QUEBEC — Teachers and daycare workers need clear instructions on how to deal with religious accommodation requests, groups told National Assembly hearings into Bill 62 on Tuesday.
The proposed legislation aims to ban people from wearing face coverings when giving or receiving a public service. It also proposes guidelines for religious accommodations in the province.
According to the bill, requests must be consistent with the right to equality between women and men and must not compromise the principle of state religious neutrality.
The guidelines are too vague for teachers, argued the president of the Fédération autonome de l’enseignement, a union representing 34,000 teachers in the Montreal area.
“The bill states the jurisprudence without giving teachers the tools they need to know what to do when a request is unreasonable,” Sylvain Mallette said. “Once again, we’re leaving it up to establishments to fend for themselves and it makes the news when a school accepts something that other schools don’t. It’s teachers at the end of the day who get singled out.”
Both the FAE and Centrale des syndicats du Québec urged Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée to be more specific. What do you do with children who don’t celebrate Halloween or can’t listen to music for religious reasons, asked CSQ President Louise Chabot. “Without rules of application, Bill 62 is basically unusable,” she said.
Vallée referred groups to the Quebec Human Rights Commission’s virtual guide on processing reasonable accommodations, which states, among other things, that an accommodation can be refused “if the cost is too high for a company to absorb, it interferes with the proper operation of the organization, or it significantly impairs the security of others or infringes on the rights of others. If an employer or a service provider can objectively demonstrate that the only accommodation available would cause one of these consequences, the request can be denied.”
The minister told the Montreal Gazette she is open to updating the virtual guide and making it more user-friendly.
Still, Quebec’s association of private daycares told hearings it worries about the cost of accommodations. Allowing an employee to go out and pray means that employee has to be replaced, argued association vice-president Mona Lisa Borrega. “This is really opening the door to all kinds of requests that will really put a strain on … our monetary resources and on the organization of our work,” she said.
Bill 62 hearings continue on Wednesday.
