In August, the office of the Quebec Anglican bishop sought to make a lunch booking for a mixed group of clergy and laity at Le Parlementaire during the Oct. 29-Nov. 2 Quebec Anglican Synod.
In a politely worded email, the reservation was refused. It was not possible, the email read, for the restaurant to accommodate groups “near or far to a religious movement” as this would violate the “neutrality of the National Assembly.”
Quebec Anglican Bishop Bruce Myers told The Catholic Register that the knee-jerk refusal of parliamentary staff is revelatory.
“The restaurant incident is an example of what happens when it’s just assumed that laïcité means that we are erasing all religious expression from the public square,” said Myers.
The Anglicans made alternate arrangements, but after the story was picked up by French-language newspaper Le Devoir the government backtracked.
In a Oct. 23 media scrum, National Assembly president Nathalie Roy told reporters the refusal was “a mistake.” Roy indicated the decision had been made by a lower-level staff member who had not run the request past a superior.
Despite the admission of error, Myers said it is concerning that the first response of the staffer was a negative one.
“The first place they went was, no, you can’t make a reservation here because we’ve defined you as a ‘religious movement’ that will compromise the neutrality of the National Assembly, and therefore you can’t have an event here. It took pushback within the media to have them revisit that,” said Myers.
It is an example, Myers says, of a “creeping secularism” that strays from what is contained in Bill 21, the 2019 Quebec laïcité law. The contentious law prevents government employees, including judges, police officers and teachers, from wearing religious symbols such as crosses, kippah or headscarves in the course of their work.
“What I think may be happening is that individuals within the government apparatus are making their own judgments based on what seems to be in the atmosphere rather than what’s stipulated in law,” said Myers.
The Anglican primate suggests that the “restaurant incident” reveals the lack of social consensus, and that further conversation and debate is required.
“Who determines the limits of how laïcité is understood in the contemporary Quebec context? Do we have a public discussion about it first before those limits are erected?”
It has been an eventful few weeks for Legault who is facing mounting pressure to strengthen laïcité measures in the education sector after 11 schoolteachers had their teaching licences suspended after a report found Islamic teachings and religious practices were introduced in Montreal classrooms.
Two days later, the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec fought off a Parti-Québécois, Liberal-backed motion to strengthen the province’s secular laws that included putting “an end to the public financing of religious schools.”
There are 50 private, religious schools that receive government money; of those, more than half are Catholic. There are four private Muslim schools in the province, but all the schools currently being investigated are fully public.
The Anglican presence in Quebec is small, but Myers says what happened in Quebec City should be a wake-up call for all Quebecers who have more than a nominal attachment to their faith.
“I’d say what we encountered as the Anglican Diocese of Quebec in our interaction with the restaurant at the National Assembly isn’t just about us. It’s about every citizen of Quebec who is a religious practitioner of some kind, whether they’re Anglican or Roman Catholic or Pentecostal or Muslim or Jewish. So, we’re small for sure, but we’re kind of the test case for everyone else.”
Myers has been a member of Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue of Canada since 2009. He said both Catholic and Anglican bishops have expressed a qualified support for state secularity if that means the state does not give preference to any one religion, but not if it means the exclusion of people of faith from the public square.
“We want to be a part of the civil society, but part of the civil society in Quebec includes people and citizens who practise religious faith of some kind. That is not something that we can easily separate out from who we are. We need to, in appropriate ways, be able to express that in our public lives as citizens, in ways that don’t inhibit on the lives or the rights of others.”