To federal Minister Marc Miller, who accused him the day before of “harrying” Muslims by wishing to ban prayer in public, Quebec Prime Minister François Legault retorted on Wednesday that he would protect “at all costs” values of Quebec.
In a press scrum at the entrance to a meeting of the Council of Ministers, Mr. Legault did not wait to respond to the federal Minister of Immigration, who had deplored his outing against religious demonstrations in public on Tuesday.
“I will defend our values at all costs,” he said, at his first meeting with the parliamentary press since his visit to Paris to participate in the reopening of the doors of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral. Mr. Miller, he suggested, confuses “Muslims then Islamists”.
“Mr. Miller… I think he doesn’t really understand the issues, Mr. Miller,” added the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, a little later in the day.
To the surprise of many, during his press briefing reviewing the year 2024, the head of the Quebec government suggested Friday that prayers in public could soon be banned in Quebec. “We are looking at all possibilities, including the use of the derogation clause. We don’t want to see prayers in the streets,” Mr. Legault said, one day before his departure for France.
Asked about his perception of the differences between Muslims and Islamists, the CAQ elected official then contented himself with saying that “the concrete examples we saw there, […] it was Islamism.” “It was not other religions,” he added, before specifying that he did not want to see “people on their knees in the street.”
According to Marc Miller, this is another example which confirms that Mr. Legault “always pats Muslims on the back”. “I don’t know what Mr. Legault is going after. It seems to me that it is constantly the Muslims,” he said Tuesday before a meeting of the Council of Ministers.
Questioned by the media, Mr. Miller then highlighted the “irony” of Mr. Legault’s appearance at the inauguration of Notre-Dame in the context of his comments on secularism. The leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, for his part accused François Legault of “distracting” Quebecers while the health system is a “mess”.
Interviewed this week at Globe and MailMr. Miller’s colleague at Justice, Arif Virani, also went so far as to say that the preventive use of the derogation provision — a possibility that the Legault government is evaluating — should be avoided. “I have difficulty envisioning a circumstance where this would be justified,” he said in this interview given in English.
A few hours before a virtual meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his provincial and territorial counterparts, Mr. Legault asked that the federal government focus instead on developing a “plan to secure the borders” . “It is urgent that he [le] filing,” he said Tuesday morning.
This plan would allow Canada to avoid steep tariffs at the borders following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, according to Mr. Legault.
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