Woman at centre of niqab debate now a Canadian
In this regular feature until Election Day, the National Post captures a telling moment in time in the 2015 campaign. In a crowded Ontario office, Zunera Ishaq held up her right hand and recited the oath of citizenship.
“I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Second Queen of Canada, her heirs and successors,” she said, clutching a tiny Canadian flag in her left hand.
And as she always does whenever she leaves her Mississauga, Ont., home, the 29-year-old Ishaq was wearing a niqab.
Before the oath, she was taken into a room where she took off her veil in front of a female officer and identified herself.
Although the prospect of this moment became one of the defining issues of the 2015 election, nobody knew exactly when it was coming. Aside from the smartphones of family and friends, only a CBC camera captured the scene.
“It’s very important to stand up for your right. If you will not stand up for your right you will not get it,” Ishaq, now a Canadian citizen, told the broadcaster.
For the past three years, Ishaq — who immigrated to Canada from Pakistan in 2008 — has been fighting a ban on the wearing of face-covering veils at citizenship ceremonies. The federal Conservatives introduced the ban to little fanfare in January 2011, just three months before the last election.
At the time, then-immigration minister Jason Kenney called it “frankly bizarre” that women had been allowed to wear niqabs and burkas while swearing the oath of citizenship.
Ishaq mounted a legal challenge, arguing the ban was discriminatory and was a “personal attack on me, my identity as a Muslim woman and my religious beliefs.”
A federal judge agreed and struck down the ban earlier this year; two subsequent Conservative appeals were denied.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has since made it a major campaign issue to reintroduce the ban if he is reelected on Oct 19. “I will never tell my young daughter that a woman should cover her face,” Harper said during a French language debate in September.
As the niqab stance revived the Tories’ electoral fortunes, Harper also promised a Barbaric Cultural Practices hotline and hinted at a ban on niqabs in the civil service.
Ishaq grew up in a moderately religious family in Pakistan that eschewed religious clothing, although she chose to start wearing the niqab in her teen years. Having obtained her citizenship just in time to vote, Ishaq said she found all the attention “ironic.”
“We have a crisis of jobs right now. There is the big global issue of refugees. We are not paying attention to these issues and just focusing on a single person,” she told the National Post earlier this week.