11.02.2007

fear of veils

Jeffrey Simpson had a good column in today's Globe and Mail about the Conservative's ridiculous proposal to require Canadian voters to show their faces in order to vote.

As many people have pointed out, this would mean that all the Canadians who spend the winter in warmer climes - and those currently serving in Afghanistan - would be barred from voting. After all, a requirement is a requirement, and if it's fair for a few women in Quebec, it's fair for a few thousand Canadians in Florida and Arizona.

But of course this proposed amendment to the Canada Elections Act isn't about fairness. It's about bigotry and xenophobia.
If logic prevails - which, in this case, it likely won't - about 80,000 Canadians who voted by postal ballot in the last election will be denied the chance to vote that way in the next one.

The reason? Nobody sees their faces. They vote from Florida or Hawaii or Arizona or Europe or wherever without ever showing their faces at a polling booth or sending along a piece of photo identification. That's the way postal balloting works, and always has.

But, according to a foolish amendment to the Canada Elections Act introduced recently in Parliament, anyone who does not show his or her face at a polling station will not be able to vote.

So, by logical extension, "snowbirds" and other Canadians out of the country for an election should be disenfranchised.

But, of course, that's not likely to happen, because the amendment is not about logic but rather about fear and prejudice.

This amendment arose because of xenophobia in Quebec, where a handful of Muslim women wanted to vote fully veiled.

The province had already embarrassed itself through worldwide media coverage after the town of Hérouxville started passing resolutions against stoning and other manifestations of extreme Muslim law.

Capitalizing on this irrational fear of the "other," Mario Dumont's Action Démocratique du Québec did surprisingly well in the Quebec election in April. In this climate, alas, a big deal was therefore made about veiled Muslim women voting in three federal by-elections called in late July, even though it was estimated that only 700 veiled women might conceivably have wanted to vote in the three ridings, almost all in Outremont.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper inflamed matters more by comments delivered while in Australia. He declared, quite wrongly, that Canada's Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand, was rewriting Parliament's law that the Prime Minister insisted required visual identification. Mr. Mayrand, said the Prime Minister, should apply Parliament's law, not reinterpret it.

But the law, as it then stood, said no such thing. It allowed people to vote without showing their faces provided they had two pieces of identification or had their identity vouched for under oath by another voter from the same district.

Mr. Harper, therefore, was either pandering to base instincts in Quebec on the eve of by-elections, or was genuinely misinformed about Parliament's law. We shall never know the motivation.

. . . .

The amendment, of course, leaves the inconsistency that the grandstanders now must fill. How does Parliament insist on visual identification for Muslim women who wish to veil themselves, while allowing tens of thousands of sun worshippers and others outside the country to vote by postal ballot?

These postal voters outnumber the veiled women by, oh, 8,000 to 1, so do we disenfranchise them? Should Parliament make them submit a copy of their passports with their postal ballots? The grandstanders in Parliament and the xenophobes who made a mountain of this molehill will presumably give us the answers.

Or they will throw logic aside, and crack down on veiled women and let the postal voters do what they have always done without a fuss. But if this were to be the result, the rather ugly motivations behind the amendment will be unveiled.

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