Then he said: “I’m sure we have employees in the public service who wear a niqab, I’m sure we do,” as quoted by Ottawa author Andrew Griffith in a paper he published last month during the election campaign furor over Conservative reaction to Ms. Ishaq’s court challenge, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent promises that a re-elected Conservative government would bring in legislation to ban niqabs in the public service.
But at the time Mr. Clement made his remarks as he and other Cabinet ministers were reacting to the court decision in Ms. Ishaq’s case, several of the ministers said their opposition to the wearing of niqabs only pertained to citizenship ceremonies, not in the public service.
Canadian Press reporter Joan Bryden and other journalists questioned the ministers about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comment then that wearing the niqab was contrary to Canadian values and “rooted in a culture that is anti-women.”
“That is what the prime minister said and that is a point of view that one can hold,” Ms. Bryden reported Mr. Clement as saying at the time. “That doesn’t mean that you can impose that view in the workplace or in the private sphere. The one place where I think we have a right and an obligation to stress Canadian values is the act of obtaining one’s citizenship.”
As the election sparks flew again this week over Mr. Harper’s view on the niqab, the department that oversees the public service on his behalf, Treasury Board Secretariat, said in response to questions from The Hill Times it does not have “any data or other information pertaining to niqabs” or any complaints about women wearing them in the public service.
The election campaign research by Mr. Griffith might back up a statement to The Hill Times from the head of the Canadian Council for Muslim women, Alia Hogben, that it is likely no Muslim women in the public service wear niqabs.
Mr. Griffith, a former director general in the public service who once worked in the Privy Council Office and as a writer specializes in multiculturalism, has gathered data that show only 1.8 per cent of federal public servants, not including the defence department, have self-identified as Muslim in the Statistics Canada National Household Survey—which would be about 4,100 of the total non-defence population of 412,575 public servants.
Mr. Griffith prepared a brief paper on the topic based on data he obtained from Statistics Canada from an inquiry last April, when his curiosity was piqued after Mr. Clement's comments after a change Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney ordered for a legal manual citizenship judges must abide by.
Federal Court Judge Keith Boswell ruled last February the change, which required citizenship judges to reject citizenship applications from female candidates wearing niqabs if they refused to show their faces at two successive ceremonies, was unlawful because it violated an existing regulation that requires citizenship judges to administer the oath of citizenship “with dignity and solemnity,” and “allowing the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation thereof.”
The Harper government appealed the ruling, failed in a bid to get the Federal Court of Appeal to overturn Judge Boswell’s ruling and also failed in an attempt to get the Federal Court of Appeal to stay the ruling during an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Mr. Griffith’s paper included a wider comparison of religious minorities employed in the federal public services and the public services of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. Quebec was the lowest at 2.1 per cent, compared to 6.2 per cent in the federal public service, 8.7 per cent in Ontario, 6.8 per cent in B.C. and 6.2 per cent in Alberta.
Nationally, religious minorities are 8.3 per cent of the national population, 11.6 per cent of Ontario’s population, 10.9 per cent of B.C.’s population, 7.6 per cent of Alberta’s population and 5.1 per cent of Quebec’s population.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com/
Author: Tim Naumetz
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