Harper embraces wedge politics

Re: “Ban on wearing niqabs at citizenship ceremonies handled clumsily,” Rob Breakenridge, Opinion, Sept. 22.

Given that Zunera Ishaq has to reveal her face to prove her identity, has decided to wear the niqab of her own free will, and there is no law against her wearing the niqab in public, I keep wondering what Canadian value Prime Minister Stephen Harper is upholding?

Is it the waste of hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars fighting the Canadian Constitution? Or is it about men telling women what they can or cannot wear? Supporting religious intolerance? The tyranny of the majority? Wow, starting to sound very non-Canadian to me.

As for that “majority,” during the Second World War, the majority of Canadians supported the imprisonment of thousands of Canadians of Japanese descent and denying asylum to a boat load of Jewish refugees. That majority was wrong then, as it is today.

Harper’s stance is not about Canadian values. It is about using wedge politics and him doing his Chicken Little dance to whip up xenophobia hysteria in order to pander to the stranger danger that exists in all of us in order to get votes over an issue about a ceremony for one person 99.999 per cent of Canadians will never see.

Surely, Canadians can chill out and do better than give into such nonsense.

Bruce A. McFaul, Calgary