Premier Marois' Charter of Québécois Values white paper draws selectively and mischievously on the work of the Quebec Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodement reliées aux differences culturelles. The commissioners, Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, released their exhaustive and somewhat controversial 2008 report, entitled Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation, to very mixed reviews from the media, stakeholders, academics, and politicians. The Bouchard/Taylor Report's numerous recommendations attempted to find the all-too-elusive sweet spot between the need for meaningful yet reasonable accommodations of religious visible minorities and what they argued was the ever-pressing imperative for the Québécois majority community, in the face of ever-expanding pluralism, to promote and achieve a more robust dynamic of integration of immigrants via a unifying Québécois identity shared by all Quebec's citizens.Their robust, nuanced and balanced recommendations addressed several main themes: the need for greater education regarding diversity; the necessity of a comprehensive informal harmonization of reasonable accommodation practices; a more comprehensive approach to the full integration of immigrants; a clearer explanation and understanding of the concept of interculturalism; a far better management of Bill 101 that focused on French in the workplace; the imperative of addressing quickly all matters of inequality and discrimination; and finally, the need for the Quebec state, via a White Paper, to spell out and then formalize the conception of secularism. Legislation, among other measures, should remove the crucifix from the wall of the National Assembly, terminate the saying of prayers at municipal council meetings, and put a moratorium on the development of private ethno-denominational schools.The Commissioner's extensive and controversial Report received little attention from the beleaguered Charest Liberal government in the lead up to December 2008 election. On 22 September 2009, Premier Charest's slim majority government tabled Bill 16 that outlined the approach that the Quebec government should take to cultural diversity by addressing the matter of reasonable accommodations. When the Bill stirred up a very nasty political backlash, Premier Charest quickly backed away from implementing any recommendations of the Bouchard/Taylor Report.Facing declining revenue caused by the Great Recession, Premier Charest's Liberal government struggled with balancing the budget. After their 2011-12 budget proposed to raise university tuition fees by $1,625 over five years, radical students shut down most classes by organizing a prolonged and at times series of violent protests supported by the Parti Québécois. Shocked by this development and confident of the backing of the business community and the public, on 18 May 2012 the Charest government, with the support of the recently created Coalition Avenir Québec, passed Bill 78.  It empowered the state to end the boycott of classes and to place firm restrictions on all protests. Fines for infractions ranged from $1000 to $125,000 per day. Bill 78 was strongly criticized as draconian and unconstitutional because it violated civil liberties. The student protests continued for a fortnight but then subsided as summer arrived.The Charest government, hoping to capitalize on the student crisis, called a general election for 4 September 2012. The presence of François Legault's Coalition Avenir Québec, comprising fiscal and social conservative nationalists from rural/suburban Quebec ridings, split the vote three ways. Marois' Parti Québécois won a minority government with a plurality of 54 seats with 32% of the votes. Charest's QLP was reduced to 50 seats and 31% (42% in 2008) of the vote. The CAQ won 109 seats with 27% of the vote and held the balance of power. The election was a vigorously contested affair ending in a failed gunshot attack on Pauline Marois during her victory speech. Within days, Marois was sworn in as the first woman Premier of Quebec. Her cabinet cancelled several of the decisions of the outgoing Charest government, including the suspension of most sections of Bill 78.  Premier Marois' minority government, confronted with vigorous opposition from the CAQ and a revived QLP under new leadership, has faced considerable frustration and delays in getting the PQ's social, linguistic, democratic reform and economic and budgetary legislation through the National Assembly.In order to advance the PQ's secessionist agenda and reunite the party, Premier Marois desperately needs a majority government. The Premier, with the support of her Cabinet, decided to focus the Fall 2013 session on crafting a legislative solution to the controversial issue of religious accommodation and Québécois identity.  