RPL Press Release, 2025-03-20

Bill 94: A Major Step Towards Secular Public Schools

2025-03-20

Montreal, 20^th March 2025. The Rassemblement pour la laïcité (RPL or Alliance for Secularism) welcomes Bill 94 introduced by Minister Bernard Drainville to strengthen secularism in the Quebec school system. The fundamentalist excesses observed in several primary and secondary schools in Quebec required a firm response and concrete action from the Minister of Education. Bill 94 is a very important step in that direction.

Most of the proposed amendments to the Public Education Act are consistent with the RPL’s recommendations, the first being that the public school system should fully comply with the Act respecting the laicity of the State (Bill 21). We hope this will be accompanied by concrete actions to affirm and promote this model of secularism in schools, in addition to addressing the lack of educational resources available for teaching about secularism itself, particularly within the framework of the Quebec Culture and Citizenship (CCQ) program.

We welcome with great satisfaction all the measures proposed to protect students from religious pressure, including the ban on wearing religious symbols by all school personnel, the ban on prayer rooms and religious activities in schools, and the requirement that anyone who provides services to students must do so without any religious considerations.

And how can we not strongly welcome the ban on face-coverings for anyone, at any time, on school premises? Wearing the niqab, a retrograde religious practice that represents a refusal to communicate, in addition to undermining the dignity of women, is unfortunately a practice increasingly reported in certain schools and CEGEPs, and seems to represent a new strategy of Islamist infiltration. We welcome this firm response by the Minister of Education, and we invite his colleagues in other ministries to extend it to CEGEPs, universities, government daycare centres and private daycare centres.

Religious Neutrality

The measures proposed in Bill 94 enshrine religious neutrality as a duty of strict restraint for school staff and a distancing from convictions and religious practices in the school system. These practices will help favour a learning environment free from religious pressures and more conducive to student flourishing, as well as prevent communitarian and religious excesses, as in the case of Bedford School and others. We invite Ministers Pascale Déry and Suzanne Roy to extend these measures to CEGEPs and daycares.

Bill 94 also provides additional guidelines for requests for religious accommodations. However, the RPL believes that the Bill does not go far enough in this regard. Indeed, a religious accommodation which, in practice, results in a religious exemption from a regulation or law, cannot be religiously neutral. It will inevitably be at odds with the secular nature of the State, and can also generate feelings of injustice in the school system. Instead of providing more and more guidelines, human resources, and public funds to processing such religious accommodations, it would be more appropriate and relevant simply to prohibit them in the school system.

In summary, we enthusiastically welcome Bill 94, which aims to strengthen secularism in public schools and to ensure a harmonious learning environment free from intimidation, in which equality between women and men is respected. Finally, in view of “anti-Quebec” remarks and the lack of civic spirit repeatedly reported in schools, we recommend adding national integration (Bill 84) as a goal of the Quebec school system.

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SOURCE : Rassemblement pour la laïcité
Nadia El-Mabrouk, President