(LifeSiteNews) –– The Canadian province of Quebec is moving ahead to expand its so-called religious symbols ban to now include all school staff, meaning no one who works at a school would be allowed to wear crucifixes or crosses of any kind.
On March 20, the Quebec provincial government of Premier François Legault tabled a bill which, if passed, would expand the province’s current religious symbols ban to stop “any religious indoctrination.”
“In Quebec, we made the decision that the state and the religions are separate and today we say the schools, the public schools are separate from religion,” said Minister of Education Bernard Drainville to reporters Thursday.
The new bill would update Quebec’s Education Act and would mandate that all students and staff at schools have their faces uncovered. It would also mandate teachers submit all of their educational plans to school principals so that they could be evaluated each year.
According to Drainville, the “idea” of the new bill is “to protect students from any religious indoctrination.”
He said, “If we are going to be coherent with this idea that a figure of authority should not wear a religious symbol, well, any adult can be a figure of authority and therefore no adults who are working within the school system should be allowed to wear a religious symbol.”
The Chair of the English Montreal School Board, Joe Ortona, blasted the bill as “a smokescreen for this government who’s sinking in the polls to try to show that they’re doing something.”
“And again, they’re not. They’re just coming up with phony solutions that really play to their base, which seems to be intolerant of any mention or of any public display of any religion whatsoever,” he added.
The announcement of the new proposed law comes after Premier François Legault in December of 2024 tasked his top cabinet officials with putting in place a law that would ban all praying in public in Canada’s only historically and culturally Catholic province.
“Seeing people praying in the streets, in public parks, is not something we want in Quebec,” Legault said at the time.
In 2019, Quebec passed its so-called secularism law, or Bill 21, that bans all public servants, public school teachers, police officers, government lawyers, and wildlife officials from wearing any religious symbols while at work, including crosses or crucifixes.
The province’s highest court upheld the law earlier this year after an appeal to overturn it failed.
Canada’s notwithstanding clause, which is in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allows provinces to temporarily override sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect new laws from being scrapped by the courts.
Canada’s leading constitutional freedom group, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), late last year sent a “demand letter” to Legault regarding his plan to ban public prayer.
“Such a ban is a totalitarian suppression of the freedoms of expression and of conscience and religion,” the JCCF said regarding its notice of sending the demand letter.
Quebec has been historically a Catholic province, however, since Vatican II, Mass attendance has plummeted and the provinces birth rate has nosedived to all-time lows. The province also has high abortion and euthanasia numbers, indicating a serious departure from the practice of the Catholic faith.
