Officials in the Canadian province of Quebec want to ban prayer from public spaces, a measure that appears particularly targeted at Muslims but which could affect Christians as well.
Premier François Legault said last year that he does not want to see prayer in public places, according to a Thursday report from the Toronto Star.
“Seeing people on their knees in the streets, praying, I think we have to ask ourselves the question. I don’t think it’s something we should see,” the official said.
As a result, Secularism Minister Jean-François Roberge said that he will seek to address the issue this fall.
“The rise of street prayers is a serious and sensitive issue in Quebec,” Roberge said in a statement, per the Toronto Star.
“Last December, our government expressed its unease with this growing phenomenon, particularly in Montreal,” he continued.
The proposal comes after Islamic prayer rituals in Montreal were recorded last month, according to the CBC.
Some Muslims even made a point of praying outside of the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal, drawing substantial social media attention.
Islamic interest groups were not pleased with the suggestion that public prayer be prohibited.
Is this law authoritarian?
The Canadian Muslim Forum said in a statement that the government “should be focused on solving real problems, not policing the fundamental rights of its citizens.”
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association also said that banning public prayer is a violation of religious freedoms.
“Public spaces belong to everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs,” the group said. “These spaces must be places where diversity of belief, culture and identity is both respected and protected.”
Muslims now compose 4.9 percent of the Canadian population, marking over 1.8 million people, according to a Canadian government webpage.
That’s a significant increase from 2 percent of the population in 2001.
Muslims are now the nation’s second-largest religious group after Christianity.
Though the policy in Quebec does not appear to target Christians in particular, the Canadian government has otherwise forwarded anti-Christian narratives and passed anti-Christian policies.
In recent years, the government of now-former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau encouraged the claim that Christian schools in the nineteenth century dumped Native American bodies into mass graves, although no evidence for such an assertion has been found.
A ban on so-called conversion therapy passed three years ago was so broad that general condemnation of homosexuality and transgenderism could be considered violations of the law.
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