‘The broad pattern here is one of rejecting the ‘Canadian approach’ to multiculturalism and tolerance, and rejecting the implications of that for flexible workplaces'
HR teams in Quebec are facing a different landscape on religion at work than their counterparts elsewhere in Canada. With Bills 94 and 9, the provincial government has tightened bans on religious symbols, extended face-uncovered rules and lowered the threshold for refusing religious accommodation in key public-facing sectors.
Those changes are already shaping who gets hired, who can advance and how far managers can go to be flexible with staff, even as sectors such as education and childcare struggle with chronic staffing shortages.
In Montreal’s largest school service centre, for example, nearly 200 support staff, including more than 100 lunch and after-school monitors, have left their jobs after refusing to remove religious symbols under Bill 94, according to the CBC.
Meanwhile, in publicly funded daycares, operators and educators now subject to Bill 9’s symbol ban say they are short of information as requests for clarifications have gone unanswered.
New standard for religious accommodation
According to Pearl Eliadis, associate professor at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy, the real “sleeper” issue for HR is how the legislation narrows accommodation standards in Quebec’s public sector.
Across Canada, she says, human rights law has generally treated accommodation for religion as functionally similar to accommodation for disability, pregnancy or family status.
“Regardless of whether you're a person who's child-bearing or whether you are person with a disability or whether you're a religious minority, the concept of accommodation in Canada, generally speaking, has always been similar,” she says.
“Accommodate people in order to provide that ground foundation of equality.”
Effectively, this legislation makes it easier for employers to refuse religious accommodation requests on the basis of relatively minor inconvenience. Bill 9 makes that shift explicit by replacing the traditional undue hardship threshold with a “more than minimal hardship” standard for religious accommodation in both the public and private sectors.
“I think the broad pattern here is one of rejecting the, I would say, ‘Canadian approach’ to multiculturalism and tolerance, and rejecting the implications of that for flexible workplaces, with regard to religious minorities,” Eliadis says.
“In the context of religious accommodation, if somebody is asking to have Diwali off in lieu of Christmas Day, or whatever it is, the ability to refuse that request has been significantly expanded … all you need to show as an employer is that there's pretty much any inconvenience, and you will get away with it.”
Gendered impacts, historical roots of secular laws
A Quebec government statement on Bill 9 describes it as a way to “further strengthen Quebec’s model of secularism” by targeting subsidized daycares, subsidized private schools, higher education institutions and public spaces.
Eliadis says the laws are “ironic” when situating them in a longer history of Quebec’s relationship with organized religion and women’s equality. She points to the decades when the Roman Catholic Church exerted deep control over health care, education and family life, especially for rural women.
“There’s a gendered issue here, which I think is absent in the rest of Canada, which is that women very much saw organized religion, the Catholic Church in particular, as being the enemy of women's equality,” she says.
“And for Quebec to see itself as moving forward in its evolution as a modern society, the pressure was to make sure that this idea of secularism not only became real for Quebec, but it also involved a much more radical kind of whiplash sort of situation, where it went from one extreme to the other.”
Eliadis also traces how post–9/11 fears about Islam fed into today’s legislative approach; she notes that the laws are framed as formally neutral – “It does not say Christian symbols versus Muslim symbols. It doesn't say Jewish symbols”.
However, considering where secularism in Quebec came from, the laws are ironic in whom they now impact.
“The people who are most affected by this are women,” she says.
“And it's this weird, reactionary approach to women that has … I would almost call it a patronizing approach to women, saying ‘You don't know what's best for you, we'll tell you what's best for you. You not wearing a hijab is best for you, and best for all of us.’”
What employers and HR should do now
Eliadis says the first step for any employer is simply to understand whether these laws apply: “Just see whether the legislation applies to you or not,” she says, and if it does, then the rules are more restrictive.
In some cases, non-compliance can have direct institutional consequences, says Eliadis. Audit and review powers in the legislation mean HR and leadership teams need to document decisions around dress codes, scheduling and accommodation, and be ready to explain how they line up with statutory requirements.
“If you're in an educational setting, the Quebec government can, as a sanction, decline to accredit the institution if they don't feel that it's following the rules appropriately,” Eliadis says.
“The implications for employers who are, or may be, affected, obviously, are to have their HR people and their lawyers look carefully at the legislation, first of all, to make sure whether they're covered or not.”
There is also a risk management concern at hand, she adds, where employers may want to provide flexibility around a religious accommodation. If the employer is subject to the laws, she says, “they're bound by that rule.”
The risk arises if a granted religious accommodation doesn’t land well with another employee, Eliadis says.
“It’s the law now, so the question would be, if an employer said, ‘I want to give this person a religious accommodation,’ and another employee felt inconvenienced by that … this is a risk management issue.”
