Legault only politician willing to call out threat of mass prayers

Premier Legault's initiative should serve as an inspiration to other Canadian premiers

Even if the notwithstanding clause is required for its execution, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is poised to pass a bill “to strengthen secularism in Quebec” — an expansion of Bill 21 — that will ban mass prayer in public areas. The law will also require immigrants to adopt Quebecers’ “shared values.”

Last December at a press conference, Premier François Legault announced his intention to confront the mass prayer issue head on. “I want to convey a very clear message to the Islamists,” Legault said. “The fundamental values we have in Quebec, like secularism, like equality between men and women, we will fight for them, and we will never, ever accept people disrespecting those fundamental values.”

On the weekend following this challenge, by real or opportunistic coincidence, a mass Islamic street prayer was held in front of Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica, the quintessential exemplar of Quebec’s founding cultural identity.

Mass Islamic prayers have been a fixture in Britain and Europe for years, and have now come to various urban sites in Canada. Dreading charges of Islamophobia, multiculturally committed politicians outside Quebec do not take a stand on them. Thus, Legault has emerged as the sole political leader willing to grasp the thorny nettle of street prayer and call it out as the culturally threatening political statement it is. But numerous progressive critics, including — with respect — naïve religious authorities, defend them as faith-expression rights.

Quebec’s Catholic clergy, for example, opposes the ban. Bishop Martin Laliberté, president of the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Quebec, expressed concern “about the erasure of people and believing communities from Quebec’s public space.” True, the ban would preclude priests conducting a putative street mass, blocking pedestrian and vehicular traffic, but how would that “erase” Catholicism? And Montreal’s Archbishop Christian Lépine defended the mass prayers as a fundamental freedom. “At its core, to forbid public prayer would be somewhat like forbidding thought itself,” he said.

Ironically, “forbidding thought itself” is already happening in allegedly democratic societies — to Christians. In 2023, a solitary woman Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, was twice arrested for praying outside a Birmingham, U.K. abortion clinic. Not out loud, mind you. Silently. Arrested literally for “thinking.” And speaking of “erasure” from public spaces, we have abortion clinic “bubble zones” throughout much of Canada. Curtailing Christian rights comes easy to some politicians.

Yet, woke politicians are exquisitely attuned to Muslim sensibilities. Responding to Legault’s announcement, then Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Legault “keeps picking on Muslims.” He said, “People have the right to pray in public,” wondering aloud if the ritual ascent of the steep stairs to Montreal’s St. Joseph Oratory by Christians on their knees would be banned. But the Christians climbing the stairs of St. Joseph Oratory are on their own sacred religious turf, and they are not inconveniencing outsiders. Miller’s intended parallel to mass Islamic prayer in front of sacred Christian space is logically untenable.

In contrast to this factitious defence of mass street prayer, Iranian-Canadian Goldie Ghamari, a former MPP, addressed the phenomenon on the much firmer ground of lived experience. In Iran, “(Mass street prayer) is a sign of conquest… a sign of power,” Ghamari told Sky News, and an “(abuse) of the freedoms and the Charter within Canada.”

Ruth Wasserman Lande, a Research Fellow at Israel’s Misgav Institute for National Security, echoed Ghamari’s perspective in a July 2024 Brussels briefing. “It’s not just about prayer,” she said, referencing escalating Islamisation in European cities, “it’s a territorial statement…‘We are here, and we are taking over these spaces’.”

In 2024, a Muslim Algerian YouTuber, Nabil Absi, was filmed entering a Quebec church with a mass in progress. We see Absi interrupting the service to ask the priest if, since he cannot find a mosque, he can pray in the church. The priest nods acquiescence.

Absi walks to the front of the sanctuary. He calmly unfurls his prayer rug, prostrates himself and offers up ritual prayers to Allah. Parishioners exchange anxious glances. His prayers concluded, Absi rolls up his rug, stands and, after bowing politely to the priest who nods politely back to him, departs. The service continues as though nothing had happened.

Absi’s tableau was political theatre for his followers, a wink messaging. People seeking a place to worship their god in unusual places don’t usually bring a cameraman along, forcing a priest to go along or be rude.

Legislation against Islamist practices in Quebec’s public spaces cannot, alas, restore diminished confidence to Quebec’s clergy. Still, it’s better than nothing, and Premier Legault’s initiative should serve as an inspiration to other Canadian premiers.