At the same time, the less likely the Bill 21 issue looks to be solved at all, the shabbier and more craven Trudeau and his federal counterparts appear
Quebec Premier François Legault and his fellow nationalists turned crimson this week at news the English Montreal School Board was considering using $125,000 from the federal government’s Court Challenges Program to fund its legal battle against new restrictions on certain civil servants’ attire — most numerously, teachers who wear hijabs.
The Court Challenges Program, originally designed to help interest groups advance language rights in the courts, falls in and out of official favour. Most recently the Harper Conservatives axed it in 2006, and the Trudeau Liberals resuscitated it. But Quebec nationalists have no cause to be “shocked.” These are precisely the circumstances in which the program was born, only with ethnic and religious rights standing in for linguistic ones.
That is exactly the calculation behind Trudeau-the-younger’s hesitancy thus far to challenge Bill 21 officially. Indeed, it is the same cat-and-mouse game Ottawa has played with nationalist governments in Quebec City for 40 years. Bock-Côté had a hand in creating Pauline Marois’ “values charter,” which also had sovereigntist motivations. The plan was a PQ majority would pass the legislation without invoking the notwithstanding clause, La Presse reported in 2014, citing well-placed sources; and when federal courts blew it to bits, Marois would have “a powerful lever for sovereignty.”
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