Flash forward six weeks and, to Canada’s embarrassment, you can insert Quebec and Quebeckers in place of Iran and Iranians in Bennett’s statement. True, it’s an imperfect comparison. A Quebecker who flouts a law that would restrict civil servants from professing faith by how they dress will likely only face firing, not arrest and torture. So it could be worse.

Still, the so-called Charter of Quebec Values proposed by the Parti Quebecois is a shameful attack on the fundamental rights of freedom of religion and expression that are enshrined in Canadian law and, indeed, even in Quebec’s own charter of rights and freedom. Quebec’s proposed law would prohibit civil servants, including teachers, nurses and social workers, from wearing obvious signs of faith such as crucifixes, kippahs, hijabs and turbans. Some small items would be permitted but nothing that the law, and the bureaucrats who enforce it, might deem “ostentatious.”

All of this is outrageous, secularism gone mad. Canada is a pluralistic, multicultural nation that succeeds because it embraces fundamental values of equality, dignity and freedom, particularly the freedoms of expression and religion. All Canadians enjoy not only the right to pray and worship freely but to live their faith openly in the public square.

Secularism should not be about obliterating religion from public view. It is about fostering public institutions that are neutral, not blind, to religion. It is about building respect and accommodation, about promoting equality and dignity, about ensuring that no one faces discrimination or persecution or is barred from working in public service or receiving public services because of where they pray or how they dress. It is about declaring that no Canadian must ever choose between his job and his God.

Promoting these human values abroad became an official plank of Canada’s foreign policy with the creation last February of an Office of Religious Freedom. In launching the office, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said Canadians have a duty “to defend the rights of the afflicted and give voice to the voiceless” by opposing religious hatred and intolerance. He was right. Canadians have a moral duty to decry religious bigotry and persecution — wherever it occurs.

So, yes, we should ring alarms when we witness religious intolerance in Iran or in any foreign nation. And when, to our shame, it occurs in Canada our objection should be deafening.