Canada’s Quebec to ban turbans in primary schools, even for children

Quebec (Canada). Sikh children in Canada’s Quebec province may soon have to take off their turbans before they walk into class.

The province’s newly elected government plans to stop elementary school students from wearing visible religious symbols, including the Sikh turban and the Muslim niqab. Sikh, Muslim and Jewish children are expected to be hit the hardest.

The separatist Parti Québécois won the provincial election in October. A ban on religious symbols for schoolchildren was one of the promises it made to voters.

“We were elected on this base, and it’s on this base that we are going to work,” Quebec Education Minister Joël Arseneau told the Montreal Gazette.

Premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon defended the plan in September, before he took office. “It’s accepted that when you send your child to school, there are rules. The vast majority of people will understand that a religious symbol can be removed,” he had said.

Rights groups reacted sharply

Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, Quebec spokesperson for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said: “Once again, we’re faced with a solution in search of a problem. And this time, the Quebec government is targeting children, sending a message of exclusion and rejection of difference to every elementary school student.”

Quebec has tightened its rules on religion step by step. In 2019, the Coalition Avenir Québec government passed a secularism law that stopped teachers, principals, vice-principals, police officers and judges from wearing religious symbols at work. That law was challenged in court and is now before the Supreme Court of Canada.

In April this year, the same government extended the limits to public universities, government-funded private institutions and daycare centres. It also banned group religious practices on roads and in parks.

Until now, the rules applied to staff. The new plan would reach children in primary school.

For Punjab, where countless families have sons, daughters and grandchildren in Canada, the news strikes a familiar chord. Sikhs in Canada fought for years to wear the turban in public life. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police allowed turbaned officers in 1990.

The ban is not law yet. It still has to be passed by Quebec’s National Assembly.