As much of the world dons face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Canada’s Supreme Court refused to suspend a law banning Muslims women’s religious face coverings in Quebec.

On April 9, the Supreme Court of Canada denied an appeal filed by civil rights groups to suspend portions of Bill 21, the discriminatory Quebec bill banning religious symbols from being worn at work by certain government workers, until the constitutional challenge to the bill is heard on its merits at the Quebec Superior Court.

Bill 21 also requires people giving or receiving government services to uncover their faces for identification or security purposes. Opponents of the bill overwhelmingly agree that it disproportionately targets Muslim women in particular, particularly due to the mention of face coverings, which bars niqab-wearing women from accessing public services. The premier of Quebec, François Legault, celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the appeal.

A few days earlier on April 6, Canada’s Chief Public Health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, recommended that people wear non-medical face masks in public to help contain the spread of COVID-19, especially by people who show no symptoms and may be transmitting the virus unknowingly. These masks could be made out of things that one would ordinarily find at home, like cotton T-shirts or bandanas secured with hair elastics. Quebec currently has the highest number of COVID-19 cases of any province in Canada, but Legault said on April 10 he’s optimistic that numbers are stabilizing due to the precautionary measures being taken.

Although not yet mandatory in Canada, other parts of the world have issued orders for people to wear face protections in public, such as the Czech Republic, Morocco, and some parts of Germany and the U.S.

To be clear: one day after celebrating the Bill 21 appeal’s failure at the Supreme Court, Legault commended the precautionary measures being taken by Quebecers in the fight against COVID-19, which include recommendations to wear face coverings in public.

Despite face coverings being recommended by the Canadian government for health security reasons, the Quebec ban on religious face coverings is still being both upheld and applauded. While public health is a more pressing and valid reason than religious freedom for permitting face-covering, this raises serious questions about the arguments and motivations behind Bill 21, specifically around the supposed “identification and security reasons” for which niqab-wearing women must uncover their faces.

In Montreal hospitals, suspected COVID-19 patients visiting the emergency room are provided a face mask upon arrival and asked to leave it on while in a room with anyone else present or while interacting with staff. By contrast, a woman wearing a niqab entering the same emergency room would be forced by law to remove it before she is able to access health-care services (and presumably given a mask to replace it if she was suspected to have the virus).

While the mandatory masks are obviously understandable from a medical safety perspective, it is noteworthy that at no point are patients asked to remove their masks for “identification or security” reasons. Hospital workers rely on masked patients’ identification documents and medical charts to know who they are interacting with — but the same does not apply to women wearing religious face coverings, for whom identification and medical charts are for some reason considered insufficient.

For all the fear-mongering about the spread of Islamic or Sharia law in Canada and the U.S. over the past two decades, a lot of the measures used to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are similar to practices already carried out by many Muslims under that same set of laws, including physical distancing, face covering, and regular washing.