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QUEBEC — Premier Philippe Couillard has praised a Laval teenager who says she wants to become a police officer and still wear a hijab, and rushed to the defence of an MNA who chose to wear his kippah in the legislature.

As the highly charged issue of religious symbols continued to dominate the legislature Thursday, Couillard found himself in the hot seat for his government’s decision to not restrict personal religious freedoms even for authority figures like police officers.

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And as happened several times in the last few weeks, real examples of such situations are floating to the surface.

“She is very brave,” Couillard said in reference to Sondos Lamrhari, 17, who started studying police science at Collège Ahuntsic in Montreal this fall and says she would like to work as an officer wearing her modified hijab.

“She is obviously very smart so she knows about the context of all of this in Quebec,” Couillard said. “She is deliberately telling her fellow Quebecers, because she is a fellow Quebecer like all of us, ‘I made an adjustment.’