The “Social Death” of Muslim Women in Quebec

Hadjira Belkacem didn’t wait for the humiliation of being fired because of her religion. 

She quit.

Belkacem taught children in Quebec’s government-subsidized daycares for nearly 20 years, taking babies from their parents’ arms every morning and returning them safely at night. 

She was like a second mother to them, witnessing first steps and first words, teaching them how to use a fork, how to say please, how to show empathy and which arm goes in which sleeve of their winter coats.

Years ago, when a mother with two children in Belkacem’s care became pregnant with her third, she said Belkacem would drive the kids home every night so she didn’t have to pick them up. 

“She wasn’t just doing a job, she was building a community,” the mother said, in an interview with The Rover.  

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All of these things that Belkacem did — from wiping away tears to lighting candles on birthday cakes — she did while wearing a hijab. But hijabi women aren’t allowed to work in Quebec’s government-run daycare system anymore. 

“Kids, they care about how you make them feel, not what’s on your head,” said Belkacem. “Those children were my life. That job was my life. I rarely visited my family back in Algeria because I needed to be there for my kids. That’s what they were to me.”

Banning religious symbols may be a priority for this government, but it’s a different story for the working families who actually rely on the system. Some 62 per cent of parents with children in Quebec daycares say it doesn’t matter if their teacher wears a hijab, according to a Léger poll released in March.

Waiting lists for a spot in the subsidized program stretch for years because of staffing shortages. So why shrink the labour pool? Why pick a fight with workers whose conditions are so dire that half leave the profession within their first two years of service? 

Belkacem says these questions run through her head daily.

In its bid to reinforce secularism in the province, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government passed Bill 9 in April, prohibiting government-run daycare employees from wearing religious symbols on the job. The law also forbids prayers in public spaces, prayer spaces in universities, and prevents hijabi women from volunteering at their children’s schools. 

When asked about the plight of these workers, CAQ MNA Bernard Drainville blamed the women.

“They chose to lose their jobs,” Drainville said, during a press scrum in February. “They decided not to respect the law, and therefore it’s their decision.”

Belkacem quit before the new law came into effect. She said there was more honour in leaving than being told to go. Her voice still cracks when she speaks about it.

“I am someone who is proud, and my dignity, it’s important to me,” said Belkacem. “My government telling me how to dress? I cannot accept that. I changed countries once before, I can change jobs. But it is a dark time. I have no income of my own. I told my husband, ‘Now you’re carrying me.’ We have one income but a mortgage to pay, two kids to put through school.

“And while we’re dealing with this crisis, I am grieving the loss of my career. I see a baby in public and it nearly brings a tear to my eye. I miss it so much. Seventeen years, this was my life.”

Bill 9 is the latest measure by the CAQ government to impose French-style secularism in its public institutions. The law’s predecessor, Bill 21, prevents public school teachers, police officers, prison guards and other authority figures from wearing religious garments on the job.

In theory, Bill 21 applies to all religions. But in practice, it targets Muslim women. At least, according to research by the Association for Canadian Studies, York University and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. 

Whether the intent of these laws was to target a particular faith, their effects on Muslim women are extremely well-documented.

A survey of over 1,000 religious minorities found that, since the adoption of Bill 21, the political climate in Quebec has left Muslims isolated, hopeless and fearing for their children’s future in the province. Published in 2022, the study tracked an alarming rise in hate crimes against Muslims, citing examples of women being spat on, having their hijab ripped off, and one mother being run off the road by a pickup truck. The woman was walking with her three-year-old at the time.

Belkacem doubts the climate will improve with a provincial election just months away.

Although the CAQ is polling a distant third, the Parti Québécois (PQ) sits within reach of forming a government. PQ leader Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon has promised to extend the hijab ban to students in elementary school. The PQ leader recently gave an exclusive interview to Rebel News, an organization with a history of sharing Islamophobic conspiracy theories. Rebel News was investigated by the Toronto Police’s hate crimes unit in 2024 after its owner ran ads claiming Canada was “under siege” because of immigration from Muslim-majority countries.