This is what led to the Marois' PQ government issuing a white paper entitled Because We Believe in Our Values. The paper outlines what Marois' government believes are the growing problems associated with the incessant demands of the religious ethnocultural communities for what the government considers unreasonable accommodations. The PQ government contends that these unreasonable accommodations are preventing the timely and very necessary integration/assimilation of these religious ethnocultural communities into to the majority Québécois society.The government's legislative approach, outlined in Because We Believe in Our Values, goes well beyond the nature and scope of the recommendations in the 2008 Bouchard/Taylor Report. The PQ government contends that the reasonable accommodation crisis, if left unresolved, will do lasting harm to the Québécois identity and social cohesion, which it claims are based on the fundamental values that reside at the heart of the québécois nation - secular state institutions, gender equality, and the primacy of the French language.The government proposes radical amendments to the 1975 Charte québécoise des droits et libertés de la personne. These amendments would affirm the collective rights of the Québécois nation and the power of the Quebec state. The principles of state neutrality and the secular character of all of Quebec's public institutions would be enshrined in the Quebec Charter as fundamental values. The Charter would define what are reasonable accommodations and set out a framework for demands of reasonable accommodation that would take into account gender equality and the secular nature of all of Quebec's public institutions.Other legislative and regulatory measures would: outline the responsibility of all representatives of the state to remain neutral in all religious matters in the exercise of their duties; prevent all civil servants from wearing any and all ostentatious religious signs; require that any person involved in state services, civil servants and citizens, be required to do so with an open face; and, finally, set up an elaborate framework to oversee the process whereby all government ministries, agencies and establishments will set out policies and procedures to deal with all requests for religious accommodation.The Parti Québécois government's highly legalized, state driven, and heavily bureaucratized approach to addressing the tensions created by demands for religious accommodation measures has created a veritable tsunami of criticism. One of the most outspoken critics is Charles Taylor, who has denounced and ridiculed the radical nature of the PQ Charter of Québécois Values as being “hypocritical, terribly unfair, and as laughable as a Monty Python comedy sketch”.Several former PQ leaders – namely, Jacques Parizeau, Bernard Landry, and Lucien Bouchard – have denounced Marois' approach for different political reasons. Several Québécois intellectuals and many journalists have expressed serious concerns. Quebec business and professional organizations are fearful that the PQ's radical approach will harm the economy. Catholic Church Bishops warn that it will create more cultural ghettos and impede integration. Québécois feminist organizations are deeply divided on the proposals. Former and current leaders of all three national parties have denounced the PQ's proposals as a politically driven, largely unwarranted, and very dangerous attack on religious freedoms. There has been, quite rightly, a comprehensive outcry against what the PQ government is proposing to do to deal with its unreasonable accommodations crisis from Canadians all across Canada.On the constitutional level the proposed amendments to the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms would allow collective rights to trump individual rights as well as create a hierarchy of rights by enabling gender rights to trump religious rights. Amendments would compel Quebec courts to interpret individual freedoms in the context of Québécois values. This would set up a very nasty political clash between the Quebec and Canadian Charters of Rights and Freedoms with the latter, which is part of the Constitution Act, 1982  – i.e., the supreme law of Canada – trumping the former. If the Parti Québécois puts its radical proposals into law, handing dangerous power to its state secular clerics, and if it wins a majority in the next provincial election by doing so, the outcome does not bode well for the national unity of Canada. In short, this matter is serious and deserves the close attention of all concerned Canadians.This is the third of a three part series by Michael Behiels. Click here to read part 1 of this series: “Understanding the origins of Quebec's policy of coercive conformity”.  Click here to read part 2 of the series: “The Nationalist and Catholic Origins of the PQ's Charter of Québécois Values”.Michael Behiels, Emeritus Professor, University of Ottawa. He has written and lectured extensively on Canadian political affairs, with a particular focus on political, ideological and constitutional development pertaining to the Canadian federal system and Quebec's role within the federation. His latest co-edited book is The State in Transition: Challenges for Canadian Federalism (Invenire Books, 2011).