A bad ban comes round again
There are three sins in Quebec’s proposed Bill 62, announced last week. The first is that, as National Post columnist Chris Selley recently put it, the law would bureaucratize the system by which common-sense accommodations are granted to public-sector workers who happen to require their faces to be covered for religious reasons.
The second is that it is gives licence to the federal government to follow suit with legislation that would forbid new citizens from wearing the niqab in citizenship ceremonies; a position that was not only struck down by the Federal Court earlier this year, but flies in the face of common sense. It does, however, play well to an electorate increasingly wary of the impacts of multiculturalism in general, and of Islam in particular.
The third sin is that it forces us to continue talking about the issue.
When stacked against the odious Quebec Charter of Values, Bill 62 is comparatively benign. The Parti Québécois’s bid to codify state secularism would have banned public servants from wearing conspicuous religious symbols — particularly the wrong religious symbols — which would have, in effect, barred some devoutly religious citizens from large segments of public life.
Bill 62 merely wishes to ensure that faces remain uncovered for security reasons, and that public servants must deal with the public with their visages in open view. And even that last point is somewhat flexible. “An accommodation that involves an adaptation of either of those rules is possible but must be refused if the refusal is war- ranted in the context for security or identification reasons or because of the level of communication required,” the proposed law states.
In other words, Bill 62 would forbid Quebecers from getting on a plane or obtaining a drivers’ licence with a face covering — which is already the case. And civil servants will have to ensure they can do their jobs effectively if they wish to wear a niqab or similar vestment, which is reasonable.
Why the National Assembly’s nod is required to ensure such a common sense measure remains a mystery. It’s a law in search of a social ill that needs rectifying. A degree of identity politics and appeasement is the only rationale here. Premier Philippe Couillard is trying to win over the voters who were swayed by the original Values Charter, while avoiding the distasteful implications of its full-fledged adoption.
But the real shame is that this half measure gives new credence to the Conservative Party’s bid to the same base with its own niqab ban — itself a needlessly polarizing approach. Why the governing party needs to ban a piece of cloth during a citizenship ceremony, that a citizen retains the full right to wear anywhere and anytime else, has never been explained beyond a passing shrug and an insistence, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper that: “it’s not how we do things here.”
Indeed. To think the Conservatives were once the party that vowed to fight Quebec’s Charter of Values, promising to launch a legal challenge if ever the bill did become law.
“We will be closely monitoring the outcome of this legislation,” said then minister of employment and multiculturalism Jason Kenney. “If the bill as currently framed, seeking to ban certain Canadians from participation in public life, becomes law, we will closely analyze it. If it is found to violate our Constitution and our constitutionally protected freedom of religion, we will challenge it.”
But, alas, that was back in 2013. That was how we did things here, then. Things have apparently gone downhill a bit since then.
The worst part about Quebec’s revived niqab ban law is that it gave the federal government cover to discuss their own