Once again, a fierce social, ideological and political battle is now underway in Quebec.  This battle was deliberately provoked by the Parti Québécois government's determination to legislate - via its proposed Charter of Québécois Values - what religious symbols can and cannot be worn in the public and para-public sectors.  Premier Marois released an orientation document, Parce Que Nos Valeurs, On y Croit (Because We Believe in Our Values), which outlines in some detail why and how the PQ government proposes to legislate a binding framework that will provide a guide for provincial and municipal governments as well as all para-public institutions in their attempts to negotiate reasonable accommodations that respect core Québécois values. These are defined as the separation of state and religions, the secular nature of state institutions, the equality of men and women, and the primacy of the French language.The PQ's Charter of Québécois Values is the latest stage in Quebec's long evolution from a Church-State into a secular Nation-State, a process that began in the 1950s with the emergence of a secular, middle-class Québécois neo-nationalist movement. The political transformation of the Quebec state and its institutions took off once the Quiet Revolution erupted in 1960 following the election of Jean Lesage's Liberal government. Hundreds of traditional nationalist Catholic priests and nuns were defrocked within a decade. A secular cadre of neo-nationalist and secessionist intellectuals, state technocrats, and politicians usurped the Catholic Church's influence over government and politics by taking control over all education and health and social services institutions.Once again, Quebecers and Canadians are confronted with a very old and very controversial question. How do Canada's two French- and English- speaking host societies achieve the integration of recent ethno-cultural and religious minority communities into their respective midst?Canada's long history of immigration reveals that prior to the 1960s neither French Canada nor British Canada coped very well with immigration. French Canadians rejected in principle all immigration and made no concessions to those few immigrants who settled into their midst. All UK immigrants brought their differences and historical grudges with them to Canada. By 1900, members of an emerging British-Canadian nation used the workplace, Protestant Churches, health and social service organizations and schools to coerce non-British newcomers to integrate and eventually assimilate into the British-Canadian society. After WWII, for demographic and economic reasons, Ottawa relaxed immigration rules to accept millions of European refugees and immigrants. In the 1960s, Canada adopted increasingly liberal, open door immigration policies that continue to attract every year nearly 250,000 immigrants from every continent of the globe to settle into Canada's rapidly expanding metropolitan regions.The constant influx of Caucasian Europeans and then Third World visible minority immigrants poses a complex challenge for all governments and Canadians seeking the proper approach to achieving unity within diversity. This challenge has been particularly troublesome for the Francophone majority community of Quebec, which is divided between its secular, educated, urbanized middle classes on Montreal Island and its suburban, small town and rural communities off the Island. Prior to the 1970s, most immigrant families opted to learn English so they could get good jobs and have the opportunity to move anywhere in North America.  By the late 1960s, the emerging political and social cleavages in Quebec occurred along language lines. The expanding Francophone urban working and middle classes compelled the new activist state of Quebec to use the French language as a tool of economic and social promotion for the Québécois majority.In 1974, after a long and acrimonious debate, Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa passed Bill 22, The Charter of the French Language. It made French the official language of the Quebec state at all levels, compelled most immigrant parents to enrol their children in French language schools, and urged large corporations to function in the French language if they wished to do business with the state. In 1977, René Lévesque's Parti Québécois implemented Bill 101, a much tougher and more controversial version of the Charter of the French Language. While the most flagrant discriminatory aspects of Bill 101 were thrown out by the Supreme Court of Canada, within two decades Bill 101 fulfilled most of the socio-economic objectives of its framers and supporters.  Francophones are now in charge of Quebec's public and private sector economies and their individual and family median incomes surpass those of most Anglophones and Allophones. The vast majority of visible immigrant children are now educated in Greater Montreal's French-language schools and, if they choose, they can work in French in the private and para-public sectors. Very few immigrants are Quebec civil servants.Premier Marois' struggling minority Parti Québécois government, for electoral, nationalist and secessionist reasons, has decided to move well beyond language as the major instrument of state power and socio-economic promotion.  It has decided to challenge head-on Ottawa's conception and practice of multiculturalism. Since 1948 when multicultural policies were first put into practice, Québécois neo-nationalists have condemned Ottawa's multiculturalism programs.  Quebec's Francophone majority perceives itself as a distinct, autonomous nation, not simply the largest of Canada's many ethnocultural communities.  The Trudeau government in 1971 implemented a formal policy of multiculturalism within Canada's bilingual framework - entrenched as s. 27 of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms and in the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act.Québécois intellectuals and politicians continue to denounce multiculturalism, however defined and enacted, as a devious attempt to equate the Québécois nation with the increasingly numerous ethnocultural minority communities of Canada.  Instead, since the 1970s the Quebec state has promoted and implemented its policy of inter-culturalism, one that promotes active cross-cultural dialogue that, over time, will achieve integration and eventually full assimilation of immigrants into the host Québécois majority society.  It short, the Quebec state's politicians and technocrats practice a slow but determined policy of coercive Québécois conformity, one that closely resembles the Anglo conformity policy practised by the Canadian state and British Canadians until the 1960s.This brief background puts into context the Parti Québecois government's drive to determine via legislation and substantive amendments to Quebec's Charter of Rights and Freedoms what constitutes reasonable accommodations for Montreal's religious visible minority communities and how these can be put into place and regulated by the Quebec state.This analysis is the first of a three part series by Michael Behiels.  Click here to read part 2 of this series: The Nationalist and Catholic Origins of the PQ's Charter of Québécois ValuesMichael 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).