QUEBEC CITY - When the Human Rights Tribunal ruled that Saguenay Mayor Jean Tremblay must cease saying the Lord's Prayer before sessions, he ignored the suggestion.
When the same judgment ruled that the crucifixes on the walls of Saguenay City Hall were discriminatory, he ignored that too.
But ignoring the ruling is apparently not enough.
Tremblay started his attempt to overturn the decision in a Quebec City courtroom Friday.
"And I will continue to fight for the respect of the Christian people," Tremblay told CTV Montreal's Quebec City bureau chief Kai Nagata.
Tremblay says he has raised nearly $160,000 from around North America to fight a legal battle to preserve the religious references.
And he says he will take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if required.
Tremblay was not in court Friday, but the city's lawyers argued that if a 25-second pre-session prayer is discriminatory so then are such institutions as the national anthem, the cross on Mount Royal, holidays such as Easter and Good Friday as well as many symbols and flags.
"The words ‘God keep our land,' every town or street with Saint in the name, the cross on the Quebec flag, it will all be open targets for discrimination lawsuits," said city lawyer Isabelle Racine.
The Quebec Secular Movement argued that such symbols and practices were inappropriate in such a place as a town hall, and that the city's argument is misleading. The movement's lawyer Marie-Michelle Poisson says the group has no intention of attacking the province's heritage symbols, but will fight to make sure the province's public institutions remain secular.
Quebec Court of Appeals Judge Lorne Giroux will now have a few days to decide whether he will hear this appeal.
The mayor has already expressed his desire to see this wind up in the Supreme Court, and it would appear that he has the financial support to carry on his legal crusade indefinitely.
