Tories use niqab to stoke fear, NDP says
MONTREAL— The Conservatives are running a “toxic” fear campaign that has put the party’s electoral success above the country’s need to work together on real issues like the environment, the economy and health care, says New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair.
He said Stephen Harper’s party has spearheaded a polarizing attack on the NDP over the marginal issue of Muslim women who wear the niqab — a controversial subject in Quebec — and found an “improbable ally” in the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois.
Mulcair said the two parties have inflated the debate over a Muslim woman’s right to wear the face covering at a citizenship ceremony — the subject of an ongoing court challenge — based on a “fear of the unknown and the foreign” so that it now occupies a central place in the election.
“The debate over the acceptance of refugees or the wearing of the niqab are legitimate debates in a democracy.
“But what is not legitimate is the manipulation of an issue purely for partisan purposes,” the NDP leader said in a speech in Montreal.
“If some of these women are being oppressed, we have to reach out to them. It’s not by depriving them of their Canadian citizenship and their right that we can help them.”
Mulcair’s decision to address the issue is as much out of principle as strategy ahead of Thursday night’s French-language leaders√ debate. Though a relatively novel issue in the rest of Canada, Quebecers have been debating the accommodation of religious minorities for much of the last decade. Recently, the discussion has been driven by a proposed provincial ban on public servants wearing religious symbols in the workplace, a so-called values charter, as well as a spate of terrorism cases involving young Muslims earlier this year.
The Liberals and NDP say that as long as a candidate for Canadian citizenship can prove their identity they should be allowed to wear the niqab. Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has classified the practice is “offensive” to most Canadians and “rooted in a culture that is anti-women.”
But the NDP has also been tripped up on the matter. One of the party’s Quebec candidate said last week that Mulcair should open up the Constitution to abolish the Senate — an official party position — but also to put new limits on religious freedom. He later backed off his comments, but there are other signs the issue is registering with the electorate.
In the Montreal riding of Papineau, NDP candidate Anne Lagacé Dowson had one of her campaign signs vandalized with black spray paint in the form of a niqab that left only the former broadcaster’s eyes visible.