Canadians: Tell Ontario legislature to stop power-grab by chief electoral officer
(LifeSiteNews) – Quebec Premier François Legault has 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 last week on Friday afternoon.
While Legault directed the ban at “teachers implementing Islamist religious concepts in schools,” the reality is the ban would apply to all faiths, including Catholicism, which is the founding faith of the province.
He was quoted by La Presse recently as saying “We have seen teachers implementing Islamist religious concepts in schools.”
“When we want to pray, we go to a church, we go to a mosque, but not in public places. And, yes, we will look at the means where we can act legally or otherwise,” he said.
Legault said it he has asked members of his cabinet to produce a plan to put the ban in place during the new year and says if he gets pushback he will use the province’s notwithstanding clause to do so.
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.
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.
Legault, speaking about his proposal to ban public prayer, said he wanted to send a “very clear message to the Islamists.”
“We will fight, and we will never, never accept that people try to not respect the values that are fundamental to Quebec,” he said.
Banning public prayer is a ‘totalitarian suppression’ of free speech, says legal group
While the Canadian Muslim Forum noted that Legault’s words were “deeply troubling,” Canada’s leading constitutional freedom group, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), announced it had 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 Tuesday regarding its notice of sending the demand letter.
The JCCF wrote in the demand letter that far from reinforcing secularism, the ban on praying in public places would “contradict the principles on which the secularism law is based: “(1) the religious neutrality of the State, (2) the equality of all citizens, and (3) freedom of religion.”
In the demand letter, lawyer Olivier Séguin wrote that Legault’s “approach to the situation” suggests a “militant, anti-religious and dogmatic conception of one of the healthiest and oldest practices that human beings have maintained in their relationships with their fellow human beings and with a higher power.”
“The ban on prayer announced by the Premier borrows from the intolerant overtones of a state atheism that flourished east of the Iron Curtain during the 20th century, and of which history has retained only sad memories. In so doing, our government would be violating the principles of religious neutrality, equality and freedom of religion on which the secular state is supposed to be based,” he added.
When it comes to the historical fact of Quebec’s Catholic heritage and past, Quebec Life Coalition President Georges Buscemi earlier this year observed to LifeSiteNews that laws such as the secularism one in reality reflect the rejection of faith by today’s Quebecers.
“This decision is completely consistent with the recent historical trend in Quebec, which is one of rejecting its Catholic heritage in favor of a liberal ‘enlightened’ worldview, which considers religion to be a purely private matter,” he told LifeSiteNews.
Canadians: Tell Ontario legislature to stop power-grab by chief electoral officer