Quebec’s Bill 62 is discriminatory. It is specifically targeting the minority of Muslim women that cover their faces with a niqab, normally accompanied by other garments, which cover the body, excepting the eyes and usually the hands.
If it was not arguable whether or not Bill 62 is discriminatory, this conversation would not even be happening. But under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, discriminatory laws are null and void. Furthermore, Canada’s Human Rights Code protects Canadians from religious discrimination in five distinct areas, one of them being services. Bill 62 bans covering of the face while receiving or giving public services, so a niqab-wearing woman as well as Canadians with scarves and hoods obscuring their identities cannot work for the government in the public service, or get on the bus without removing their offending garments.
But seriously, how does the Quebec government expect this bill to bypass the Supreme Court of Canada? Natasha Bakht, a professor of law at the University of Ottawa, stated in an article by The Toronto Star that the bill will likely make it to the Supreme Court, because it does seem to be targeting niqab-wearing Muslim women. The Quebec government will have to prove the bill was only introduced for the purpose of public security. But how does it not target the niqab?
The govenment doesn’t concern itself with people covering their faces in the cold weather. It can’t even be targeting people covering their faces while committing a crime, since that is already illegal as stated in the Criminal Code, in 351(2): “Everyone who, with intent to commit an indictable offence, has his face masked or colored or is otherwise disguised is guilty of an indictable offence…”
Who else regularly covers their faces in public that the Quebec government would concern themselves with enough to pass a bill about? Not to mention, the Quebec government’s preoccupation with religious garments. If you recall in 2013, the Quebec government under former Premier Pauline Marois proposed the Quebec Charter of Values, a bill which would ban public workers or recipients of public services from wearing religious symbols that were considered ‘overt,’ including large crosses, turbans, the niqab, hijab, and kippa, to push an image of neutrality. This charter failed to pass in 2014, when the Parti Québécois and Marois lost the provincial election to the Quebec Liberal Party.
Some Canadians cheer for this bill. Fear surrounds the niqab for many—many fear its association with religious extremism. Some cheer for what they believe is the preservation of our country’s values, while we neglect a Charter-sworn right to freedom of religion that this country vowed to protect.
As a Canadian in the Muslim community who knows people who wear the niqab, I am not afraid of it. I know them for who they are, their personalities and uniquenesses, rather than through the lens of a concept association. I know that both the hijab and the niqab are often worn for a mixture of cultural and religious reasons, among others; in my lifetime, neither have ever been an indication of extremism or fanaticism. In an ideal Canada, the religious accept the non-religious, and the non-religious accept the religious. This is what Canada’s charter aims for. Their coexistence is a part of what makes Canada different. Alienation through targeting niqab-wearing women doesn’t further this goal, it removes us from it.
Can we cherry-pick the rights and freedoms protected by the Charter, which is the very embodiment of Canadian values, to target what we fear?
Photo by Aaron Hemens
