Wisdom in song

“Leave the kids alone!” The words might reverberate in distant memory as the warning in an ancient Boomer rock song about turning kids into bricks in the wall.

In fact, they’re now a cri du coeur from a left-wing opposition member in Quebec’s National Assembly demanding that the minority Parti Québecois government stop creating roadblocks to religious freedom.

“Leave the kids alone! The priorities for the education system are clear: address the staff shortage, repair our schools, put an end to the three-tiered school system and reduce the dropout rate,” Roxane Milot, of Québec Solidaire said last week.

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Milot was responding to a government announcement that it will proceed with legislation prohibiting children from wearing “religious symbols” at school. No date has been set for introduction of a bill. But the pledge, coming only days after the PQ formed a minority with less than 30 per cent of the popular vote, indicates how serious it is about interfering with constitutional religious freedoms.

Serious… or perhaps “ridiculous” is the mot juste.

The rationale, after all, is that if a) State institutions must be religiously neutral, and b) schools are State institutions, then c) children attending schools must also be religiously neutral. Jean-Christophe Jasmin, Quebec director for the non-partisan think tank Cardus, points out the argument simply doesn’t hold up.

“I don’t see how (the) logic applies to children,” Jasmin told Canadian Press. “Children do not represent the State. They are part of civil society. There is no duty of neutrality on the part of children.”

In fact, the duty being invoked here is not one of neutrality at all but of activist animus toward freely lived public expressions of, and identification with, religious faith. Short form: anti-faith bigotry.

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The PQ appears to have taken on the religious-hostility mantle of its predecessor government, the Coalition Avenir Québec, which led the way with sweeping bans on adults wearing religious symbols. Initially limited to State-related employment, they expanded to almost anything receiving significant public funding. In its last gasp at power, the CAQ banned public prayer unless explicit State permission was obtained in advance.

For following what the party insisted was the overwhelming public will of Quebecers to limit faith observance to private premises, it was richly rewarded by the electorate with a historic wipeout from 79 seats to zero in the Oct. 5 vote.

Taking wisdom – not! – from that reality, the PQ’s education minister has pre-emptively declared “non-negotiable” the determination to bar pupils from wearing hijabs, kippas, turbans, crucifixes, etc. as part of their school dress.   

Of course, that is beyond even ridiculous. As everyone knows who has spent so much as an afternoon in the visitors’ gallery of any legislative assembly in the land, everything, including the time of day and when the clock stops, is up for negotiation. How much harder will that reality land on the PQ’s minority government?

It received, after all, fewer than one in three popular votes. It faces three opposition parties from the newly reborn Conservatives on the right to centrist Liberals and Québec Solidaire on the nationalist left. For her part, Roxane Milot has already vowed to help block any legislation that refuses to leave the kids alone when it comes to wearing their religions on their heads or hearts.

Defeating such a legal violation of constitutional freedoms through the legislative process, rather than the courts, is devoutly to be wished. Even so, any bill, in and of itself, isn’t the dragon that really needs to be slain. What’s needed is for Canadian citizens of all faiths, inside and outside Quebec, to persuade-cajole-pressure the province’s political and bureaucratic class to recognize that ideologically assaulting the Charter-guaranteed religious freedoms of anyone, in this case especially of children, is unconscionable in its paltriness.

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It is not a fit objective for the open-hearted people that the late Premier René Lévesque described as “not a small people but something of a great people.”

Indeed, Quebecers are that, and their new minority government can show its respect for them by leaving the kids alone.

A version of this article appeared in the November 08, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Wisdom in song".