The controversial poster showing a veiled woman at Montreal city hall will not be replaced until 2025, several months after Mayor Plante promised she would remove it.
On October 27, the mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, announced on the show Everyone is talking about it that the sign welcoming the town hall, installed since its reopening last June for a museum exhibition, would be changed in the name of secularism.
“I understand it, the discomfort […] We are in a secular society and our institutions must be secular,” she declared.
We will have to wait until February 2025 for it to be removed and replaced, indicated Catherine Cadotte, press secretary in the mayor’s office.
Without religious sign?
“For several weeks, the Office of the President has been working jointly with various services to develop a replacement concept. The priority is to develop a concept that ensures that everyone feels represented and welcomed at city hall.”
This new concept which will be revealed “in the coming weeks” will no longer show a veiled woman, the firm said in response to our questions.
However, the Plante administration is refusing, for the moment, to specify whether any religious sign will be represented there, contenting itself with saying that it will be “very different” from the current work.
The poster showing three people sparked controversy because the only woman depicted there is veiled. Groups, including the Mouvement laïque québécois (MLQ), had called for its withdrawal.
“There must be no religious sign on the new poster,” demands Daniel Baril, president of the MLQ. Secularism is a real neutrality of facts and appearance, therefore there is no religious sign [à l’hôtel de ville].»
The National Council of Canadian Muslims, which denounced the decision to remove the poster, is still concerned about the precedent it creates.
“We are not calling for a policy which says that there must absolutely be someone with a religious symbol all the time”, but will the City now establish a “distorted secularism where we demand that we make invisible the religious minorities”? he asks himself. “If so, it would be discriminatory.”
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