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The Quebec flag flies near a church in Gatineau in August, 2022.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.
The Supreme Court of Canada begins hearings today to consider the legal case for and against Quebec’s Bill 21. This much controverted legislation, which prohibits certain public sector workers from wearing religious identifiers such as hijabs, kippahs and holy medals on the job, has pitted the Coalition Avenir Québec government against a formidable array of lobbyists, concerned religious groups and civil rights bodies. There are now pressures on the provincial government to broaden the ban to displays of devotion, including communal prayer in the public space.
The government passed the bill in 2019 by invoking the notwithstanding clause, allowing it to override the freedom of religion guaranteed by Canada’s Charter. The Supreme Court, then, is the last hope for Bill 21’s challengers.
Many think, and with some justification, that the bill is largely a political strategy to address challenges to the province’s much vaunted neutrality on all matters religious, which has been especially heightened of late by perceived threats from Islamic fundamentalism. But what if Bill 21 is really a continuation of the exorcism of Quebec’s Catholic culture? What if this is the apotheosis of the process born of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s? What if the policy of laïcité represents the final hollowing-out of Quebec Catholicism?
As a governance principle and a doctrine of state, laïcité is not antithetical to the religious sensibility or to religious creeds per se. Rather, it is designed to ensure the firm demarcation of state neutrality from faith priorities and influence.
Quebec’s Bill 21 violates Charter rights, say challengers at Supreme Court
Its genesis can be found in the 1905 Law of Separation of Church and State, passed by the French government of prime minister Maurice Rouvier. This was a radical corrective to decades of upheaval in France, including the anticlerical legacy of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the tumult engendered by conservative restorations, the national divisions still raging around the Dreyfus Affair, and more besides.
Laïcité in the Quebec context is both similar and unlike. The Quiet Revolution was not a noisy and calamitous sundering; more often than not, the Quiet Revolution continues to be invoked in both the popular and political imagination as a strange hybrid of truism, trope and canard. It explains everything – possibly.
The reality is more subtle and continuing.
To be sure, the Quiet Revolution dismantled the clerical hold on Quebec, threw off the hegemonic control exercised by the Union Nationale government of Le Chef – the redoubtable Maurice Duplessis – and ushered in an avalanche of changes that remade the face of the province. But the seemingly iron-clad carapace of clerical control was not as resistant to penetration by modernity as many thought. In fact, many of the architects of change in the health and education sectors of Quebec society were priests, including Alphonse-Marie Parent, the chair of the commission that reorganized the entire secondary school system and effectively abolished the wonderfully grand but increasingly archaic collège classique model, and that voice crying in the wilderness, the Dominican friar Georges-Henri Lévesque, the creator of the Social Science Faculty at Laval University and an abiding influence on the intellectuals and artists who weren’t in Mr. Duplessis‘s orbit.
And there were many political figures and journalists who paved the way and welcomed the fresh blood coursing through the arteries of la belle province: the Cité Libre intellectuals, future cabinet ministers, eminent writers like Claude Ryan of Le Devoir, and at least one prime minister.
The obscurantist and theocratic impulses of the clerical and political elite frequently engendered opposition from within their own ranks, and this opposition both adumbrated and secured the future of a post-clerical Quebec.
So why is the CAQ determined to fight a battle long since won? Is it really because of Islamist threats, the possible sliding back into a religious cocoon insulated from secularism? Or is it because it is still wrestling with the vacuum created by the demise of this clerical Quebec?
As the critic George Steiner noted in his 1974 CBC Massey Lectures, Nostalgia for the Absolute, once a theological culture has been gutted, the struggle to replace it often involves the creation of a “substitute or surrogate theology,” typically a secular alternative offering a totalist worldview not too dissimilar to the theology it replaced – and often, to deleterious effect.
The only way to successfully move forward is to create a culture of tolerance to offset a legacy of intolerance, secular or religious. Bill 21 does not advance such a culture. Instead, it nurtures the shibboleths, half-truths, and animosities of the past.