And while the Liberals are polling a close second to the PQ, the party — once a stalwart defender of religious minorities — supports Bill 21. However, the Liberals say they wouldn’t oppose court challenges to the bill.

“We don’t have any defenders in the political sphere. We’re on our own now,” said Zeinab Diab, a scholar whose PHD research centred on Bill 21. “These women are experiencing a social death, their choices are being limited by the state, they are being physically and psychologically isolated by the state. 

“It is an incredibly distressing time for them.”

***

When members of the CAQ government describe Muslim women, they present them as both perpetrator and victim.

On the one hand, when Drainville says hijabi women “chose to lose their jobs,” he claims they’re actively resisting the will of the state.

On the other hand, when Secularism Minister Jean-François Roberge testified before a parliamentary commission in February, he suggested these women needed to be liberated by the state.

Diab argues that the point of Quebec’s secularism laws isn’t to save these women but rather to exert control over them.

“This is the same logic Canada used to justify the residential school system,” Diab said. “They were saving Indigenous kids by removing them from their communities, their spiritual practices, their language and assimilating them into a ‘superior’ culture. This is about the white majority in Quebec exerting control over its minorities. It is not feminism guiding their decision-making, it is colonialism.”

Amira Elghawaby served as Canada’s Special Envoy in Combating Islamophobia from 2023 to 2026, a role that brought her into contact with hundreds of hijabi women across the country. 

Far from sheepish or submissive, these women hold public office and host television shows, they lecture at universities, compete in elite sports and run emergency rooms that save lives every day. Some chose to wear the hijab later in life despite worries from their parents that they might face discrimination. Others fear the attention their daughters might get should they one day decide to wear a piece of fabric that makes them so identifiably Muslim.

Elghawaby says that when Roberge claims he wants to save these women, he flattens the diversity within Muslim communities into something vaguely sinister.

“It creates this monolith of the brainwashed Muslim woman wearing a hijab without free will,” she said. “But in reality, this legislation is erasing these women from public life. You are almost dead in the social space. You are not alive the way other women are in Quebec. You’re not free to make decisions about your career. If your children are in school and they want a quiet moment for prayer, they’re not allowed. If you want to volunteer at your children’s school, you can’t.”

This CAQ government and the PQ have repeatedly argued that these secularism bills are a continuation of the Quiet Revolution, when francophone Quebecers emerged from under the shadow of the Catholic Church and built the foundation of a social democratic state in North America.

Diab counters that the state is already secular, public schools no longer teach religion, and Quebec did away with Protestant and Catholic school boards in the 1990s. She says that focusing on what a teacher wears rather than how they teach doesn’t address the potential for religious bias in our school system.

Bill 94, for instance, was tabled in the wake of a scandal that had nothing to do with religious symbols.

The legislation, which extends the symbols ban to support staff at schools, came after media reports of teachers imposing Muslim ideology at a public school in Côte-des-Neiges. A report by 98.5 FM found that a clique of teachers at the elementary school treated students differently based on their gender, religion and cultural background.

Some of the problematic teachers, who were mostly of Arab descent, were either refusing to teach science and sex education or only doing so sparingly. There were also tensions between the school’s Muslim and non-Muslim teachers, according to the news report. What the report didn’t mention is that there were also Muslim teachers standing up to the clique.

That’s what the Ministry of Education found in its own analysis of the Bedford School scandal. In the end, 11 teachers had their licenses suspended. 

“The irony is that none of these teachers actually wore religious symbols,” said Diab. “Which goes to show how superficial these hijab bans are. Ultimately, they were fired for their actions and not what they wore. But now Muslim women must suffer the consequences.” 

Calls for the Quebec government to erase the hijab from public spaces go back decades.

Before Bill 21, the PQ government of Pauline Marois tabled the Quebec charter of values in 2014. That legislation would’ve prevented public-facing employees of the state from wearing religious symbols, but it never passed. The PQ called a snap election and lost before voting on the charter.

