The Minister of Education in the Quebec government, Bernard Drainville, banned the ministry’s schools from turning classrooms into places of prayer.

“Our schools are secular and must remain so. Therefore, I will send a directive to school service centers to ensure that classrooms remain classrooms and do not become prayer rooms,” Drainville said in a talk with journalists on Tuesday morning.

The minister was commenting on a report by the "Cogeco" news agency stating that two high schools in the city of Laval, north of Montreal Island, allowed students to gather in classrooms to pray after they had been gathering in inappropriate places, such as staircases and parking lots, to perform prayers.

Faced with the increasing demand, the two schools preferred to limit the practice of prayer to specific classrooms.

“There are cases of schools, at least two, that caught my attention,” said Minister Drainville, who had hinted yesterday that the issue was that these rooms did not allow students of all religious denominations to enter, adding: “School is not a place of prayer, and no person or group should be allowed to use a classroom as a prayer room. I find that our law on secularism is clear enough; it says that the State of Quebec is secular.”

The Quebec Minister of Education added that he cannot prevent students from praying at school and urged those willing to pray to do so quietly.

In the same context, on Wednesday, the National Assembly (the legislative assembly) of Quebec unanimously adopted a proposal presented by the Quebec Party (which calls for Quebec’s independence from Canadian federalism) reminding that “public schools are not places of worship” and that “establishing prayer rooms, regardless of denomination, in a public school building contradicts the principle of secularism.”