Mark Steyn writes:
On CTV early in the evening, Jason Kenney popped up and pushed back against Lisa LaFlamme’s suggestion that the niqab controversy had cost the Tories the election. He pointed out that polls showed some 80 per cent of Canadians opposed to new citizens being masked when taking their oath of allegiance to Queen and country: It had the unusual distinction of being a Harper policy with near universal appeal.
But so what? M Trudeau’s narrative is the one that will prevail — that questioning Islamic self-segregation is at odds with “Canadian values”. And so no politician with an eye to electoral viability will ever raise the subject again.
Most people want to think of themselves as “nice”, and so it’s easier to welcome the increasing presence of shrouded women on the streets of Canada as a deepening of our heartwarming embrace of self-affirmation-by-multiculturalism, rather than something that mocks any conventional notions of women’s rights. Yet, whatever disquiet might be felt, they will take their signal from their politicians, and fall silent on the matter.
