MONTREAL—First, the Conservatives decided that it was good politics for the prime minister to use a pit stop in Quebec earlier this month to champion a ban on the wearing of face coverings at citizenship ceremonies. No sooner had Stephen Harper announced his government would appeal a Federal court ruling supportive of the right to wear a niqab at such ceremonies that his party set out to raise funds on the issue. If imitation is the sincerest from of flattery, Harper’s brain trust must be feeling pretty good for the Bloc Québécois has now embraced the prime minister’s stance with a passion. In an attack ad launched this week, the sovereigntist party notes that Thomas Mulcair has taken the opposite position and asks whether one must hide one’s face to vote for the NDP. With two of Canada’s federal parties determined to score pre-election points on the back of a practice that is exclusive to a minority of Muslim women at a time when emotions are running high as a result of the actions of Islamic extremists, what could possibly go wrong?

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For the answer to that question one might ask Rania El-Alloul. The Montreal resident went to court on Tuesday to apply to get her car back after it was seized by the Quebec automobile insurance board and, instead, was scolded for wearing a headscarf. According to justice Eliana Marengo, there is no place for anything religious (save perhaps a Bible?) in a court of law. Moreover, in her book, wearing a hijab to court is as inappropriate as sporting sunglasses. When El-Alloul declined to take her scarf off the judge adjourned her case indefinitely.

The story does not say whether Marengo would have meted out the same treatment to an applicant wearing a Catholic veil or a Jewish kippa. Or whether the sound of official silence that initially greeted this episode would have been as deafening if the plaintiff had been other than Muslim. The chief justice of the Quebec Court, through a spokesperson, stated that there was no ban on religious clothing in her jurisdiction but added that individual judges were free to set a dress code in their courts. Quebec’s minister of justice Stéphanie Vallée took refuge behind a wall of judicial silence. She may have been waiting for her boss, Premier Philippe Couillard, to come out and say that he was “disturbed” by the incident. That happened when he met the media to discuss the latest changes to his cabinet late Friday morning.

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At that point, almost a day after the story broke, Canada’s normally hyperactive minister for multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, had yet to devote a single tweet to the issue. All that in the face of a strong body of legal expertise that argues a) that justice Marengo did not have a judicial leg to stand on and b) that she likely trampled on El-Alloul’s fundamental rights. For that advice, legal experts can expect to be vilified in many quarters. That’s what happened when Liberal and NDP leaders Justin Trudeau and Mulcair questioned Harper’s decision to jump in front of the anti-niqab parade. On Thursday evening Trudeau was also lambasted for tweeting his dismay at the Quebec court episode. When Harper made his niqab announcement, the application for a mosque by Shawinigan’s local Muslim community had just been turned down by the local city council for fear of a public backlash. Since then, François Legault, the leader of Quebec’s third party, has floated the notion that a police investigation should take place before such applications are granted. The Coalition Avenir Quebec also wants Charter rights to be amended to prohibit the dissemination of “non-Quebec” values. It is not clear who Legault thinks is qualified to determine which values are worthy of Quebec’s stamp of approval. A poll published this week by the COGECO radio network reported that two-thirds of Quebecers do not want a mosque in their neighborhood. At the time of the debate over the Parti Québécois’s charter and its attending imposition of a secular dress code on all public sector employees last year, there was evidence that one of the collateral consequences of the discussion was to inflame anti-Muslim prejudices. It is on those embers that the Conservatives and the Bloc are pouring fuel. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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