PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE THEY FEEL THREATENED BY MORALITY:

Quebec’s Secularism Laws Are About Control, Not Freedom: My teaching career ended because I chose to keep my hijab (Fatemeh Anvari, 10/28/24, MacLean’s)

I spent my childhood in Tehran and moved to Ottawa when I was 10 years old. After some years, we returned to Iran to be closer to family. There, I earned an English literature degree and taught English to students of all ages; working with young children brought me the most joy. In 2017, when I was 23, I moved back to Canada and pursued a master’s in education at the University of Ottawa. I’d spent most of my life in Iran, where the ruling regime took away many of our basic freedoms and controlled women’s bodies by enforcing the hijab. Canada felt like a place where I could be myself, where diversity and freedom of expression were celebrated. Or so I thought.

I first heard about Quebec’s proposed Bill 21 in the second year of grad school, during a discussion with one of my university professors. The bill was part of Premier François Legault’s push for laïcité, a secular principle that emphasizes the separation of religion and state. Specifically, the bill would ban public servants in positions of authority—including teachers, police officers, doctors and judges—from wearing religious symbols. This meant no Christian crosses, no Muslim hijabs, no Sikh dastars and no Jewish kippahs. I was shocked. How could this be happening in Canada, a country that celebrates diversity? My professor reassured me that it wouldn’t happen. “Not in Canada,” she said. However, in June of the following year, it passed into law.


A few months later, I moved to Gatineau, Quebec, where I planned to work as a supply teacher in English-language public schools. I applied to jobs and eventually got a call from a school asking me to come in to teach. I wondered what would happen when I showed up and they saw that I wore a hijab. I was nervous they’d turn me away. But that wasn’t the case; I got the job without any issues. The English Montreal School Board, or EMSB, the largest English-language public school board in Quebec, even argued to the Superior Court of Quebec that Bill 21 shouldn’t apply to English schools, citing the need to protect minority language rights. Although the Superior Court upheld most of Bill 21 in April of 2021, they agreed with the EMSB and made an exemption for English schools. The Quebec government wasted no time appealing that decision.

In October of that year, I was hired at an English elementary school in Chelsea, near Gatineau, teaching third-grade English Language Arts and serving as a homeroom teacher. At the time, the English school exemption was still in the appeal process, and I was optimistic that it would stand. However, less than two weeks after my contract started, the Quebec Court of Appeal rejected a request to temporarily exempt English schools from Bill 21 while the appeal was ongoing. This means that I was not allowed to wear my hijab at the school anymore.