A policy that covers up its purpose

Quebec’s Bill 21 is a racist solution in search of a problem

“I believe we will see every girl in school in my lifetime.”

These are the words of 21-year-old Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel laureate and education activist who was shot in the head at age 15 for pursuing something most of us take for granted: an education.

This horrific crime didn’t stop Yousafzai from studying, nor from expressing herself through writing, as anyone who visited an Indigo in the year 2013 can confirm. (Her book, “I am Malala,” was an international bestseller.) Today not only does Yousafzai continue to go to school — at Oxford University no less — schools are named after her.

There’s a Malala Yousafzai Public School in Caledon, Ont. And another, Malala Elementary, is scheduled to open in Fort Bend, Texas, next year.

We shouldn’t be surprised if, in the coming decades, more schools open bearing the name of the Pakistani student who risked her life to learn, and whose “Malala Fund” raises money worldwide so that other girls may study free from persecution.

And yet, remarkably, if a Malala Yousafzai Elementary school were to open its doors in the province of Quebec tomorrow, Yousafzai herself would not be allowed to teach there. Just ask the province’s government, whose discriminatory Bill 21 — passed last month — prohibits public sector workers in certain positions from donning religious garb at work.

That means, for example, no judges in turbans, no police in kippahs and no teachers in head scarves.

The policy is a racist solution in search of a problem; an alleged ode to secularism that conveniently targets non-Christian faiths, as it isn’t white Christian Quebecers who typically wear religious headgear, but Muslims, Jews and Sikhs. (Muslims and Jews also happen to be a main target of hate crimes in Montreal.)

The good news is that civil rights groups are challenging the legislation in court this week. For starters, they want to know how in God’s name such a policy can be enforced. The bad news is that Quebec’s government appears committed to its discriminatory legislation.

Earlier this month, Quebec’s Education Minister Jean-François Roberge had the gall to post a photo of himself to social media standing next to Yousafzai (who wears a head scarf ) at a conference in France. He mentioned that he spoke to the activist about education, a statement many ridiculed online this week for its obvious hypocrisy.

Journalist Salim Nadim Valji tweeted in response to the minister, “Mr. Roberge, how would you respond if Mme Yousafzai wanted to become a teacher in Quebec?”

It would be an “immense honour,” Roberge wrote. However, he added, “as in France ... as well as in other open and tolerant countries, teachers can’t wear religious signs while performing their duties.” In other words, he may as well have written, “Of course Malala can teach here. She just can’t be herself.”

Quebec Premier François Legault seems to agree with this sentiment. The premier told media this week that while “Malala did extraordinary work to promote education for young girls,” when it comes to teaching in schools, “here in Quebec — like in France, Germany and Switzerland — we have made the choice that teachers won’t be able to wear religious symbols.”

He also said: “People who wear religious symbols, it doesn’t mean they don’t have good values.”

But that’s precisely the meaning behind Bill 21 and others like it. It operates on the absurd and ignorant assumption that people of non-Christian faiths are ideologues incapable of independent thought and fairmindedness. It’s an ugly piece of legislation that concerns itself only with what is on Malala Yousafzai’s head — not what’s in it. When your policies would exclude the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate from becoming a judge or a teacher in your province, is that not a clue that perhaps it’s time to go back to the drawing board?

Secularism is about the separation of church and state, not the separation of sacred identity markers from the people who wear them. Those who wear religious garb are perfectly capable of separating the tenets of their faith from the job at hand. When I saw my family doctor as a teenager — a modern orthodox Jew who wore a kippah — he did not, upon learning that I had become sexually active, begin reciting passages from the Torah. He gave me a Pap test.

Malala Yousafzai can and will do anything she wants. It’s too bad the same thing can’t be said about young people of faith in Quebec.