Religious symbols at work: Provincial crackdown could shrink workforce further
Quebec’s secularism framework is moving deeper into the public sector workplace, and organizations are warning that the talent tap is tightening just as staffing crises worsen in sectors such as education and childcare.
The new law, Bill 21 (An Act respecting the laicity of the State), came into force in 2019. It bars certain public servants, including teachers, from wearing religious symbols at work.
But the provincial government is now looking to extend Bill 21’s reach with proposed Bill 9, which would bring similar restrictions to publicly funded daycares and early childhood centres, called centres de la petite enfance (CPEs), by prohibiting staff in those facilities from wearing religious symbols on the job.
In a submission to the Quebec National Assembly, the Association québécoise des centres de la petite enfance (AQCPE), the organization representing CPEs in the province, warned that shrinking the eligible workforce further could directly threaten service quality in a sector already facing what it describes as a “severe shortage” of qualified staff, where ratios are not always met and closures can be longer. The AQCPE cautions that limiting who can work in publicly funded daycares risks weakening educational quality across the network and reducing the number of future graduates eligible to work in CPEs.
English school board caught between the law and the labour market
School boards are facing similar constraints, particularly in Montreal. Since Bill 21 came into force — even before — the law las been the subject of sustained legal challenges, including a high-profile case launched by the English Montreal School Board (EMSB) based primarily on minority-language education rights under s. 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The board argues that the law compromises its ability to manage and control its school system and respond to strong parent demand for programs, while also limiting who it can hire.
Speaking to HRD Canada, Michael Cohen, manager of marketing and communications at the EMSB, notes the long procedural history and how it has fed into daytoday talent decisions at the board.
“We went to court and we won the first round, which would have allowed us to hire people who wear religious symbols, and then the government appealed, so it was suspended,” says Cohen. “And then we went to the [Quebec] Court of Appeal, where it was struck down, so we lost that, and now it's going to the Supreme Court of Canada in March.”
Cohen notes that during this legal battle, the provincial government has made more changes such as the proposed Bill 9, which he says has “added more wrinkles to make it more restrictive now, so it's definitely affected us.”
Workforce planning adjustments
Cohen says that even as the secularism law is contested, public sector employers such as the EMSB must continue to make hiring and promotion decisions under the existing restrictions, with each change in the legal landscape requiring rapid adjustments to workforce planning.
According to Cohen, the EMSB has turned away candidates who would otherwise help relieve pressure in critical roles.
“We've had people apply to be teachers who were wearing hijabs or kippahs, things like that, and they basically were told because of the law we couldn’t hire them if they wore the religious symbols,” he says. “So these people decline the jobs at a time when we're having a hard time to find qualified teachers — we've had to turn a lot of teachers down, and it hurt us to do it.”
For HR teams operating in a provincewide shortage of qualified educators, being required to refuse otherwise suitable candidates on the basis of religious symbols creates a direct and immediate constraint on staffing flexibility, particularly in hard-to-fill subject areas and in schools serving diverse communities, says Cohen.
“We've had teachers who probably would like to advance to become a vice-principal or a principal, and if they're wearing religious symbols, the law won't allow it,” he says. “And now they're extending it to beyond teachers — we have childcare workers and people who work with special needs children who, if they apply now, we won't be able to hire them either.”
Bill 21 also intersects with employer branding and diversity commitments, as Cohen notes that the EMSB positions itself as strongly committed to inclusion and pluralism in school life, yet it remains bound by provincial law in its employment decisions. This creates a gap between the diversity it promotes in programming and the limits it must apply in hiring and advancement, he says.
Younger workers leaving
Cohen believes that the challenge isn’t limited to current staff, as Bill 21 affects how younger generations view public sector careers in Quebec. Researchers with the Law 21 Research Project, a collaboration from McGill and Concordia universities, surveyed law and education students and found that 51 per cent indicated they would look for work outside Quebec because of Bill 21, raising “the possibility of a generation gap” in attitudes toward the legislation.
The study reported that some education students said they were unwilling to teach in Quebec at all because of the law, even when they were not directly subject to the ban.
Cohen points to real world examples of that talent drain. “I think what's happening is, what do you tell a young person from Montreal who's grown up wearing a religious symbol, who's gone to McGill, who's getting their teaching certificate, and tell them that ‘You want to be a teacher, fine, but you can't be a teacher in the city you grew up in, so you have to leave.’ It's a very awkward situation,” he says.
Workforce planning under policy constraints
For HR leaders in the public sector, Bill 21 affects their staffing choices not just for frontline workers, but every employee in the organization. Bill 9 would add daycare and early childhood workers to the list of staff subject to religious symbol bans, while earlier secularism measures have been extended to school support staff such as lunchroom monitors and after school care workers, according to Cohen.
He notes that the expansion into these roles risks making an already difficult staffing environment more acute: “We have childcare workers and people who work with special needs children who, if they apply now, we won't be able to hire them either."
The impact is felt most acutely in frontline workforce planning. Cohen describes the annual scramble to find enough educators.
“Every summer, the story in the media is 'How can we find more teachers?' because teachers also leave because of burnout and all kinds of reasons,” he says. “It's very sad that when you have an information kiosk and someone with a religious symbol walks up to your table, they're immediately discounted as a potential candidate because of something they're wearing on their head — instead of what's really important, which is what's between their ears.”
For HR leaders across Quebec’s public institutions, Cohen captures the operational bind: sustaining service levels and inclusive workplaces while implementing a legal framework that narrows who can work in publicfacing roles, particularly in education and childcare where staffing pressures are already high.
