MONTREAL (CCN) — The Quebec government will be expanding its secularism rules across public institutions in a new bill that is expected to be tabled Thursday.
Various media outlets in the province confirmed the contents of the new bill, which includes a ban on prayer rooms in universities and CEGEPs, restricting the offering of religious-based meals and banning religious symbols in communications by public institutions.
The new law will further the laws introduced in 2019’s Bill 21 that enforces secularism by prohibiting certain public employees from wearing religious symbols while at work. Teachers, police officers, judges and others in positions of authority have been banned from wearing items such as turbans, crosses, hijabs and kippahs.
The provincial government has also been investigating how to further strengthen secularism in the province, and is considering a ban on prayer in public spaces.
In October 2024, following press reports of Islamic influence in a number of Montreal-area public schools, Premier Francois Legault began examining ways to ban praying in public. His Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government doubled down in recent months as mass Islamic prayers closed down streets in conjunction with pro-Palestinian protests in Montreal.
The Quebec bishops have long fought against such laws, and when Legault made his announcement on a prayer ban last year, Trois-Rivieres Bishop Martin Laliberté published an open letter asserting that “prayer is not dangerous.”
Some fear the province’s move will threaten longstanding Catholic traditions in Quebec. A number of Good Friday Way of the Cross celebrations take place in various locales, most notably Montreal and Quebec City. The Very Rev. Christian Schreiner, Dean of the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Quebec City, has organized the Good Friday walk in his city, which got a huge boost when Cardinal Gérald Lacroix became Archbishop of Quebec. Schreiner said that technically the walk is not praying in a public space — “We’re just walking and carrying a Cross,” he told the Register’s Anna Farrow before this year’s event.
But he wonders how the Way of the Cross will be met under new legislation.
“We continue this because obviously there is no policy,” he said at the time, “but it might be interesting as a case study if somebody from the CAQ would say, ‘Hey, why are you walking with the Cross in old Quebec?’”