Like Bill 21, the charter applied to all religious symbols, but the discourse and media coverage surrounding the legislation zeroed in on Muslim women. Particularly, that secularism and equality between men and women are fundamentally incompatible with the hijab.

The charter was itself an outgrowth of a social crisis that dominated Quebec headlines when the Charest Liberals were in power. With immigration from Muslim-majority countries increasing at the beginning of the 2000s, a handful of anecdotes about hijabs, halal meals and prayer spaces were amplified on the front pages of Quebec’s most-read daily newspapers.

The overwhelming message of these news items, Diab says, was that Muslims were imposing themselves on Quebec society. They did this by demanding accommodations related to their faith. In the midst of the media frenzy, there were countless reports about a village in Mauricie adopting a deeply Islamophobic bylaw.

In 2007, Hérouxville’s elected councillors tabled a “code of life” which implied that Muslim immigrants were prone to publicly beating women and burning them alive. News about Hérouxville was broadcast worldwide, making this small farming parish synonymous with intolerance.

But a university researcher who studied media coverage around the reasonable accommodations “crisis” found that much of the controversy was manufactured.

Researcher Maryse Potvin published her findings in the International Journal of Canadian Studies. “The media,” she wrote, “(elevated) anecdotal material to a social crisis.” Something as banal as a request for halal options at a cabane à sucre became front-page news in the Journal de Montréal.

The 2008 Bouchard-Taylor report also found that claims of creeping religious influence in Quebec society were a “crisis of perception” stoked by distortions in media reports. 

Manufactured or not, the crisis had a disastrous effect on the PQ. 

Ahead of the 2007 provincial election, PQ Leader Andre Boisclair sided with Quebec’s religious minorities, denouncing the “incredible downward slide” of our political discourse.

Months later, the PQ’s conservative supporters abandoned the party in favour of Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a party whose leader took a hard line against Islam during the campaign. With its base splintered, the PQ suffered its worst political defeat in a generation, finishing third behind the Liberals and ADQ. After Marois replaced Boisclair in June 2007, the PQ began adopting the politics of exclusion.

Even as the reasonable accommodations saga faded from memory, the media continued pushing stories that stoked fear of Muslims.

Richard Martineau, for instance, wrote 438 columns about Islam between 2006 and 2014. Writing in Quebec’s largest newspaper chain, Martineau described Islam and the hijab in overwhelmingly negative terms, speaking about Muslim women but rarely listening to them, according to a study by the Université du Québec à Montréal.

In 2016 alone,La Presse published 1,408 articles about Islam, but only 64 featuring the word “Islamophobia”, making Muslims incredibly visible while ignoring crucial aspects of their lives from the discourse.

This discourse, Diab claims, has largely been imported from France, where the government imposed a series of hijab bans starting in 2004. And while the legislation was passed in the 21st century, the history of “unveiling” Muslim women stretches back even further.

“The French were ‘unveiling’ Muslims in the streets of Algeria almost 70 years ago,” said Diab. “The French military would stage these public unveiling ceremonies and invite reporters, cameras, it was a huge event. These images would then be broadcast in France so they could tell the citizens back home, ‘Look, we’re not colonizing Algeria, we’re liberating its women.’ 

“But they didn’t care about these women, they wanted to destroy the solidarity these women found through Islam to further dominate them.”

Staged as a response to the uprisings against colonial rule in Algeria, the wives of French generals would remove the women’s hijabs and even burn them while a crowd cheered. 

They combined this with a postering campaign that featured a Muslim woman removing a face covering with the caption: “Are you not pretty? Unveil yourself!”

***

During her PhD research, Diab interviewed 21 women affected by Bill 21.

Twenty were teachers and one was an attorney. Three-quarters of them were born in Quebec, but she says none feel as though they’ll ever truly be considered Québécoise.

She says she understands their plight because, like the 21 women, Diab also wears a hijab.

“Quebec tells us ‘We don’t want you as you are, you’re not a Québécois when you wear your hijab,’” said Diab. “But even if we do remove it, we’ll never be Québécois enough for some.”

