Hope for tolerance of religious face covers
Critics of secularism law find irony Quebecers being urged to cover faces
Three years ago, Warda Lacoste was at the centre of a fight against Quebec’s attempt to ban religious face coverings for people who were giving or receiving public services.
The Montreal woman says she was spat on, verbally harassed and even had a bottle of beer thrown at her when she was out in public wearing a full-face veil, known as a niqab, in that time of heightened tensions.
Lacoste (who previously went by the surname Naili) said the experience marked her. “It was quite a challenge,” she said in a recent interview.
The rules against face-covering proposed by the provincial Liberal government of the day were suspended after a court challenge, but they were revived last year as part of the Coalition Avenir Quebec government’s secularism law, Bill 21.
These days, Lacoste, 36, said there is something strange about seeing Quebec Premier François Legault urge Quebecers to cover their faces in public to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Lacoste recognizes the COVID-19 crisis is real in Quebec, which has recorded more than half of all the confirmed cases in Canada. “But of course, we can’t ignore that the situation has an ironic side,” she said.
For over a decade, heated debates have swirled in Quebec around issues of secularism, the accommodation of religious minorities and whether the government should regulate religious symbols in the public sphere.
The Legault government’s Bill 21 bars some public-sector employees in positions of authority from wearing hijabs, kippas, turbans and other religious dress at work. It also stipulates that people receiving and giving public services must do so with their faces uncovered, though there is an exception for anyone “whose face is covered for reasons of health.”
This week, the premier said he “strongly” recommends that Quebecers wear protective masks, especially on public transportation, to try to prevent the transmission of COVID-19.
The Quebec government is donating one million masks to the City of Montreal, the epicentre of the provincial outbreak, Legault announced on Friday. It is also sending $6 million to public transit agencies in the Montreal area to distribute free masks to riders.
Legault has not made wearing a mask mandatory, however, telling reporters that it would be legally difficult to implement such a measure. “We’re not excluding it, but for right now, we’re not there yet,” he told reporters on Wednesday. The comparison between Quebec’s secularism law and the COVID-19 mask directives is clear, said Jeffrey Reitz, director of the ethnic, immigration and pluralism studies program at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
But he said people have largely avoided connecting the two issues because while medical masks and religious face coverings may be similar in practice, they symbolize different things.