@HydrogenGuide Everything we drink, eat, or inhale causes cancer, heart disease, and dementia. Each one lessens our life span from 6 months to five years so cumulatively we should expect to die some time in the next 30 days. Is that about right?
Perplexity? In early April 2026, Quebec’s National Assembly passed Bill 9, an expansion of the province’s secularism law (“laïcité”). The law is religion-neutral on its face — it does not single out Muslims. Its main provisions:
•Collective prayer in public spaces (streets, parks) requires advance municipal authorization, granted case-by-case.
•Designated prayer rooms are banned in universities, CEGEPs, and other public institutions.
•The religious-symbols ban (from 2019’s Bill 21) is extended to subsidized daycare and private-school staff.
•Public institutions can no longer offer exclusively religion-based menus (kosher/halal only).
•The law preemptively invokes the notwithstanding clause to shield it from Charter challenges.
Where the framing goes wrong
•The law does not “ban Muslims from praying in public.” It restricts collective religious practice in public roads and parks without municipal permission, and applies to all faiths — Christian Good Friday prayer marches in Quebec are also affected.
•Individuals praying privately or quietly in public are not the target; the law addresses organized group prayer events.
•Minister Jean-François Roberge has said the trigger was concern over street-prayer demonstrations at pro-Palestinian rallies, but the statute itself applies regardless of religion.
Hypocrite, Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman and Turkish governments systematically exterminated approximately 1.5 million Armenians, leaving hundreds of thousands more homeless and stateless, and altogether virtually wiping out the more than 2 million Armenians present in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.