Le Québec en quête de laïcité [Quebec’s pursuit of secularism] (Normand Baillargeon and Jean-Marc Piotte)

If there is one public issue that best illustrates the distinctness of the contemporary political culture of Quebec from that of anglophone Canada, state secularism, la laïcité, might well be it.Should civil servants, including public school teachers, be permitted to openly display signs of religious affiliation at work?Does a state curriculum that prescribes teaching about different religious traditions violate the principle of separation of religion and state?What does respect for freedom of conscience and religion require of public institutions, including schools, when they are faced with demands for special accommodation based on religious beliefs?These questions, now scarcely on the political radar in anglophone Canada, are presently among the most contested in Quebec public discourse.The superficial explanation for their intractability here is circumstantial.Secularism was central to two widely publicized and deeply divisive recent events: the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation and the introduction of the Ethics and Religious Culture Programme into the provincial curriculum.The deeper explanation is historical.One of the defining victories of the Quiet Revolution was freedom for individuals and, at the state level, from the interference of religious authorities.The desire to protect this societal gain, often stoked by personal experiences of growing up under the yoke of the Catholic Church, contributes to a strong current of distrust toward religion in Quebec culture.Co-edited by Normand Baillargeon, a philosopher of education who is also a prominent public intellectual, this collection of commissioned essays is valuable as a source of insightful, rigorous and spirited treatments of issues such as the head scarf question, how to teach religion in schools, and the meaning of secularism in liberal democratic societies.For readers unfamiliar with the terms of the public debate over secularism in Quebec, it is a primer on one highly principled reading of secularism, "strict secularism", which has so far failed to take root elsewhere in North America.The book's essays are organized around four questions that have largely characterized the debate over secularism in the past five years in Quebec.The first question is about which conception of secularism is right for contemporary Quebec society.Following the Bouchard-Taylor Report, the options under consideration are so-called "open secularism" and strict secularism, or secularism tout court as the proponents of this position in the book prefer to call it.According to the latter view, the secular state's obligation to remain at once neutral vis-à-vis the interests of religious groups and autonomous from the influence of religious authorities implies that state institutions must be free of all symbols of religious affiliation-from Duplessis' crucifix hanging over the president's chair in the

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