English school board

By Trevor Greenway

While English school boards across the province are celebrating a key victory with Bill 40, another fight is brewing over Bill 94, the province’s extension of Bill 21 that restricts public servants from wearing religious symbols on the job. Bill 94 will extend the law to include all staff and volunteers – including janitors, after-care staffers, volunteers and librarians – from wearing religious symbols at work. 

Bill 21 had a significant impact locally in 2021 after a Chelsea teacher, Fatemeh Anvari, was banned from her Grade 3 classroom for wearing a hijab. The case reignited the debate around Bill 21, and the controversial law is now headed to the Supreme Court of Canada for a constitutional challenge. 

Labadie told the Low Down that the WQSB is hesitant to agree to the bill, as it contains language that could later be used against the school board when Bill 21 heads to the Supreme Court. 

“There’s a lot of language in that bill that if we adopted it as a code of ethics for staff and teachers, it would show that we supported Bill 21, and that we agreed with the policies,” said Labadie. She added that the WQSB lawyers are now parsing through the bill before the board signs off. 

“The last thing we wanted to do was to have this language that was embedded in these blanket laws that we were supposed to adopt as a board to then be used against us.”

Singfield said the extension of Bill 21 is an attack on the school board’s policy on inclusion, equity and diversity. 

“We speak about the importance of honouring the integrity of our diverse population,” Singfield told the Low Down. “We speak about inclusion, we speak about equity and not as things that we check off on boxes on a list, but rather things that we want to cultivate as pillars of our community.”

The legislation would also prohibit Muslim girls from wearing a full-face veil. The bill states that students will be obliged to “have their face uncovered when they are on the premises placed at the disposal of a school, a vocational training centre or adult education centre or a private educational institution.” The bill would also restrict parents from wearing face coverings when picking up their kids from school.