Don't be fooled for one instant by the politically correct disguised doublespeak coming out of Quebec in regards to the opposition of women wearing religious face coverings at citizenship ceremonies.
This has nothing to do with the integrity of becoming a Canadian or a Quebecker. This also has nothing to do with religious oppression of women and the endorsement of a faith that demands its devout women hide their face from the world.
As usual, this is all about Quebec, Quebeckers and their legendary intolerance to anything or anyone unfaithful to the francophone cause.
Twenty years ago next month, in the wake of the last Quebec referendum, then Parti Quebecois leader and provincial premier Jacques Parizeau told the world that the vote to separate would have passed if it had not been for the money and the ethnic votes. In Quebec, the money is shorthand for the Jews and the ethnic are the aboriginals and any visible minority that doesn't speak French as a first language.
Little has changed in two decades.
Women wearing the niqab and any other open display of religion, heritage, culture or politics that doesn't match traditional French society is greeted with disdain to this day across Quebec, even in the more cosmopolitan cities of Montreal and Quebec City.
In Quebec, symbols are particularly significant, a visual projection of pride in place and identity. The province's population has turned its back on the Catholic Church as it has become increasingly secular but Catholicism is still a powerful cultural force. Being Catholic is still symbolic of being French, in contrast to the English and their Protestant beliefs. The niqab is not only not Catholic, it's not even Christian. Instead of being seen as an expression of a particular Muslim denomination, the niqab is viewed as an attack on Catholicism and, by extension, French heritage.
The current policy requires women to reveal their faces during the citizenship process for identification purposes but allows them to wear the niqab at the formal ceremony declaring them as Canadian citizens. That policy is the proper one and does not need changing, in Quebec or anywhere else in Canada.
The citizenship ceremony, like the niqab itself, is little more than a formality. The niqab is not what makes a woman a Muslim and her attendance at the ceremony is not what makes her now a Canadian.
The logic used to justify opposition to the niqab is galling.
That's not a newfound sense of Canadian patriotism coming from La Belle Province. Many of the Quebeckers most adamantly against the wearing of the niqab while being formally sworn in as a citizen would happily burn their passport the moment Quebec would win independence from Canada.
The so-called progressives in Quebec, the intellectual elite of which Parizeau was one, shroud their own intolerance and discriminatory under a veil of political theory. If the niqab is a symbol of oppression against women, then surely the restriction against calling women to the priesthood of the Catholic Church is as oppressive. If the niqab is a symbol of control of women's bodies, then surely the Catholic Church's continued opposition to abortion is also about controlling women.
In the end, the Church and its views are tolerated in Quebec because Catholicism is so deeply embedded into the province's history. The Muslim faith in general and the niqab in particular are considered unacceptable because they are not French, they are not Quebec.
The French intelligentsia also can't imagine women choosing, of their own free will, to wear the niqab and proudly declare their faith to the world, even if that means being greeted with scorn and misunderstanding by a bigoted majority. What these Quebeckers really can't imagine, however, is why anyone would live in Quebec but not look and sound and act French.
We're good people, these bigots argue. We just want everyone to be normal and be like us because that's the best way to be.
Sadly, too many Quebeckers mask this prejudice under the guise of concern for Canadian heritage and women's freedom, when all they care about is protecting their shallow way of life and their petty, dehumanizing worldview.
