Yet for all of Drainville’s obstinacy, the PQ is a minority government, and would therefore be ripe for a Liberal filibuster, if there isn’t an election call beforehand. Should that happen, and there is a strong chance it will, the PQ has made no attempt to hide its desire to use the charter as its warhorse of choice. The charter came to the National Assembly today, but it won’t be limited to its walls anytime soon.

Actually, there was no need for a secular charter to deal with reasonable accommodations. The Commission des droits de la personne du Québec,the province’s own human-rights commission, which strongly condemned the ban on religious symbols, considers that the charter’s provision about accommodation to be totally unnecessary, since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms already guarantees full protection against gender discrimination.

Despite a handful of spectacular cases that were disproportionally inflated by some populist media, Quebec’s health services and school boards report practically no problems at the ground level. Just 3 per cent of the complaints received by the rights commission over a period of six years are related to religious accommodation. (Of those, the majority came from Jehovah’s Witnesses.)

English Canada certainly doesn’t need a secular charter. All it needs is administrators able to say no to unreasonable requests.

Brad Duguid, Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, said he respects the university’s jurisdiction to make its own decision, but “my inclination would be to side with the views of the prof on this.”

“It’s my opinion that … our universities should not be obliged to alter course curriculum in any way that would be seen as discriminatory with regard to gender equality,” Mr. Duguid said, calling such equity a “sacrosanct” principle.

Under Canadian law, public institutions and employers have a duty to accommodate difference. That could mean accommodating a disability, for example. It also covers religion. At a university, there are many requests, like a student asking to have an exam reschedueled for a religious holiday, that can be considered and sometimes addressed without harming or disadvantaging other students, or undermining values of gender and racial non-discrimination. That has to be the key test.

So what about a student asking to be segregated from fellow students? That crosses a line.

The York case was unusual, in that the course was online, in-person meetings were rare, and some students were allowed to miss them for non-religious reasons. We disagree with the university decision, but it isn’t a slippery slope to gender-segregated university classrooms. That just isn’t on the menu. Freedom means the right to privately practice a religion, and to publicly profess it. But the right extends only so far as it does not impose those beliefs on others or on institutions. A student asking for the classroom to be curtained off, to separate him from members of another sex, race or religion should not be granted his wish, and will not be.