Spurning Quebec's proud Catholic roots

The controversy over the Quebec Charter of Values (or, as it also is called in French by the government of Quebec, the Charter of laïcité) has thus far bypassed the greatest issues raised by this authoritarian legislation.

Of course, as others have discussed, the legislation would threaten the freedom to dress as one wishes (as long as standards of public decency are not affronted); and might incite hostility against unexceptionable groups in society. But the legislation also raises the specter of a state abusing its jurisdiction: There is nothing, no statute, or legitimized precedent, that empowers the government of Quebec (or any other jurisdiction in this country or in any other country that recognizes elemental standards of human rights) to tell people what indications of adherence or belief they may display on their own persons.

Admittedly, there would be a legitimate complaint about people wearing completely transparent outfits that revealed them as if they were entirely naked. (Such an occurrence might not in every case or in the eyes of all beholders be disagreeable, but it would be unacceptably immodest and distracting, profoundly offensive to many, and an incitement to neurotic levels of exhibitionism.) By the same criterion, it would not be tolerable for a person to wear a garment that was festooned with, say, explicit depictions of child pornography.

Moreover, the state, in Quebec and other civilized jurisdictions, also has the right, implicit in its responsibility to maintain public order and administer the laws, to require people to be reasonably, facially identifiable. This was the main issue in France when the government legislated against the substantial obscuring of peoples' faces in the alleged adoption of the native or sectarian costume of certain religious and ethnic groups.

But this is not what Quebec proposes to do. It proposes to determine what level of religious symbolic identification is acceptable for citizens to display; and to empower petty officials to harass, prosecute, and dismiss from their lawful, gainful employment, people who wear a crucifix, Star of David, Islamic Crescent, or the insignia of other religions where the insignia are larger than such pettifogging officials may from time to time determine. And they propose to entrench this wild exercise in state self-aggrandizement in what is pompously declared to be a Charter of Values.

But the so-called "National Assembly" of the self-described Quebec "nation" has no authority to do anything of the kind. A provincial legislature in Canada has no standing to tell the population it represents what their "values" are; in a democratic jurisdiction, the people decide their values. And as long as they abide by laws that the legislators have the proper authority to make and enforce, citizens can hold and espouse whatever values each one of them wishes.

This principle must be known to the minister Responsible for Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship of Quebec, Bernard Drainville, who has been lumbered with responsibility for this hare-brained escapade. The whole idea is insane. And if Quebec proceeds on any more ambitious basis than requiring people to be reasonably identifiable (i.e. unmasked), it will be a watershed in Quebec's protracted experiment in the conjuration and abuse of provincial state powers for contemptible — in fact, racist — purposes.

© 2025 Conrad Black