Bilingual, Educated, Qualified—and Still Not Welcome in Quebec

As a federal judge with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada since 2022, Nour Farhat hears asylum claims and renders decisions daily on immigration and refugee matters. While she says her work is validating and important, the Montreal native always dreamed of becoming a prosecutor. She studied constitutional and criminal law at Université de Montréal and then attended Université de Sherbrooke for her master’s degree in criminal law. Farhat says she was focused on her “purpose” and trusted that hard work would get her where she wanted to go. Farhat was blindsided in 2019, when the province’s Coalition Avenir Québec—CAQ—government passed Bill 21. Framed as a defence of secularism, it bars teachers, police officers, judges, and other public servants in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols at work. For Farhat, it meant that her hijab—a simple expression of her Muslim faith—disqualified her from the career she had strived toward for years. “I work as a federal judge in Canada,” says Farhat, “and currently I don’t even have the right to work as a municipal lawyer in Quebec.” In Quebec, Bill 21 has drawn sharp opposition from a broad coalition—including the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the English Montreal School Board, and the Fédération des femmes du Québec—who argue it tramples basic rights, particularly religious freedom and equality under the Charter. The controversy isn’t just about exclusions many see as targeting religious minorities but how the law was passed. By invoking Section 33, the notwithstanding clause, the government essentially flipped an override switch that allows it to suspend rights and block judicial review for five years.

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“The province of Quebec knows that Bill 21 violates the Charter rights of Quebecers,” wrote Harini Sivalingam, director of the equality program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, in a press release. “That is why they had to use the notwithstanding clause.” The lower courts have already acknowledged the law violates the rights of Muslim women and inflicts cruel and dehumanizing consequences on those who wear religious symbols—but their ability to act has been constrained by the clause. This past January, the Supreme Court decided it would allow the constitutional challenge to be heard. CAQ, however, has decided not to wait for Canada’s highest court to decide on Bill 21’s constitutionality before pressing forward. Bill 94, introduced in March, aims to sweep more public sector workers into the ban, including daycare workers, psychologists, teachers’ aides, and even secretaries and coaches. Extending the law’s reach means entrenching it deeper into everyday life, normalizing discrimination in some of the province’s most formative spaces. For critics, the fight is no longer just about legality. It’s about what kind of society Quebec wants to be. Born and raised in Quebec, Farhat grew up in Montreal North, one of the city’s most economically disadvantaged and racially diverse neighbourhoods. “As a woman of colour,” she says, “I grew up seeing underprivileged sectors and how our reality was very different from other parts of Canada.” Farhat saw the overrepresentation of visible minorities in prisons and in the judicial process, while also noticing their underrepresentation as police officers, Crown prosecutors, judges, and probation officers. “Of 100 new federally appointed judges 98 are white,” a Globe and Mail headline stated in 2012. Things may be improving, but the pace remains glacial. “It’s what made me choose criminal law,” Farhat says. “I wanted my career to be a tool to defend and promote human rights.” It wasn’t to be. What hurt the most, she says, was knowing she had done everything required of her, including prioritizing the French language. “I chose to study in French,” Farhat says, “and yet this is how the government treats people like me. I had the right qualifications, the right training. My colleagues who finished the same degree were able to continue to the next step in their career, and I couldn’t.” For many Quebecers who express their faith visibly, Bill 21 has meant lost jobs, stalled ambitions, and a deep sense of alienation—of being made to feel like second-class citizens in a province they call home. A 2022 study by McGill and Concordia universities found that over half of students were considering leaving Quebec to find work—and nearly half of those were from French-language institutions. Last year, a separate study of Muslim women painted an even starker picture: 71 percent were thinking of leaving. Those numbers underscore what Farhat has experienced first-hand. After graduating in 2019, she spent two years working in civil litigation and constitutional law. She represented one of the major teachers’ unions, the Fédération autonome de l’enseignement, which contested Bill 21 in the Superior Court of Québec, arguing that the law disproportionately harmed Muslim women. She regularly appeared in media and legal forums to explain the law’s impact. Farhat describes the eight-week trial as one of the hardest experiences of her life. “Many articles were written about me,” she says. “It was a privilege to work on the legal case, but it came with a very heavy price.” For defending teachers’ right to wear religious symbols, Farhat was bombarded with hundreds of threats. “One bullet is enough,” read one message. Another warned, in French, “If I see you in Montreal, you’re dead.” She received images of corpses, bullets, bloody knives. Some told her to kill herself. Others hurled Islamophobic and sexist slurs, calling her a plastic doll or “pute islamiste” (Islamist whore). After opinion pieces about her appeared in the Journal de Montréal, the hate mail surged. Now based in Toronto, Farhat is one of many French-educated Quebecers driven out of the province, forced to choose between their careers and their faith. “My religious beliefs are more than an opinion,” she says. “They’re part of my identity, they’re not an accessory.” Farhat pushes back against the assumption that people who wear visible signs of their faith can’t be impartial. “Everyone comes with a set of beliefs, likes, and dislikes,” she says. Farhat points out that in his 2021 ruling, Justice Marc-André Blanchard dismantled a key argument behind Bill 21: that religious symbols on public servants somehow threaten the state’s neutrality. The government, he noted, offered no real evidence, just a theory treated as fact. For Joe Ortona, chair of the English Montreal School Board, that theory isn’t just flawed—it runs counter to everything the school board stands for. At its core, it undermines the EMSB’s mission to foster peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic Quebec. Ortona was directly involved in the EMSB’s legal challenge at the Superior Court of Québec. From a practical perspective, Bill 21 will worsen staffing shortages by restricting the ability to hire and retain qualified people. But the damage goes deeper. “It sends a message of intolerance and exclusion to our students and their families,” Ortona says in a statement. The board’s opposition hinges on Section 23 of the Canadian Charter, which guarantees English-speaking minorities in Quebec the exclusive right to manage and control their own school system, a right they argue Bill 21 directly violates. But while the EMSB warns the law goes too far, the Parti Québécois and the CAQ argue it doesn’t go far enough. As Quebec’s government doubles down with Bill 94, Farhat has quietly built a life elsewhere—one that offers the freedom Bill 21 denied her. She now feels she’s able to fully commit to her role as a judicial officer and champion the rule of law. “I’m not expending energy fighting for my right to exist and my right to work,” she says about her current career as an administrative judge with the federal government. “No one cares about what I’m wearing on my head.” The post Bilingual, Educated, Qualified—and Still Not Welcome in Quebec first appeared on The Walrus.