Beatrix Stone | Originally Published: 4 April 2026
Note: Laïcité is spelled a variety of ways, including laicity and laicite. “Laïcité” is commonly used in French sources, and it is the spelling I use in this paper.
The Parti Québécois (PQ) proposed Bill 21: An Act respecting the Laïcité of the State in 2019. The goal of the bill is to preserve the “laïcite,” secularity, of the Québécois public service based upon four principles: the separation of church and state; the equality of all citizens; freedom of consciousness; and freedom of religion. Bill 21 was introduced shortly after a similar initiative in France, during a period of political uncertainty in Quebec as the Bloc Québécois struggled to preserve Québécois nationalism in the face of weakening political unity. The PQ used section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the ‘notwithstanding clause,’ to pass Bill 21 in violation of the fundamental freedoms outlined in sections 2 and 7-15 of the Charter, which include the freedoms of religion and conscience. This use of the notwithstanding clause has reverberated through Canadian politics, inciting division and controversy.
In late March, the Supreme Court of Canada began hearing the final appeal challenging the use of the notwithstanding clause in Bill 21. Prior to this, the Québéc Court of Appeals and the Québéc Superior Court did not address the case because of the preemptive use of the notwithstanding clause. Now, the Supreme Court decision may influence massive shifts in constitutional politics around the use of the non-withstanding clause. In this article, I will critically evaluate the social implications of Bill 21. I discuss three perspectives on laïcité, and, by extension, Bill 21. First, the historical, then the legal, then the philosophical. I will conclude by critiquing Bill 21 and providing a policy framework for legislating in the divide between church and state.
I argue that Bill 21 is a violation of fundamental freedoms of religion and conscience. I also determined that the bill is an ineffective way to regulate the relationship between church and state. The outcome of Bill 21 is not the laïcité of the Québéc government; instead, it is the increase of social divide and the exclusion of religious individuals. It is important to discuss the social, religious and secular implications of Bill 21 because this was only the beginning of a larger shift in Québécois cultural policy. Since Bill 21, the Québéc government has only increased its efforts to enforce secularity. This year, Bill 94: An Act to, in particular, reinforce Laïcite in the education network and to amend various legislative provisions, and Bill 9: An Act Respecting the Reinforcement of Laïcite in Québec, expanded the initial conditions of Bill 21 to include a ban on religious symbols for individuals working in public schools and subsidized daycares.
To understand the impact of Bill 21, as well as the subsequent laïcité policies, it is important to first address where laïcité came from and how it developed in Québéc. The law separating church and state in France was passed in 1905. From that point on, laïcité became, according to Professor of Political Theology Anastasia Colosimo, “an integral part of France’s contemporary political DNA.” Framed in the context of over a hundred years of religious conflict, the Third Republic regime sought to separate church and state in order to reach state neutrality. The policy was essentially a regime stabilizer, adopting a ‘you do you’ tone towards religious organizations, which, while it did not directly penalize them, distinctly separated personal and institutional religion from government discourse. The resilience of the policy has been tested in the last hundred years. Most recently, demographic changes in France resulting from an influx of immigration have placed state neutrality in direct contention with Muslim communities.
A key feature of the original debates taking place in the 1905 policymaking process was that the state should retain a measure of control over religious institutions, an issue now coming back to the forefront as religions such as Islam are perceived as ‘dangerous’ by the French state. Important to this is a 2010 policy which prohibited concealing one’s face in public. Bill 21 includes the same regulation, requiring all individuals in the public service to work with their faces uncovered. Colosimo critiques French policy as “[taking] over religious license,” and as a reflection of the larger ideological position of the French society, which prioritizes political community over social community. Laïcité is intertwined with the very foundation of French politics and is closely connected to its complex history. So, how did this French idea manifest itself in Québéc?
Professor David Cameron, a Canadian political scientist who has written extensively on laïcité and politics in Québéc, criticized the PQ’s pursuit of laïcité as an attempt to “pump up nationalist volume by manufacturing a divisive crisis,” which has had a distinct impact on minority communities. Sociologist and political scientist Efe Peker argued that there is a close link between secularity in Québéc and Québéc’s “self-image as a postcolonial nation in opposition to English Canada.” Post-colonial politics in Québéc, closely linked to a history of Catholic influence in the province, have shaped an aggressive move towards secularity after the Quiet Revolution, a period in the 1960s of significant political and cultural change in Québéc. Peker describes secularity in Québéc as an act of cultural defence, and makes a distinction between religious and secular forms of this defense. Religious cultural defence describes cultural protection taking place through developing a cultural community around religious institutions. Secular cultural defence, conversely, “is an enabling factor for secularization.” This defence can directly target religious institutions, which are viewed as a threat to culture from within or outside the cultural community, similar to the justifications of state neutrality used in France historically and today. Peker argues that these forms of defence, while appearing opposed, can work in tandem. Following the Quiet Revolution, Catholicism, which was historically central to Québécois culture, became “seen as an impediment to national progress and self-determination.” This period was mired in contradictions. While Catholicism was viewed as a hindrance to economic progress, the Québécois government did not entirely endeavour to drive a wedge between itself and Catholicism, unlike in France. Instead, the institutions began to coexist in a state of tense compromise, built upon deep-seated political unrest on the issue of Catholicism.
