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Ontarians should not only disapprove of Quebec’s new face-coverings law, the government should find a legal case to support to get it struck down, Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown says, continuing to harry the Liberal party from the left.

They keep saying he’s a frightening right-winger and he keeps refusing to play along. Brown criticizes the governing party not for being bleeding-heart incompetents, which they’re used to and know how to answer, but for letting screwups compound their meanness. That’s unfamiliar, uncomfortable ground for people who are used to thinking of themselves as the party of building Ontario up.

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We’ll start with Quebec’s Bill 62, which is purportedly about enforcing secularism in the public sphere but which will, in practice, mainly tell niqab-wearing Muslim women they have to take their veils off to ride city buses or go to school. Unusually, all the parties in the legislature Thursday agreed to make time to condemn another province’s new law.

Photo by Christinne Muschi / MONTREAL GAZETTE

“This legislation would disproportionately affect women who are sometimes already at the margins and push them into further isolation. These are people that you and I know,” Premier Kathleen Wynne said, leading off. “They are our neighbours: the grandmother who, if she lived in Quebec, would no longer be able to drop off her granddaughter at a city-run daycare, or a mother who would not be able to bring her children to a hospital to see the doctor. That is not the kind of society that we stand for in Ontario.”

“My leader has often said it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter who you love, it doesn’t matter how much you make, and it doesn’t matter where you worship; you have a home here, in the province of Ontario, and we respect you,” agreed Ottawa Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod, speaking for her party. “All Canadians have a legal right to their religious beliefs, including in the province of Quebec.”

But, she said, and Brown echoed her Friday, Ontario should go beyond shaking its head grimly.

“I would also ask that our government seek leave to intervene in any charter challenge on the constitutionality of this bill. I think that we must stand against it and stand firmly against it,” MacLeod said.