Bouchera Chelbi, a schoolteacher who wears a Muslim headscarf, sat in the ornate salon rouge of the National Assembly and spilled her heart out to the legislators before her. Quebec’s plan to restrict teachers’ right to wear religious symbols, she said, was going to hurt.
“As a woman, I don’t accept that you dictate to me how I can dress,” she told the MNAs.
Ms. Chelbi’s comments were both pointed and remarkable: After six days of committee hearings into Quebec’s disputed legislation on religious symbols, she was the first and only teacher in a headscarf to address politicians about it.
The Coalition Avenir Québec government heard 36 speakers at its hearings on Bill 21, which would forbid police officers, prosecutors, schoolteachers and other public servants from wearing religious items on the job. But it largely left out the people who would be the law’s direct targets, such as Ms. Chelbi.
#Quebec hurtling toward religious symbols ban, which critics say would not only be discriminatory, but a nightmare to enforce /via @globeandmail https://t.co/GBfCCMXuR8
— Huda Mzioudet هدى مزيودات 🇹🇳 (@hudamzioudet) May 19, 2019