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Amrit Kaur says she wasn’t surprised to hear that New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh was accosted at the Atwater Market Wednesday and told to remove his turban.

The man told Singh he would “look Canadian” if he “cut off” the religious head garb. Kaur called the interaction a sign of the times in Quebec.

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“It’s just the trickle-down effect of the politics,” said Kaur, a Sikh woman who is challenging Quebec’s religious symbols ban in court. “To some people, no matter how much you integrate, no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be Canadian, you’ll never be a Quebecer, you’ll never shed that immigrant label. It’s sad.”

Kaur studied to be a teacher in Quebec but moved to British Columbia to work because her turban violates the province’s secularism law. She is a plaintiff in a legal challenge against the bill and she says it has made her the target of online smears.

“I get hate mail on the regular, people who don’t even know me send me these awful messages on social media,” said Kaur, the Quebec vice-president of the World Sikh Organization’s Canadian branch. “I look at these profiles and I see that the same people telling me to go away are themselves parents. They seem to forget that I am someone’s child, they forget that there’s a person under my turban.”