Amy Pitkethly’s children had an observation.
The motto of Chelsea Elementary School, where they attend grades three and six, is “Respect for all, by all.” The anti-bullying message on their T-shirts is “We help. We tell. We include."
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And yet, an event had unfolded at their Quebec school this month that they felt contradicted those principles.
Fatemeh Anvari, a popular third-grade teacher, was removed from the classroom and reassigned to another role because she wears a hijab in violation of a provincial law. Bill 21 bars some public employees in positions of authority, including teachers, from wearing religious symbols, such as turbans, kippahs and hijabs, at work.
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“They just thought it was wrong,” Pitkethly said, “that it doesn’t go with what they’ve been taught.”
News of Anvari’s reassignment spread quickly in emails and text messages between parents in Chelsea, Quebec, a community of some 6,900 people roughly nine miles from Parliament Hill in Ottawa, before a report in the local weekly, The Low Down, catapulted it to national and international attention.
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Anvari’s removal put a face and a name on the 2019 law — long a flash point for controversy in Quebec and beyond — and rekindled outrage over it, sparking protests in Quebec and denunciations from officials of all political stripes across Canada.
Court rules Quebec can bar government workers from wearing hijabs, turbans, other religious items
Mayors of big cities outside Quebec pledged to fund a legal challenge. Marc Miller, the federal minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, slammed the law as “cowardly.” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, said it ran “counter to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
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Anvari did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post, but told CTV News that she was “heartened” by the support from the community, which has tied green ribbons to a fence outside the school in support. She said she hoped her situation would prompt debate about “how big decisions affect other lives.”
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The controversy has also renewed fraught questions about whether Canada’s constitution sufficiently protects minority rights and whether the federal government should take a harder line against a law that it has sometimes tiptoed around for fear of inflaming tensions with vote-rich Quebec.
The law, “An Act respecting the laicity of the state,” or Bill 21 as it’s commonly known, is the first of its kind in North America. It includes a grandfather clause that exempts employees who are already in their positions from the prohibition against wearing religious symbols, but they lose that exemption if they’re promoted or moved to another institution.
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It was one of the first laws passed under Fran？ois Legault, Quebec’s nationalist premier, who argues that it doesn’t target any one religion and that public servants shouldn’t wear symbols that might promote their religion at work. He contends that it will help secularize a province in which the Catholic Church long exerted outsize sway.
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Critics assail the law as an assault on freedom of expression and religion and claim that it disproportionately affects Muslim women who are teachers. Some school board officials have argued that it’s “problematic” because it is occurring during a teacher shortage.
While Bill 21 is broadly supported in Quebec, it has opponents there, too, who are challenging it in court. In the meantime, some have called on Ottawa to join in battling the law, while others worry outside intervention — even if well-intentioned — could stoke nationalist sentiment and do more to hurt than help.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who casts himself as a champion of diversity, has often said that he disagrees with the law and doesn’t believe that “someone should lose their job because of their religion.” He hasn’t ruled out intervening in a legal challenge at some point — just not now.
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“I think that it’s important, in the first stage of the work that’s being done right now, to not give the excuse of a fight between Ottawa and Quebec,” he said last week.
Federal New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh who wears a turban, has also expressed opposition to the law. In a slight shift of his position, he said last week that his party would seek intervenor status if the “discriminatory” law goes before the Supreme Court.
Erin O’Toole, leader of the federal Conservative Party, has also said that he opposes the law, but he maintains that it’s ultimately an issue for Quebecers to deal with — a position that’s drawn opposition from his own party.
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“I think some issues transcend jurisdiction,” Mark Strahl, a Conservative lawmaker, said last week, “and I think Bill 21 is one of them.”
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Legault, who faces reelection next year, has defended Bill 21 as “reasonable” and “balanced” and said that Anvari shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. Yves-Fran？ois Blanchet, leader of the federal separatist Bloc Québécois, criticized Rae, the U.N. ambassador, for calling the law “discriminatory.”
Canada’s political leaders agree Quebec’s religious symbols ban is discriminatory. They’ve also agreed not to do anything about it.
Quebec’s Superior Court in April upheld most of Bill 21, but said it couldn’t be applied to teachers, principals and vice principals at public schools that teach primarily in English because it would violate constitutionally protected minority-language education rights in the French-speaking province.
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Justice Marc-André Blanchard said in the decision that the law “more than minimally” violates the “freedom to show or to practice religious beliefs” and that it visits “cruel” consequences on those effected by it. But, he added, it ultimately doesn’t “violate the architecture of the Canadian constitution.”
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That’s because Legault prevented a challenge to the law by invoking a controversial portion of the constitution known as the “notwithstanding clause.” That clause prevents Bill 21 to be challenged as a violation of freedom of expression or religious rights. Minority language education rights aren’t affected by that clause, allowing opponents to challenge it on that basis.
The decision is being appealed and analysts believe the case is bound for the Supreme Court.
Wayne Daly, the interim chair of the Western Quebec School Board, which opposes Bill 21, said that Anvari was hired in “error.”
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“We did make a mistake in hiring the teacher, but the bigger question is, ‘Did the premier make a mistake in making this law that’s keeping a perfectly good teacher out of class?'” he said in an interview with a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio program this week. “We’re not doing this because she’s not a good teacher.”
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The question now is whether the outrage over the latest controversy will dissipate as it has on many occasions since the bill was passed.
“Our voices are being heard and it’s making a difference,” Lina El Bakir, a Quebec advocacy officer for the National Council of Canadian Muslims, said at a protest last week. “We are going to fight so that little Muslim girls who dream of becoming teachers, prosecutors, judges or police officers can actually fulfill their dreams.”
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Pitkethly, who helped organize a protest against the law, doesn’t blame the school for what’s happened. In what’s perhaps a telegraphing of its views on the matter, it reportedly moved Anvari to a literacy project for students — about inclusion and diversity.
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