> "Quebecers are proud of having gotten the Church out of public institutions, and see Islam as Catholicism on steroids."

I could sympathize more if I believed that. But it doesn't seem to be what people are actually saying or reacting to. All I'm hearing is "they're covering their faces and that's not how we do things around these parts".

And if overbearing theocratic stuff were the issue, worrying about veils would be a pretty silly way to approach it, because veils aren't an expression of legal or even moral authority the way many of the trappings of the Catholic church were or are.

Those crucifixes are still direct endorsements of a specific religion by public bodies. That's why they were originally there. That's still why a lot of their supporters want them there. Handwaving about "culture" doesn't make that any less true, any more than it can make the Confederate flag in the US not about slavery.

When Islam starts doing something remotely that overbearing, we can talk.