By Daniel Béland

March 29, 2026

Over four days last week, the Supreme Court of Canada held hearings about Quebec’s Bill 21, the Act respecting the laicity of the State. Adopted in 2019, this provincial legislation forbids public employees in positions of authority such as teachers, police officers, prosecutors, and judges from wearing religious symbols in the exercise of their official functions.

In terms of its impact on the daily lives of Canadians, the case carries human rights implications for freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and equality rights.

But the case is important not only because of the clash of values represented in its core question of constitutionality, but also as a crucial test of the notwithstanding clause, or section 33 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

And, during a provincial election year when the Parti Québécois is in pole position by default amid upheaval in its rival parties, every story involving provincial powers, identity, and language is highly politicized.

The pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause is not only an issue with regard to Bill 21 and other Quebec legislation, but has also become a key source of controversy in other provinces.

Partly because of that, this is a very high-profile case of true pan-Canadian importance, which is why last week’s hearings lasted so long and featured so many different parties and interveners, including representatives from the Government of Canada, Quebec, but also several other provinces.

While the federal government and both British Columbia and Manitoba support the idea that, despite the use of the notwithstanding clause, “courts should still have the right to issue non-binding judgments as to whether a law violates the Charter,” a position Quebec, alongside Alberta and Ontario, strongly oppose that possibility on the grounds that non-binding judgments from the Supreme Court would be “useless”, according to Quebec government lawyer Isabelle Brunet.

A central aspect of that debate is hardly new and can be traced back to the origins of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As political scientist Patrick Malcolmson and his colleagues remind us, “The purpose of a charter of rights is to prevent democratic majorities from using political power to violate rights, especially the rights of minorities.”

Yet, during the constitutional negotiations to get its proposed charter approved, the Pierre Trudeau government included the notwithstanding clause in the new charter to appease those in Canada, including the government of Saskatchewan, who worried about the future of parliamentary sovereignty.

As Prime Minister Trudeau stated in 1981, he saw the notwithstanding clause as “a way that the legislatures, federal and provincial, have of ensuring that the last word is held by the elected representatives of the people rather than by the courts.”

At the same time, Trudeau claimed that he did not “fear the notwithstanding clause very much. It can be abused as anything can, but the history of the Canadian Bill of Rights Diefenbaker had adopted in 1960, it has a notwithstanding clause and it hasn’t caused any great scandal.”

As the case of Bill 21 and other recent pre-emptive invocations of the notwithstanding in Alberta and Saskatchewan illustrate, in retrospect, section 33 has now become a major source of legal and political controversy across the country.

If the Supreme Court fully or partially strikes down Bill 21, Quebec nationalists — especially the CAQ and the PQ — will frame the decision as an attack on both provincial autonomy and laicity.

While the forthcoming ruling of the Supreme Court in the Bill 21 case will be closely read all across the country, it is in Quebec that it could have the strongest political impact because, beyond the broader discussion about the use of the notwithstanding clause, which is highly relevant for both the federal government and all the provinces, it deals with two issues that are particularly central to Quebec politics.

First, the Bill 21 case concerns the concept of laicity (or secularism) and its meaning, which is contested. In front of the Supreme Court and beyond, as journalist Konrad Yakabuski put it in his recent Globe and Mail feature on the case, the Quebec government claims that laicity is “a fundamental characteristic of the Quebec nation alongside its language and civil law tradition that requires special consideration when adjudicating rights claims.”

During last week’s hearings, Chief Justice Richard Wagner seemed to allude to that very idea when he stated that, especially since the gradual shift from church to state provided education and health services that began during the Quiet Revolution, laicity has been “a distinct Quebec reality that does not exist elsewhere in the country”.

This historical take was strongly criticized in The Gazette by Jack Jedwab (Association for Canadian Studies), who noted that Bill 21 and its focus on religious symbols are not the product of the Quiet Revolution but the outcome of a much more recent trend: the shift of focus from the deconfessionalization of public services, which in the case of education policy was only completed in the late 1990s, to religious minorities and “identity politics.”

Jedwab is right here to stress that the debate on “reasonable accommodations” that led to the 2007-2008 Bouchard-Taylor commission betrayed a crucial ideological shift through which different political parties, starting with the Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) and the PQ and, later, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), embraced the cause of laicité, with an emphasis on religious symbols and religious minorities, two issues that did not prove dominant during and after the Quiet Revolution — when Quebec was a far more homogeneous society — in the debate over the role of the Catholic Church in the provision of public services.

Here, there is a convergence between Quebec and France, a country in which, since the late 1980s, laicity has shifted from an emphasis on the Catholic Church to an emphasis on religious symbols and religious minorities, especially Muslims.

This convergence is not accidental, as France looms large in the debate over laicity in Quebec, where media stories related to Bill 21 feature numerous references to the situation in France. In both jurisdictions, in recent decades, laicity has become closely intertwined with a majoritarian approach to the management of religious diversity.

Second, and relatedly, if the Supreme Court fully or partially strikes down Bill 21, Quebec nationalists —especially the CAQ and the PQ — will frame the decision as an attack on both provincial autonomy and laicity, which they describe as a core and historically-rooted component of the Quebec nation, even if the 2019 law is actually grounded in a relatively recent understanding of laicity that puts strong emphasis on religious symbols.

Regardless of what one thinks of the Bill 21 and the contemporary concept of laicity associated with it, a negative Supreme Court ruling about the law and the related pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause could have a dramatic impact on Quebec politics, especially if the ruling is rendered before the October 5 provincial election.

Clearly, both the CAQ and the PQ could see such a negative ruling as a key electoral opportunity and, in the latter case, as a way to further promote Quebec’s independence in the context of a potential third independence referendum. The stakes could not be higher, for Quebec but also for Canada as a whole.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.