration if the PQ wins the next election, set for 2026.
For Mr. Legault, the temptation to seize on the École Bedford case to rebuild his own political capital may be too great to resist. Another battle over religion in public schools might suit him just fine.