In their Sunday night French-language debate in Montreal, four NDP leadership aspirants gingerly navigated the minefield of Quebec’s Bill 62, nearing enactment, which will ban face coverings in the delivery and reception of publicly-funded services.
As good leftists one and all, Charlie Angus, Guy Caron, Jagmeet Singh and Niki Ashton oppose any such ban in their multicultural hearts, but desperately want to avoid offending Quebec nationalists (and others, such as this columnist) who find such a ban perfectly reasonable.
My colleague Chris Selley came down particularly hard on Niki Ashton in his recent commentary in these pages, for her ascription of Quebec’s antipathy to the niqab to the “widely different … place” religion has held in Quebec “since the Quiet Revolution.” Selley was having none of this “standard defence”—i.e. that it is more about Quebec’s political history than Islam per se — a position he labels “hopelessly transparent rubbish.”
He then sarcastically elaborated on how “very odd” it seemed to him that only Islam was targeted in the ban, since “Bill 62 places no restrictions on providing or receiving public services while wearing any religious garment or symbol other than the niqab.” [National Post] Read more
