Niqabs Again

There was a Supreme Court ruling on September 15 overturning the law banning niqabs at citizenship ceremonies. I’ve been procrastinating on this for a while, and… wait, what’s that? I already wrote about niqabs? And it’s all still relevant?

Well, that makes it easy.

So my stance for the last few years has been that I want to be on the side that isn’t telling women what they have to wear. I’m still pretty happy with this stance. As luck would have it, it turns out that Tom Mulcair seems to agree with me:

"No one has the right to tell a woman what she must — or must not — wear."

It’s nice to know that I’m in good company. Or rather, that Mulcair is in good company, because I already knew that I was right.

As with all other forms of religious accommodation, I think this should be applied across the board. That if people can cover their faces for religious reasons, they should be able to cover their faces because they are cold, or they have bad zits that day, or without bothering to give a reason at all.

If I wasn’t a citizen already, I’d show up wearing a ski mask and one of those Mulcair Beard face covering things. Just to see if I could get away with it.

It’s possible to imagine a situation where some rights could only be extended to a few people. Like in National Parks… a few people leaving the trails does negligible damage, but a hundred thousand people leaving the trails is catastrophic, so those areas are limited to parks staff. It makes sense in contexts like that. The best example of this with religious accommodations is for holidays. It’s relatively easy to give people time off for their religious holidays if they are in a minority religion, but gets increasingly difficult as that religion gets more adherents.

In contrast, sometimes the compromises made for the religious accommodation can make it something that can be made available for everyone. Like with the Kirpan case. The government argued - and I disagree with this, but will accept the premise for the sake of argument - that it wasn’t safe to have knives in school. Sikh boys are required to carry ceremonial knives. So the compromise was that they can now carry dull knives, securely strapped into the holsters. Well, once you’ve made those changes, it’s no longer unsafe to let everyone do that. At least, not unless you plan to ban metal rulers and sturdy pens as well.

But neither of these applies in this case. Citizenship will not be harmed if a majority covers their faces, or even if everyone does so. That is because the work of becoming a citizen is all done in advance of the oath. The citizenship ceremony is meaningless in itself. In fact, if I were setting it up, I’d make it like a graduation ceremony: Those who can’t or won’t attend will get their citizenship card in the mail.