Politics or Piety? Debating the Function and Meaning of Religious Symbols in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I n many liberal democratic states, the presence of religious symbols in the public sphere has become a highly contentious issue.Since the 1980s, political and legal attempts to define the boundaries of religious freedom have increasingly centred on the right of citizens to wear religious symbols.In Canada, both provincial and federal courts have routinely upheld the rights of citizens to do so in the public sphere as a form of religious freedom, 1 and policy makers have generally refrained from introducing legislation that would curtail this right.2 With the proposal of Bill 60 -commonly known as the "Charter of Values" -in 2013, the Quebec government broke with convention.3 Bill 60 was introduced with the aim of officially declaring Quebec a secular state.As a corollary, the bill proposed that all employees of public institutions and organizations -including medical staff, teachers, and university professors -be required to abstain from wearing religious symbols, such as clothing, headgear or large jewelry, in the workplace.1. Well known cases on religious accommodation include Syndicat Northcrest v. Amselem, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 551, and Multani v. Commission Scolaire Marguerite Bourgeoys, [2006] 1 S.C.R. 256.There are a few exceptions to this generalization: most notably, the 2008 Ontario Court of Justice ruling R. v. Badesha, [2008] O.J. N o .854 (Ont.C.J.), which denied a Sikh motorcyclist's claim that the motorcycle helmet provision of the province's Highway Traffic Act was discriminatory.2. There are important exceptions.For instance, in 2011, the federal government of Canada amended citizenship regulations to require individuals taking the oath of citizenship to do so with their face uncovered.The policy was overturned in 2015 after the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the requirement was not legally enforceable.See Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v. Ishaq, 2015 FCA 194. 3. See Quebec, Bill n.60: Charter affirming the values of State secularism and religious neutrality and of equality between women and men, and providing a framework for accommodation requests, 1 st Sess., 40 th Legs.(Éditeur officiel, 2013), http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parle-mentaires/projets-loi/projet-loi-60-40-1.html.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".