State Secularism Act | The study found that members of religious minorities are more likely to be affected

Vincent Laurin
Press

The survey results, conducted by the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS), were drawn from the Léger survey of the entire Quebec population and the AEC survey of minority religious groups.

According to the AEC, this is “the largest study to affect minority religious communities”. State Secularism ActAlso known as “Bill 21”, this legislative text relates to “their experiences and perceptions of Quebec’s climate” since its adoption.

It was approved by the National Assembly in June 2019 State Secularism Act It prohibits people in positions of coercive authority, such as judges, police officers and prison guards, from wearing religious symbols while performing their duties. The ban also applies to certain other state employees, such as teachers in the public network.

Derogatory comments

While members of all three religious groups (Jews, Muslims and Sikhs) were contacted as part of this study, they reported that their situation had deteriorated since the passage of Bill 21, an observation that was more pronounced among Muslim women.

Less than 78% of those contacted said they had noticed a decline in their “feeling of acceptance.[es] As a member[s] Part of Quebec society” for the past three years

Additionally, two-thirds of Muslim women contacted for this study said they witnessed or were victims of a hate crime or incident during this same period. “In the bus, someone spat on us”, “My friend’s hijab was torn in the metro”, are some of the comments reported by the people surveyed as part of the AEC survey.

Even less than 83.3% of them said that their confidence in their children’s future has declined in the past three years.

Court Examination

Muslim women and Sikh men have also felt the impact of these changes more since they came into force. State Secularism Act, in a ratio of about 75%. By comparison, only 6.7% of Quebec men and 7.6% of Quebec women said they felt the effect of Bill 21 coming into effect in those around them.

Both of these subgroups reported experiencing a significant decline in their sense of acceptance as full members of Quebec society, compared to 78.4% of Muslim women and 86.7% of Sikh men.

At a time when a legal challenge to Bill 21 has not even reached the Court of Appeal, 64.5% of Quebecers believe it is important for the country’s highest court, the Supreme Court, to rule on the question of whether it is discriminatory. , also cited AEC’s study.

Method under the magnifying glass

The results of the ACS study were obtained by combining an online survey conducted by the organization Léger among the general population with another survey conducted online by the AEC among Muslims, Jews and Sikhs. Leger weighted the results of two combined surveys using Statistics Canada data.

A total of 1,828 Quebecers — including 632 Muslims, 165 Jews and 56 Sikhs — were interviewed for two online polls.

Research and methodological experts believe that it is impossible to assign a margin of error to an online survey because the sampling method is not probability.

What’s more, the use of the online survey software SurveyMonkey raises many questions in the context of the AEC survey, according to Claire Durand, a full professor in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal.

“They are looking for people who have already responded to this type of survey at one point or another. [SurveyMonkey]It’s not representative of the population,” she explains.

With Canadian Press