They came to the metro station in scarves and face masks, protesting Quebec’s new law requiring people to show their faces before gaining access to public services.
Warda Niali was among them, wearing her niqab and jilbab. The Quebec-born woman, who converted to Islam 14 years ago, rarely takes the bus alone for fear that she will “lose my nerves” under a barrage of hateful comments. Now, with the new law, it could get worse.
“Me, I don’t want to live my life in monochrome,” Ms. Niali, 33, told the crowd on Sunday in French. All she wanted, she said, was to be a part of the rich Quebecois culture, which she described with the Canadian symbol of multiculturalism — a mosaic.
“I want antifa, I want punks, I want straights,” she added. “I want L.G.B.T.Q. I want everyone in my society. Everyone has their place here.”
That is the case in most of Canada, which trumpets multiculturalism like a national anthem. But Quebec, the only French-majority province in an Anglophone country, has always been different, never quite signing onto the idea of multiculturalism, which was viewed from the outset as another way for English Canada to devalue Quebec’s culture and place in the country.
That difference has now been crystallized by the new law, which no one even knows how — or whether — to enforce.
“French Canadians in Quebec behave like psychologically embattled people,” said Patrice Brodeur, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Montreal. “They are a majority in the province, but a minority on the continent. That means they are often blind to the ways in which they end up being the victimizer, imposing itself on minority groups.”
The face-covering law, titled the State Religious Neutrality Law, is the current Quebec government’s effort to address an angry debate that has blistered social ties and dominated provincial politics for more than a decade. And it is not likely to settle the argument.
Just on Tuesday, a motion to debate removing a large crucifix that is prominently displayed in Quebec’s National Assembly was blocked by the governing party, the same party that created the face-covering law — illustrating yet again how fraught and emotionally charged the subject of religious symbols is in the province.
The debate centers on how traditionally white, Catholic and French-speaking Quebec can absorb and respect the religions and cultures of immigrants arriving to the province, while protecting its own identity.
Rejecting multiculturalism, the Quebecois speak instead of “interculturalism” — a concept of protecting both French culture and minority rights. But until now, that concept has never been codified.
The first try came in 2008 by a government commission, which was created to respond to a so-called “accommodation crisis,” when conflicts between members of religious groups and local institutions made regular headline news. One involved the Y.M.C.A. in Montreal, which replaced windows in its exercise room with frosted glass at the request of the synagogue next door so that Orthodox students would not see women exercising.
Run by two well-respected academics, the commission issued 37 recommendations focused on increasing integration, reducing intolerance and secularizing the state. Controversially, it suggested that all state officials in positions of “coercive power” — like police officers and judges — be barred from wearing any religious symbols, and that the large crucifix hanging prominently in the provincial legislative chambers be removed.
The government voted unanimously to keep the crucifix, and the report was shelved.
The debate resurfaced in 2013, when a new provincial government suggested expanding the ban on religious symbols to all state employees.
Though cast as a bill on secularism, much of the debate stuck on voiles — the word used in Quebec for both hijabs and niqabs, because Muslims are the largest non-Christian religious group in the province, though only around 3 percent of the population according to the most recent census. (As for those who cover their faces, local estimates peg the number of women in the entire province of Quebec — population 8.39 million — who wear the niqab or burqa at 50 to 100.)
The role of women has played prominently in the debate.
“Quebec for the last 50 years has been fighting against the power of religion in public institutions,” said Diane Guilbault, the vice president of the advocacy group For the Rights of Women in Quebec. “Suddenly, this battle has become racist. Why? We were against religious symbols long before the first veils came here.”
For second-wave feminists like Ms. Guilbault, the memory of a powerful Roman Catholic Church that pushed Quebec women to stay home, produce the country’s highest birthrate and be excluded from public life is still potent.
In Quebec, unlike the rest of Canada, the Catholic church ran all hospitals, schools and social services until the 1960s, when a social movement known as the Quiet Revolution pushed it out. Women gained the right to vote in provincial elections only in 1940, two decades after most of the rest of the country.
“We are very proud of what we’ve accomplished over 50 years,” said Ms. Guilbault, 62. “We don’t want to go back.”
While Ms. Guilbault does not support the new law, she does think the niqab and burqa should be banned. “They are a symbol of the banishment of women,” she said.
Support for the law within Quebec is strong — 91 percent among French speakers, according to an online Angus Reid poll conducted last month that is often cited by the provincial government.
But denunciation of the new law from across the country has been vocal and swift. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that while Quebec makes its own laws, he believed women could make up their own minds on what to wear.
The premiers of Ontario and Alberta both slammed the law, with the Alberta leader, Rachel Notley, saying that it “smacks of Islamophobia.”
Human rights advocates and lawyers fear that the law will further isolate Muslim women and inflame anti-Muslim hate crimes, which have risen in recent years in Quebec and across the country. The most heinous was the murder of six Muslims in a Quebec City mosque last January.
“The message is this community is dysfunctional and needs to be corrected,” said Salam Elmenyawi, the president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, which represents 70 mosques and Islamic organizations. “This is institutional discrimination.”
The provincial justice minister, Stéphanie Vallée, who has said that the goal of the law is to ensure identification, communication and security, held a news conference on Tuesday to address the confusion and increasing protests the law has drawn.
People will have to show their faces only at preliminary contact with government workers, she clarified. They then can cover themselves again.
“No one will be thrown off public transit, be refused emergency health care or be chased out of a library,” she said, according to the local news media. “We do not have the intention of setting up an uncovered-face police.”
The agency that runs the Montreal subway and bus system said its workers would not enforce the law until it had been analyzed further. Some people think it will never be enforced.
“In winter, if a woman is wearing a full veil with her two kids and is waiting for the bus, will the driver not accept her?” said Gérard Bouchard, a retired history and sociology professor who was co-chairman of the commission on religious accommodation a decade ago. “No, this is nonsense. We can’t do that. Quebeckers are not hard people.”