No crucifixes. No hijabs or yarmulkes, the headwear worn by some devout Muslim women and Jewish men, respectively.
In fact, no visible signs of any religious faith.
In Canada's province of Québec, Bill 21, officially known as "An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State," prohibits public servants in positions of authority -- such as teachers, police officers, and government lawyers and judges -- from wearing religious symbols at work. The law also extends the ban to staff at subsidized day cares, private schools and professional development centers.
Passed by the Québec National Assembly June 16, 2019, it asserts that Québec is a secular state and that it aims to separate religion from state affairs.
However, Bill 21 faced a Supreme Court of Canada challenge this March regarding its impact on religious freedom and equality -- and after four days of arguments, the waiting for a decision began.
And it continues.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops spared no words in the factum, a legal statement of facts, it submitted to Canada's Supreme Court, declaring, "The purpose and effect of the act is unilaterally to amend Canada's federal constitution by imposing an anti-religious, non-neutral ideology, which goes beyond Québec's jurisdiction."
"Our constitution is founded on a political theory that sees fundamental rights and freedoms as God-given," they continued. "It is pluralist and pro-religious. To adopt an expressly anti-religious viewpoint, as the act purports to do, is an amendment of our existing federal constitution."
The approach of Bill 21, the bishops said, is biased: "In the place of a genuinely neutral, pluralist, and proreligious approach, the Act substitutes an anti-religious constitutional settlement where symbols of religion worn by individuals are not permitted in certain governmental settings."
The bishops further asserted that "Québec is attempting to impose an atheistic posture on religious believers" noting, "Just as religious symbols manifest an underlying personal faith, the prohibition of religious symbols manifests an outlook from the provincial government that denies the Divine."
Bill 21 outlines four principles of Québec secularism, including separation of state and religion; religious neutrality of the state; equality of all citizens; and freedom of conscience and religion.
Both the Parliament of Canada and Canada's provincial and territorial legislatures have authority to make laws. Parliament makes them for all of Canada, but only about matters the Constitution of Canada assigns to it. A provincial or territorial legislature, such as in Québec, can only make laws for matters within its own borders.
Laws must respect the Constitution of Canada and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Among the points at issue for some of those arguing before the court was the Notwithstanding Clause -- found in Section 33 of the Charter of Rights -- which shields Bill 21. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association describes the Notwithstanding Clause as granting "lawmakers the ability to shrug off important fundamental rights and freedoms protected under the Charter. When invoked, this clause prevents courts from striking down serious Charter violations contained in laws. It is thus nothing short of a Charter override."
Philip Horgan, who represented the CCCB before the high court, however, didn't take that tack.
"That's really part of the constitutional matrix of our country now," he told OSV News. Instead, they chose a different focus for their intervention.
"The intervention was based on the fact that, in our constitutional history -- and on a fair reading of Sections 91 and 92 -- there is no stipulation of who has the jurisdiction over religion."
Sections 91 and 92 of the 1867 Constitution Act -- one of the documents that forms the Constitution of Canada -- define the division of legislative powers between the federal Parliament and provincial legislatures in Canada.
Horgan had a total of five minutes -- together with the 15-page factum -- to make his case.
"As an intervener, you're basically providing a set of arguments for the court to consider as part of dealing with the case," he said. "There were over 50 interveners in this case, and one of the longest appellate hearings of the Supreme Court in its history."
Québec, Horgan said, retains its Catholic roots.
"There still is a strong Catholic presence in Québec," he reflected. "The architecture of most towns is dominated by the steeple of a church. The major cities, the major downtowns, are dotted with basilicas and cathedrals and major churches. There's still a historical and cultural engagement, and this is celebrated in a certain way. Easter is celebrated in a certain way, including a Good Friday procession in various major cities such as Montreal."
After Bill 9 passed in June -- an addition to Bill 21 drafted as provincial law against hate speech, but which nonetheless bans collective prayers in public outdoor spaces unless a municipality grants a special permit -- there were fears Montreal's traditional Corpus Christi procession would not take place.
However, a permit was ultimately granted in Montreal -- the largest city in Québec, and the second-largest city in Canada -- and a June 4 procession wound its way through downtown Montreal streets, led by Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine.
In a 2021 article in The Christian Century, Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion at Baylor University, described how 1950s Québec "was one of the world's most religiously active societies, with a powerful Roman Catholic Church that ... utterly dominated large areas of everyday life through its role in health care, education, and social welfare. Weekly (M)ass attendance rates reportedly reached a staggering 90 percent. Churches and pilgrim shrines blossomed, making Montreal the 'city of a thousand steeples.'"
That was then -- this, however, is now.
"The weekly attendance rate today is around 4 percent, low even by European standards," wrote Jenkins. "The province's dioceses are speedily closing or merging once-thriving parishes. Hundreds of former churches have been demolished or repurposed as homes or commercial establishments."
Still, in spite of the march of secularism in Québec, Horgan suggested that what amounts to censorship serves no one.
"Are we not better served by at least exposing students or young people to the reality of Canadian culture, as opposed to trying to somehow insulate students from the kinds of fundamental questions that could arise? 'Why am I here? What's the purpose of life?'" he said.
"These are not things you can exclude from discourse in a classroom," Horgan continued. "We should hope that we can get along -- something I call the authentic plural, which is, I can recognize differing faith beliefs without fear of some negative implication … why wouldn't we have a frank conversation about where religion can play a role, as opposed to just merely suppressing it?"
Michael W. Higgins -- a well-known Canadian academic and writer who blogs at Pontifex Minimus -- views the outcome of the Supreme Court of Canada's decision on Bill 21 in stark terms.
"If this passes, it means a significant adjustment to civil rights, and the civil right of freedom of religion," he told OSV News. "And the impact that could have across the country, federally -- that's why the opposition to the passing of Bill 21 isn't just coming from the religious sector. It's also coming from civil rights organizations, and several other bodies who look at this and say, 'If there's going to be curtailment here by way of a Notwithstanding Clause, are there other rights and freedoms that could be similarly curtailed in the future?' And what does that say about how the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is exercised in Canada?"
Bill 21, Higgins said, is fundamentally anti-religious.
"The issue over laïcité -- where there's an effort to remove all kinds of religious symbols from people working in the public sector in any capacity, whether they're educators, or whether they're involved in the courts, or whatever -- is just yet another extreme effort to evacuate religious symbolism and Catholic signs from a culture that was for centuries Catholic," he said.
Higgins also sees a warning for the United States.
"What happens in the North often happens in the South later on," he cautioned. "So I think Americans should pay close attention to what happens with Bill 21."
