Zunera Ishaq, the woman in the eye of the storm, is now a citizen, veil and all

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 home, 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 facecovering veils at citizenship ceremonies. The federal Conservatives introduced the ban to little fanfare in January 2011.

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 to the 2012, arguing that the ban was discriminatory and was a “personal attack on me, my identity as a Muslim woman and my religious beliefs.”