She argues that it also presents the risk of further ghettoizing Muslims from the rest of Quebec, with some families either homeschooling their children or sending them to private schools that aren’t subject to Bill 21.

If anything, these women are doing everything they can to continue to live in Quebec, work in French, and help raise the next generation of students. All of them, she said, belong to a support network of hijabi women who share legal and practical advice on how to live with the obstacles imposed on them.

“Women adapt, they come up with strategies, a Plan A, a Plan B, a Plan C, but the government keeps putting up more obstacles,” Diab said. She says that many of the women working in daycares are already on their Plan B since they used to be public school teachers. Now, it may be that the only hope they have to remain in Quebec is riding on a Supreme Court decision.

In March, the high court heard oral arguments that will determine the future of Bill 21.

Although the law violates provisions in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Quebec adopted it using Section 33 of the Constitution, also known as the notwithstanding clause. Section 33 is a seldom-used constitutional tool to circumvent the Charter. 

But the clause isn’t bulletproof.

The Supreme Court could still overturn Bill 21 if it finds that it violates sections of the Constitution not covered by the notwithstanding clause. Section 28, for instance, mandates that all Charter freedoms apply equally to men and women. If the Court finds that the law, as it is applied, overwhelmingly violates the rights of women, then it might have cause to overturn.

There are also pre-Confederation statutes put in place to protect the rights of Canada’s francophone Catholic minority to hold office and practice their religion in a state run by British Protestants.

“There is also the matter of the ancient right of the courts to judicial review,” said Pearl Eliadis, a professor at McGill University’s faculty of law. “These ways predate the Charter, they go all the way back to English common law. We have a Constitution where the judiciary is the ultimate arbiter of the legality of government action. So does the fact that Section 33 (the notwithstanding clause) has been invoked eliminate that right?”

Eliadis cites a case in Saskatchewan where the government used Section 33 to pass legislation that would make it illegal for teachers to refer to students by their chosen pronouns. The case, which is also before the Supreme Court, tests whether the notwithstanding clause can override judicial review.

Last year, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal said there is nothing in the language of Section 33 that limits the court’s right to determine the legality of a law. 

For Belkacem, who feels worn out by years of arguing over her place in Quebec society, striking down Bill 21 would pave the way for Bill 9 to be ruled unconstitutional. It provides just a glimmer of hope, but it is hope nonetheless. 

“These days, I’m raising chickens and selling the eggs,” she said. “Anything I can do to help the family get through this. It’s hard to feel like we’re going to be okay, like one day this will all be behind us and we can go back to being Québécois again.”

Elghawaby says that while Quebec doesn’t have a monopoly on Islamophobia, there is a near-permanent sense of hopelessness taking root in its Muslim communities. She speaks about being overwhelmed by this feeling during a vigil to commemorate the Quebec City Mosque shooting.

“I could tell — particularly young people — I could see this look in their eyes like, ‘We don’t know what to do. We have built our lives here, this is our home, we don’t want to leave,’” said Elghawaby. “And yet every step of the way, we are told we don’t belong. I refuse to give in to that feeling. I am motivated to push back against that feeling. But I do consider Quebec to be ground zero of the exclusion in the rest of the country.

“Quebec Muslims are worried about their future in a way Muslims in the rest of Canada aren’t. Canadians are worried too. We’ve had a massacre in Ontario, we have discrimination, we have Islamophobia. But the sense of being driven out of your home and not being able to live your life freely in Quebec is a constant.

“I won’t let anyone make me feel this way, but I don’t know how I would survive in Quebec. I have known many, many people who’ve left over the years because of that feeling.”

Diab used to teach at Université de Montréal, but she lives in Seattle now, unsure if her path will ever take her home.

“I was born in Lebanon, but when I speak French, I speak it with a Quebec accent,” Diab said. “This place where I grew up, where I adopted the sound of its language and used its expressions lovingly, is no longer my home. I don’t know if that can be undone.”

This article was edited by Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed.

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