Quebec attacks religious liberty
National Post, 7 December 2025
'Aggressive Secularism' is not the same as state neutrality
The Liberal government’s plan, at the behest of the Bloc Québécois, to remove the religious faith exemption from the Criminal Code prohibition on hate speech ran into unexpected and formidable opposition this week. A House committee meeting was abruptly cancelled on Thursday, leaving the future of the amendment, and the Liberals’ hate speech bill itself, in question.
Hate speech restrictions inherently sit uneasily with constitutional free speech rights, so Canada’s hate speech laws currently have some safeguards. The provincial attorney general must authorize a prosecution. The law cannot be used to limit religious liberty.
The background to the current Bloc proposal is that Quebec is going through a period of anxiety about the public face of Islam in the province. The provincial government has proposed banning all prayer in public — and even in relatively private spaces, such as prayer rooms in public institutions — because it does not like Muslims (aggressively, in its view) praying in public squares. It cannot ban Muslim prayer alone, so it looks to ban Christian and Jewish prayer, too.
It repeats Quebec’s approach to religious dress in government jobs: the province did not want Muslim teachers or nurses wearing the hijab, so it banned Christian and Jewish religious symbols, too, including Montreal police from wearing badges of their patron, St. Michael the Archangel.
This time around, the proximate cause has been the prevalence in Quebec — and elsewhere in Canada — of anti-Israel demonstrations after the Hamas terror massacres of 2023. They became occasions of overt antisemitism, sometimes including anti-Jewish vandalism and violence.
Why modifying the hate speech law would be effective when the police have been notably reluctant to enforce other laws regarding harassment and disturbing the peace remains a question. Still, there is support in the Jewish community for tougher hate speech laws, even at the cost of diminishing religious liberty. The leadership of Canada’s Christian communities have been strong in their opposition and have the support of the Conservatives.
Quebec’s particular discomfort with public Islam has its roots across the Atlantic, in the French commitment to laïcité, or state secularism. The French Revolution sought not only to overthrow the French monarchy, but the centuries of altar-and-throne arrangements in which the French crown and the French Catholic Church shared governance of society.
Altar-and-throne arrangements were the norm in Christian Europe, which is why civil authorities sought to govern religious practice and made a crime of heresy. It was altogether predictable that when altar-and-throne was replaced with throne alone, things might get worse for liberty, power now being more concentrated. Across the English Channel, King Henry VIII gave a preview of that in the 16th century.
The French innovation was to abolish the throne, too, concentrating power in the hands of zealous revolutionaries. That produced the Terror, and an orgy of lethal vandalism against French culture, history and faith. Laïcité did not get off to a promising start. It is supposed to promote liberty. It often fails, as is now the case in Quebec and, if the Bloc gets its way, in Canada.
Laïcité can coexist with French or Quebec history and culture — what Pope Benedict XVI called an “open” rather than “closed” secularity, with a state that is truly neutral, rather than suppressing religious expression in favour of aggressive secular fundamentalism.
Often enough in history, Christians promoted altar-and-throne arrangements, but they are not essentially required by the faith, and have now lost favour. The Christian faith began with three centuries of (sometimes fearsome) state persecution in the Roman Empire. The original throne of Jesus was an excruciating altar — the cross.
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