A vote against religious liberty

This week’s election of the separatist Parti Québécois will again rattle the national teacups for Canadians focused on national unity, but the election outcome should be a significant blow for religious liberty.

The dark cloud mood of Albertans preparing to cast ballots for or against a later, decisive referendum on leaving Canada is already cause for serious concern. Confederation looks to be teetering on the edge of dissolution. The ascension of PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon to Quebec’s premiership transforms the “concern” into significant political probability.

 Unlike his Alberta counterpart, Danielle Smith, Mr. St.-Pierre Plamondon goes beyond merely democratically consulting on separation from Canada. He is committed to, and aggressively pursuing, a breakup. He pledged during the campaign to hold a binding referendum in 2029 after U.S. President Donald Trump leaves office. (How a province can be reconstituted as a sovereign country based on the electoral scheduling of a foreign potentate is the stuff of logical brain cramp; let’s leave that headache for now.)

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“The Québec we want to build for ourselves will be French speaking…prosperous and modern, but above all, it will be among the most exemplary democracies on the planet,” the Globe and Mail quoted him on election night.

There are, of course, roadblocks before the architects can roll out their plans and the battiseurs roll up their sleeves for the reno-project of turning Quebec into the planet’s 201st country. The most obvious is polling showing 70 per cent of Quebecers don’t want another separation referendum. 

Two rejections of the separatist idée fixe (in 1980 and 1995) seem sufficient to nix it for good. The conclusion is supported by the separatist-obsessed PQ government elect getting less than 30 per cent of the popular vote. Even sketchy democracies, never mind exemplary ones, tend to respect public messaging conveying that degree of clarity.

 The exemplary performance of opposition parties in expressing the anti-referendum intentions of Quebec voters is another obstacle to referendum plans. As of this writing, 59 PQ MNAs will form a minority government in the National Assembly. The Official Opposition Liberals have 40 seats. The miracle-upstart Quebec Conservative Party will bring 19 new faces, and the devoutly social democratic Québec Solidaire will diversify things with its nine elected members. [In what is surely the worst electoral collapse in Canadian history, the governing Coalition Avenir Québec imploded from a majority government high of 90 seats to zero – yes, 0, the old goose egg.]

 Here, religious liberty “good news” begins for those alarmed by the ugly descent of Quebec’s political class into violations of constitutional guarantees for religious freedom. During the campaign, St.-Pierre Plamondon vowed to extend the province’s current ban on religious symbols in public sector workplaces to school children!! Under a PQ government, he swore, no child in any school receiving government dollars would be permitted to wear anything associated with religious faith.

His rationale, to be polite, was that such a prohibition would only affirm and extend the efforts of the previous government to relegate all religious belief to the privacy of Quebecers’ homes. Granted, this week’s vote was not explicitly a plebiscite on those revanchiste policies, which embodied the unshakable hangover of 1960s anti-Catholic hostility. Yet voters’ wholesale repudiation of the Coalition Avenir Québec as a party – never mind just its record in government – speaks volumes about Quebecers opposing the State wearing two-tonne boots to trample in the vineyard of faith.

 Even more solidly, the leftist Québec Solidaire may be ready at hand to support the natural liberty inclinations of the newly elected Liberals and Conservatives. Why? Because the SQ’s credo affirms assaults on religious belief as generalized bigotry, yes, but also sees anti-faith acts as specifically targeting immigrants to reduce them, at best, to second-class citizens.

Given that Premier-elect St.-Pierre Plamondon is now a member of the political precariat leading a by-the-fingernails minority government, he may well find himself obliged to properly separate Church from State once again. He can be reasonably counted on, that is, to stay in power by practicing the high principle of avoiding pointless and divisive fights with those he must rely on for support.

 True, that does place inordinate weight on a die-hard ideologue seeing clearly enough to act reasonably. Even if such clarity does, by a miracle of practicality, prevail, it’s hardly grounds for the enduring return to religious liberty we all desire. 

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 Our Lord taught us, however, to separate the sheep from the goats and place give thanks for the Good News when we hear it. 

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