Voting requirements cause controversy in Canada and raise questions about the limits of the country’s multicultural policies of tolerance.
Last week, people in Canada were asking themselves whether their very Canadian practice of tolerating and embracing cultural difference was endangering the democratic process. It started when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper attacked Elections Canada for allowing veiled Muslim women to vote without showing their face for identification. The current law states that voters are not required to show their face, as long as they show two non-picture IDs or have someone else vouch for their identity. Members of Parliament started asking whether this law was not seriously in need of revision.
All of a sudden, web bloggers were cynically joking about their right to vote wearing a Halloween mask and once again, the Muslim practice of wearing a niqab (face veil) or burqa (face veil which covers all but the eyes) was placed under scrutiny. A spokesperson with the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Montreal reacted to this undue attention to Muslim women by saying that these women were never consulted on whether they wanted to be made the exception to the election rule and have “never made the request to have to keep [the niqab] on while they vote.” She claimed Elections Canada’s good intentions were only serving to stigmatize them.
If Elections Canada’s intentions were good, what were Harper’s in drawing attention to this issue? As Elections Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Maynard, pointed out when attacked, the new laws had been presented and passed in Parliament back in May. So Members of Parliament had long been made aware of the facts and raised no objections at the time. Why the fuss four months later? NDP Member of Parliament Pat Martin had a suggestion. Elections Canada recently revealed that the Conservative Party had spent $1.2 million over the legal spending limit in the last election. Could this delayed criticism possibly be an attempt to divert the Canadian voter’s attention from the real issue? Why the sudden focus on Islamic practices and how they fit into Canadian customs? In actual fact, veiled women voters in Canada represent only a few dozen, while 80 000 faceless Canadians voted by mail in the last election. The real scrutiny might need to be re-directed at who they voted for and whether he has anything to hide.
This article was published Monday, September 17, 2007.
