Canada

A controversial secularism law in Quebec is heading to Canada’s Supreme Court – but the outcome will impact much more than religious expression in Canada, legal experts say.

The case has the potential to test national unity and the balance between courts and elected officials.

“This case is probably going to be the most important constitutional case in a generation,” said Christine Van Geyn, executive director at the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

The CBC has live coverage

Kraft Heinz has just committed another $250 million to its Montreal facility – one of the largest food manufacturing plants in North America.

In today’s uncertain environment for consumer packaged goods, this is not just another capital announcement, it’s a signal.

And frankly, an unexpected one.

Since 2019, a secularism law in Quebec has barred some public sector workers, like judges, police officers and teachers, from wearing religious attire at work. Now, the country’s highest court is preparing to consider its future.

Lisa Robicheau describes her life as “stuck between a rock and a hard place”.

The 41-year-old single mother of two, who wears a hijab, works in Montreal’s English-language school system as a contract support worker for students with disabilities – a job she loves and where she is exempt from the current law.

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.