Fact-check: Two Muslim teachers fired for refusing to remove a hijab?

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Two online articles claim that two Muslim teachers in the Canadian province of Quebec were fired for refusing to remove their headscarves. This is a lie; A recently passed bill bans teachers from wearing religious symbols at work, but the law does not apply to those who held teaching jobs before March 27, 2019. Online articles have misrepresented the story of two Montreal women who were denied layoffs. Their hijab

The hoax story of two Muslim teachers fired in Canada’s francophone province of Quebec for refusing to remove their headscarves has been shared across Canadian social media since September 10, with more than 2,300 shares in the past two days. Two versions of the story were published on two different websites.

An article appeared in Daily Sabah, an online, pro-government media based in Turkey that often focuses on Islam in the West. The second article was published by the Cultural Action Party of Canada, a Canadian online media outlet that regularly publishes articles critical of immigration and Islam.

This led to both pro-Islam and anti-Islam Facebook pages promoting the same fake news, such as “Canadians Against Islamophobia” and “Quran is the best medicine for his soul” or “Pegida”. and “III%”, two anti-immigration groups, on the other hand.

The screenshot below shows the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle applied to the Daily Sabah article, and the many pages sharing the article.

However, the story is false. Two teachers in Montreal were recently fired for refusing to remove their headscarves for work, AFP Fact Check confirmed after contacting school boards in Canada’s second largest city.

The story appears to connect two true stories that resulted from Quebec’s recent passage of Bill 21, a secularism law that would have banned visible religious symbols for all public servants, including judges, bus drivers and teachers. is

The bill caused controversy in Canada’s second most populous province and in the rest of the country, in part because it violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but Quebec still uses the clause. Compelled by the Legislature of However, this provision is section 33 of the Canadian Constitution. It allows federal, provincial and territorial governments to override the constitution on certain matters.

On September 9, several provincial media reported two cases of Muslim women whose jobs were threatened by the law passed on June 16, 2019. In one case, a woman was asked to remove her headscarf or face dismissal at the Commission Scolaire de Montréal (CSDM) in Montreal. ).

On September 9, several provincial media reported two cases of Muslim women whose jobs were threatened by the law passed on June 16, 2019. In one case, a woman was asked to remove her headscarf or face dismissal at the Commission Scolaire de Montréal (CSDM) in Montreal. ).

CSDM spokesman Alain Peron declined to comment on an individual employee’s file, but said an article in the local French-language newspaper Le Doire was correct.

Yves Parenteau, press officer for the CSDM union, Alliance des Professeures et Professeurs de Montréal, also confirmed the story. “This is the only case (within CSDM) that was brought to our attention,” he added.

The second case involves two Muslim women who applied for teaching jobs at the Commission Scolaire de la Pointe-de-l’Île (CSPI) in the eastern part of Montreal. She was turned down when she said she would not remove her hijab to teach.

“Two people who applied to our school board were wearing obvious religious symbols. We informed them of the law, and they removed the religious symbols,” CSPI communications officer Valerie Baron told AFP in an email. He refused, so we did not hire him.

Michael Cohen, an administrator at English Montreal, an English-language school board, told AFP that his school board had not been put in a situation where it was an issue, “but when we do, it’s very It would be sad.”

Both articles quoted Catherine Beauvois St-Pierre, president of the Alliance des Professors and Professors de Montréal, as saying that St-Pierre had said that the two teachers who had been fired had first been asked to “take off their headscarves or be fired.” was asked to face.”

St-Pierre said something similar to the quote attributed to her while speaking on Quebec radio, but in reference to a professor at her school board who was asked to remove her hijab, but not fired. “I was really misquoted,” St-Pierre told AFP in an email.

Grandfather clause and inherited rights

Bill 21 was amended to include a “grandfather clause” that allows all employees who held their jobs prior to March 28, 2019, the date of the bill’s first proposal in the Quebec Legislative Assembly. , regardless of their choice to wear religious symbols they are allowed to retain.

However, in the case of teachers, this does not apply to those who were already employed and wish to move to a different school board, which is considered a different employer.

According to Parenteau of the Alliance des Professeurs et Professeurs de Montréal, the woman who was asked to remove the headscarf or be fired was already working as a teacher before March 28, but changed school boards after that date. , which made this provision null and void.

In the case of the two women who were not hired, Quebec education ministry spokesman Brianne St. Louis told AFP in an email that “teachers cannot be hired because the law prohibits teachers from religious symbols.” Because they were not already employed, they were not protected by vested rights.

“There’s a double standard in this law,” Parenteau lamented, “people with seniority have rights that recent hires don’t have, and if you work in a private school instead of a public school, you have There are other rights,” he said, referring to the fact that the bill. 21 does not apply to teachers of private schools.

When asked to comment on Quebec’s Bill 21 during a September 12 federal election campaign press conference in Victoria, British Columbia, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he did not believe “any The state should legislate what people can or cannot wear, recognizing that “it would be harmful for the federal government to cavalierly insert itself into this debate.”

While the case of two Muslim teachers being fired for refusing to remove their hijab may be legal in Quebec in the future, the story currently circulating is not true.