Shaped by this historical context, legal developments towards laïcité in Québéc foreshadow tensions now present in Bill 21 debates. Education was a key battleground as laïcité developed. Before laïcité became a formal policy in 2019, a series of court cases on education began to shape the nature of church and state interaction. S.L. v. Commission scolaire des Chênes 2012 was a landmark case during which parents requested their children be exempt from a mandatory course in ethics and religion taught in public schools. In their ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada found that state neutrality is “assured when the state neither favours nor hinders” the practice of any religious belief. In the case of Loyola High School v Québéc (Attorney General) 2015, the board of Loyola High School sought to teach the province-mandated Ethics and Religion courses from a Catholic perspective. The Minister of Education, Recreation and Sports declined this request, requiring that the school, a private Catholic institution, teach Catholicism from a neutral perspective. The school argued that it was not possible to separate its Catholic doctrine from its education. The Québéc Court of Appeals upheld the Minister’s initial judgment. The Supreme Court of Canada, however, found the decision “unreasonable,” given that requiring neutrality in this area would go against the very purpose of the Ethics and Religion course. These decisions imply that legislation, then, is the best fit to address issues of cohabitation with religion, as opposed to complete separation. It is also important to note that, according to Professor of Law Frank B. Cross, legal protections for religious freedom are not solely for the benefit of the religious. In societies without a legal standard religion, the protection of religious freedom manifests as the freedom of choice, which preserves the choice to be religious as well as the choice not to be.
Lastly, a philosophical analysis of secularism, using concepts from Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s Secular Age, to draw conclusions about what it means to legislate in the divide between church and state. The central goal of Bill 21 is laïcité, translated to English as ‘secularity.’ Taylor defines secularity under three conditions: states in which politics is separated from religion; individuals actively choosing not to be religious; and societies in which faith is “one human possibility among others.” Bill 21 presupposes that religion can be separated from the public sphere and that by excluding public expressions of faith, such as hijabs, yarmulke, or crosses, spaces will be made secular. Both of these assumptions are undermined by Taylor’s conception of secularity and religion, as lived frameworks which shift person to person. This tension is at the forefront of legislation on religious belief and expression.
There are a couple of questions to ask here. First, is there such a thing as a secular space, when religion is at all times an individual choice, lived experience, and a moral framework which can behave in direct contention with the state? Second, is the very presence of a religious person in a ‘secular’ space enough to make it religious, and vice versa? Third, how can legislators govern to best fit an infinitely diverse combination of experiences across society? This is even further complicated in regions such as Québéc, in the context of longstanding relationships between the state and religious institutions previously discussed. Staunch Catholicism, in combination with open discrimination against Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim populations muddy the waters around the very possibility of state neutrality. Within this context, Bill 21 can be framed as merely a continuation of historic culture defence called upon when the PQ needed to unite a politically divided society against a common enemy: in this case, religious minorities. Bill 21 targets religious individuals, misunderstanding the interconnectedness between lived experience, religion, and secularism. While the state has the right to declare spaces ‘secular,’ it cannot guarantee absolute secularity by doing so.
So, if Bill 21 is the wrong way to legislate religion, what is the right way? I propose that spaces cannot only be identified as secular or religious based solely on their occupants. Instead, this is based on occupants and an ‘arbiter’ of the rules, laws, and guidelines which shape how conflict is addressed and discourse takes place within the space. Laïcite policy only targets occupants, thereby making a policy that is more based on exclusion than equality. Principles of church and state must not only be balanced against freedoms of religion and conscience; the state must co-exist with religion, as both an institution and a lived experience which takes place in each non-religious or religious individual. Bill 21 targets the occupants of public space while neglecting to recognize the role of religion as an arbiter in individuals’ lives and in the spaces they occupy. It adopts the idea of the state balancing against religion instead of coexisting alongside it, and makes a series of assumptions which over-generalize religious experience into something which can be arbitrarily removed as needed.
The conflict between these assumptions and the reality of religious expression remains in France and Québéc. Even after over a hundred years of developing laïcité policy, the issue remains controversial in France. The PQ implementation in Québéc has taken place in a much shorter time frame and has been met with the same pushback that the French government has yet to resolve. By implementing legislation which penalizes religious expression, the state only achieves the alienation of said individuals. Laïcite policies cannot actually erase the lived, religious experiences of hijabi women in the Quebec government, or in French society. It can, however, remove the women entirely by forcing them to choose between their religion and their state. The outcome is not the neutral government described in Bill 21’s official purpose. Instead, it is an actively oppressive government, removing religious individuals from public space on the grounds of proposed neutrality.
Jackson Leung is a third-year Architectural Studies student at the University of Toronto. He is the current Head of Design for the Attaché Journal of International Affairs (2024–2026). Jackson is currently based in Paris, participating in an academic exchange at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville.
References
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