EMSB to decide fate of Bill 21 court challenge Wednesday night

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The English School Board of Montreal is expected to decide Wednesday night whether it will take its challenge to Bill 21 — Quebec’s secularism law — to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Under that law, school boards are forbidden from hiring teachers who wear hijabs or other religious symbols.

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The board is holding a special meeting at 7 p.m. to discuss its legal plans.

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Its decision will come six weeks after the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled Bill 21 should apply to Quebec’s English school boards.

The law came into force in 2019. It bars some government workers deemed to be in positions of authority, including judges and police officers, from wearing religious symbols on the job.

Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government pre-emptively invoked the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause, which allows governments to override some fundamental rights.

The EMSB took the Quebec government to court, arguing English schools should be allowed to hire teachers who wear religious symbols because English boards have special status under the Canadian Constitution.

In April 2021, Quebec Superior Court Justice Marc-André Blanchard gave the EMSB a partial victory.

While warning about excessive use of the notwithstanding clause rights, Blanchard upheld most of Bill 21 but carved out an exemption for English school boards.

However, the judge rejected the EMSB’s contention that the law violates gender equality rights in the Charter.

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While that decision was being appealed, the EMSB must comply with the law, meaning it can’t hire teachers who wear religious symbols.

In February 2024, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned Blanchard’s decision regarding English schools.

The court found that Bill 21 “does not affect the educational language rights that (the Canadian Constitution) confers on citizens belonging to Quebec’s English linguistic minority.”

Reacting to that decision, Joe Ortona, the EMSB’s chair, said his board based its case against Bill 21 on previous judgments by the Supreme Court.

“The Supreme Court has for decades spoken unanimously about school boards’ powers of management and control over issues of language and culture,” he said.

“We feel that religion and religious liberty are matters of culture for which we have the right to manage and control within our schools.”

Ortona said his “heart goes out to” teachers who want to wear religious symbols.

“We think that teachers should have the right to wear whatever they want and we should have the right to hire teachers without arbitrary criteria like what they choose to wear, which has absolutely no bearing on the quality of the education that children receive.”

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In February, Legault hailed the appeal court decision as a “beautiful victory for the Quebec nation.” He said Bill 21 “guarantees” that people in positions of authority “are neutral and appear to be neutral.”

Secularism is a “collective choice” and “a principle that unites us as a nation,” he said.

Legault said Quebec will continue to use the notwithstanding clause “for as long as necessary for Canada to recognize our societal decisions, the Quebec nation. That’s non-negotiable.”

The ruling was also praised by the Mouvement laïque québécois, a group that promotes secularism.

The appeals court decision was “a great victory for English-speaking citizens, our English-speaking friends, because they were denied under the ruling of Quebec Superior Court the right to secular public services in English schools,” Guillaume Rousseau, a lawyer for the group, said in February.

He said the ruling makes it clear that the “notwithstanding clause is not something that violates rights, not something that goes against democracy. It’s part of our democracy and it’s up to our elected officials to decide.”

ariga@postmedia.com

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