Twenty years ago this month, the Supreme Court of Canada cracked open a new fault line between Quebec and rest of the country, one that would put the French-speaking province on a trajectory diametrically at odds with the multicultural values Canada had come to embody and disrupt Quebec politics for years to come.
In quashing a Quebec Court of Appeal decision that had prohibited a Sikh boy from wearing a kirpan, or ceremonial dagger, at school, the country’s top court came down squarely on the side of religious freedom as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and against Quebec’s vision of la laïcité, then an emerging doctrine of separation of church and state in a province that had gone to great pains since the Quiet Revolution to replace its dominant Catholic institutions with unsparingly secular ones.
