PM: Feds won’t challenge veil ban

OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau offered relatively mild criticism on Thursday of a new Quebec law that bans people from providing or receiving public services with their faces covered and asserted that it’s not up to the federal government to challenge its constitutionality.

The prime minister’s response to Bill 62, passed Wednesday by Quebec’s Liberal government, is in stark contrast to his swift, vehement and unrelenting attacks on the charter of Quebec values proposed by the former Parti Québécois government four years ago.

The PQ proposal would have barred public servants from sporting any ostentatious religious symbols. Trudeau once equated the fight against it to that of Martin Luther King’s fight against segregation, discrimination and the notion that there are second-class citizens.

Trudeau’s response to Bill 62, widely seen as targeting Muslim women who wear the niqab or burka, is also a far cry from his unequivocal denunciation during the 2015 election campaign of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s insistence on banning face coverings for anyone taking the oath of citizenship.

“It’s not up to the federal government to challenge this,” Trudeau said Thursday in Roberval, Que., where he spent the day campaigning for the federal Liberal candidate in Monday’s byelection.

He would not say whether he believes the law violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, saying only that “there’s going to be a lot of reflections on” the law’s constitutionality.

He added that the federal government “will certainly be looking at how this will unfold, with full respect for the national assembly that has the right to pass its own laws.”

Trudeau said it will be “healthy” to have debate on Bill 62, which goes much further than Harper’s ban on face coverings at citizenship ceremonies.

“I believe that we have an obligation to defend everyone’s rights, even when it makes us uncomfortable,” he said.