She testified at the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodations.
And again at the committee looking at Bill 94, which said Muslim women who wear face coverings will have to remove them to work in the public sector.
On Wednesday, citizen Carole Dionne was back in the legislature with the same message.
It’s urgent to act now to ban religious symbols in the public sector — even if the government needs to override the charter of rights and freedoms and use the notwithstanding clause.
“Put them under your clothes if you must but I don’t want to see them,” a frank-talking Dionne told the committee looking into Bill 60.
“It’s not the size that matters — no ostentatious symbols.”
Dionne, a retired teacher who taught for 37 years in Charlesbourg, a Quebec City suburb, said when she went to work, she had to dress in a certain manner, too.
“I couldn’t go to work in a bathing suit,” Dionne answered Liberal MNA on the committee Kathleen Weil at one point after Weil pointed out nobody in the Shafia family — which Dionne mentioned as an example of the need to ban symbols — wore a veil.
Dionne went further in her brief: even students should not be allowed to wear symbols because CEGEPs and universities are publicly funded institutions.
Crucifixes should be banned in public spaces and the one over the speaker’s chair of the National Assembly should be removed and parked in another area of the building.
She also wanted a ban on prayers before municipal council meetings, no more accommodations for halal or kosher foods, the end of prayer rooms in institutions and no more government subsidies for private religious schools.
She would also do away with all ethnic and religious courses in schools and ban the niqab, burka and hijab throughout Quebec because they are “prisons made of cloth.”
“They represent a refusal of our lifestyle,” the brief adds. “It is the categoric refusal to integrate in our society. If we do not ban these here in a free, evolved and democratic country, it means we condone this drift against women. When we leave the country, we must adopt to the values present in the adopted country before we arrive,” Dionne said in her brief. “We must not transport here delays in other countries to recognize the equality of women and men.”
“I can tell you are a woman of character,” Democratic Institutions Minister Bernard Drainville told Dionne in his remarks after Dionne’s presentation.
Unlike the parade of philosophers and groups the committee has heard from, Dionne spoke bluntly and did not hold back under questioning.
“I am tired of hearing from people like the barreau (Barreau du Québec) and the (Quebec) Human Rights Commission who say we can’t do anything.
“I want to be governed by representatives of the population, not judges. Parliamentarians make laws, judges apply them. Thus the people choose its laws and the judges follow.
“We voted for these people (MNAs). I am tired of a government of judges. I think we have to adapt institutions to the reality.”
Dionne’s presentation was the first of the day of hearings into the bill.
Wednesday, a new poll, conducted by CROP for La Presse, showed support for the charter of values has stabilized in Quebec.
Despite briefs last week ripping the charter to shreds by the bar and human rights commission, support for the charter now stands at 47 per cent compared to 40 per cent opposed. Eleven per cent don’t know.
“We can say the Jell-O has set, it won’t move,” CROP vice-president Youri Rivest told the newspaper.
“This (charter) has created a cleavage which is clearly favourable to the Parti Québécois.”
Among francophones alone, 57 per cent support the charter. Fifty per cent of allophones are “very unfavourable,” to the charter.
On the proposal in the charter to ban all symbols, 51 per cent say it should apply to all employees while 53 per cent say it should only apply to authority figures.
Drainville refused to comment on the poll on his way into hearings.