To understand why Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard chose to defy his own beliefs and risk his province's international reputation by pressing ahead with a ban on religious face coverings, you must begin with the premise that doing nothing was not an option.
For more than a decade now, Quebec has been in the throes of a relentless debate about the challenges posed to its secularist society by the arrival of thousands of new immigrants belonging to religious minorities in general and one religious minority in particular. Without action to establish the primacy of secularism, this unfinished business risked monopolizing Quebec politics ad nauseam. Mr. Couillard sees the niqab ban as the least invasive way of bookending this debate.
As one former senior provincial cabinet minister explained it to me, a majority of francophone Quebeckers has felt extremely unsettled by the renewed incursion of religion into the public domain. Quebeckers fought to rid their polity of the insidious influence of the Catholic Church. This has instilled in them a zero-tolerance attitude toward the state's condoning of any religion. The government's failure to act remained an itch Quebeckers could not resist scratching. [Globe & Mail] Read more
