Executive Summary
In 2025, a Government of Quebec committee released a report containing fifty recommendations aimed at strengthening and clarifying Quebec’s model of state laicity. In this response, we evaluate each recommendation in line with our understanding of the simultaneous importance of the state’s duty of religious neutrality and individual freedoms.
We appreciate much of what the Committee has to say. We strongly support many of the recommendations and hope governments across Canada will also take them up. Specifically, the Committee talks about clearly defining the separation of church and state, phasing out subsidies and tax privileges for religious institutions, ending state funding of religious schools, and protecting access to abortion and sexual health education.
However, we are concerned that these critical advances for secularism are undermined by other recommendations that attack individual rights to freedom of expression and belief, such as the expansion of religious symbols bans. We argue that this is because of the inherent contradiction in laicity. Proponents argue that the state must not just be neutral in action but neutral in appearance. Thus, to protect individuals from potential religious coercion, the state must, ironically, restrict individual religious freedom.
Further, the Committee’s report unnecessarily employs rights-limiting language. Words matter. Language throughout the report narrows human rights protections to citizens and a binary conception of gender. Additionally, we are concerned by the Committee’s efforts to undermine human rights by watering down the duty to accommodate from a well-established standard.
Quebec has a genuine opportunity to lead Canada in articulating a robust and principled model of religious neutrality. To do so, however, such a model must be anchored within a human rights framework that protects freedom of conscience and religion, while respecting diversity in a multicultural society. Laicity, as expressed in the Committee’s report, fails this test. True religious neutrality is not achieved by regulating personal expression. It is achieved when the state abstains from religious favouritism, refrains from coercion, and safeguards the equal dignity of all persons.
