Why doesn’t the CAQ target stilettos, while they’re at it?

Apparently, François Legault’s new Coalition Avenir Québec government has already addressed all the province’s real problems. Because, less than a week after taking office, it was already turning its attention to an imaginary one.

In Quebec, Muslim women who wear the chador, a shawl that covers the body and the head except for the face, are so rare that the media illustrate stories about them with visuals from abroad. As far as anybody knows, there are none in the province’s civil service.

The CAQ, however, is suspiciously obsessed with the chador. And even if it is non-existent in the civil service, the government said this week it intends to ban it anyway.

It would extend the former Liberal government’s law ( being challenged in court) against face coverings such as the niqab and burka, worn by a few Muslim women in Quebec, for people giving or receiving public services.

And the chador prohibition would be in addition to the CAQ’s proposal to forbid government employees in “positions of authority,” including teachers, from wearing any religious symbol. The Coalition would make “fashion police” more than a figure of speech.

The CAQ’s ayatollahs-in-reverse (the Iranian ones made women wear the chador, the Coalition would make them stop wearing it) say the shawl is a symbol of the oppression of women.

But why stop there, at chadors in the civil service that don’t exist anyway? Why not extend the ban to other things that are said to oppress women, and that unlike the chador, are actually worn by female civil servants (not to mention CAQ ministers and members of the National Assembly)?

Let’s start with high-heeled shoes. Google “high heels oppression,” and you’ll get “about 2,530,000 results,” including articles by feminists arguing that heels are empowering, because the added height makes the wearer feel stronger and more confident.

Other women, however, wear heels even though they find them uncomfortable, even painful, and risk injury, because they feel pressure from fashion to do so. Some of these women may work in the Quebec civil service. Shouldn’t the CAQ unshackle these slaves of fashion?

(The same, tongue-in-cheek point was made five years ago, about the former Parti Québécois government’s proposed “charter of values,” in a Montreal Gazette opinion article by Katharine Cukier. Plus ça change …)

Seeing high heels on a Québécoise, however, doesn’t bring out the feminist in a Quebec cultural nationalist the way merely imagining a veil on a Muslim woman does.

Neither does seeing the crucifix in the Assembly, a symbol of a Catholic Church that has been accused of historically oppressing Quebec women. The same government that would ban the chador from the civil service would keep the Assembly crucifix.

There are other inconsistencies in the CAQ’s positions.

The Coalition would forbid judges from wearing religious symbols, but allow the crucifix to remain in courtrooms.

It uses feminism as a pretext for restricting the wearing of the chador, but secularism for other religious symbols.

The CAQ bases its policy on a recommendation of the Bouchard-Taylor commission, though the recommendation did not mention either teachers or civil servants. The Coalition’s position has been criticized by the two commissioners, Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor.

And while the government claims not to be targeting minorities, Premier François Legault has assigned the file to the minister responsible for their integration.

The one consistency in the CAQ’s positions is that the brunt of their adverse effects would be felt by one group in particular: Muslims.

The most conspicuous and probably most numerous category of government employees who wear religious symbols are the Muslim women who wear the head scarf known as the hijab.

They, and other Muslim women who wear veils identified with their religion, would face discrimination in government employment, denied opportunities for integration.

A government that claims to be concerned about the symbolic oppression of women would oppress Muslim women in fact. And Muslims in general would be stigmatized.