Column · 7 October 2026
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Public money for religious schools is over: Quebec takes its classrooms back
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s government is preparing to cut public funding to religious schools, the ones that receive a tax credit as religious organizations. Announced in Granby on September 27, the pledge is now the line of the new Parti Québécois government. After years of secularism with a double standard — neutrality on the podium, confessional cheques in the back room — Quebec is finally taking its schools back. Taxpayers’ money is not there to train the faithful.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said it plainly: a Parti Québécois government will stop funding religious schools, meaning those that benefit from a tax credit as religious organizations. Announced on September 27 in Granby, the commitment becomes, with the October 5 election, the direction of the new government. For Quebec secularism, this is excellent news. Late, but excellent.
For years Quebec preached state neutrality with one hand and signed cheques with the other. As early as 2024 the PQ was already talking about some fifty religious-vocation schools and a rough figure of about $160 million a year. The public school was supposed to be neutral. The subsidized school could still pass on a confession — Bible, Torah or Quran — with everyone else’s money. That contradiction had lasted long enough.
A school is not a mosque, a yeshiva or a sacristy
Secularism is not a Montreal fad. It is Quebec’s historical compromise: after the Grande Noirceur, the people took the school away from the clergy and made it a common good. The Quiet Revolution was not fought so it could be undone by confessional subsidies and Canadian multiculturalism.
The principle is simple. Whoever wants a religious school pays for it. Whoever wants the taxpayers’ money follows the ministry curriculum and leaves faith at home, in the temple, the synagogue or the mosque. PSPP also made clear that the tax category will have to be cleaned up: some schools registered as religious organizations no longer run a confessional program and follow the state curriculum. Those are not the target. The target is schools that make religion a pedagogical project — and get part of it refunded by the tax office.
Bedford was not an accident
The PQ explicitly ties this turn to Bedford elementary school. A core of teachers linked to the same religious milieu imposed a climate of control there: girls set aside, content censored, a helpless administration. That was not an “intercultural discomfort.” It was entryism. And entryism feeds on three things: denial, public money, and the ban on naming the problem.
Naming it, precisely. The PQ government also wants to ban, in elementary school, conspicuous religious dress and symbols that immediately assign a child to a belonging. It wants to ban partnerships between schools and places of worship, force places of worship to register as such rather than as “community centres,” and require foreign donations to religious organizations to be declared. Common sense again: a state that does not know who is funding its schools no longer controls its education.
Children should not be separated, from the age of six, by the veil, the kippah or an ostentatious cross. A school is a place where one learns to be Quebecois together — not an annex of the parish or of the community of origin.
Secularism and sovereignty are the same fight
This measure will hold only if Quebec defends its law. PSPP has pledged to keep the gains of Bills 21 and 94 and to renew the notwithstanding clause. He is right. Canadian multiculturalism, Ottawa’s courts and a certain left that confuses criticism of a religion with “hate” will work to undo all of it. Quebec secularism is not a provincial whim. It is the exercise of a legislative sovereignty that the federal regime recognizes only when it bothers no one.
A minority government will have to hold the line. Five seats short of a majority. The opponents of secularism — soft Liberals, the woke, confessional lobbies — will cry exclusion, racism, an attack on “rights.” Let them cry. The right not to fund proselytism is not negotiable. Neither is a little girl’s right not to be marked by a religious symbol before she can even read.
Common sense, at last
People may believe. They may pray. They may pass their faith on to their children, at home, in the evening, on Saturday or Sunday. What they can no longer do is demand that the neighbour pay for the operation. Public money is for learning French, mathematics, the history of Quebec and the sciences. Not for training the faithful.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s government has the mandate to close this file. Let it do it fast, clearly, and without apologizing. Secularism is not an offence. It is the condition for the school to become again what it must be: ours.
Bring back common sense.
