Defence Minister Jason Kenney took the strange step of invoking a comparison with Sharia law in an online debate over the legality of a ban on niqabs during the swearing of oaths at citizenship ceremonies.

Coming the day after Prime Minister Stephen Harper extended an unprecedented invitation to Muslim Canadians to break their Ramadan fast at 24 Sussex, the comment appears unlikely to help heal any divisions created by the government’s pursuit of a ban on face coverings at the ceremonies.

The exchange began late Monday night on Twitter, with Kenney touting the religious diversity of members on the government’s new Religious Freedom Advisory Committee. Twitter users almost immediately hit back at the minister, asking how he can be committed to religious freedom but willing to force women to remove a religious garment before becoming citizens.

One of the users, ex-CSIS operative and counter-extremism expert Mubin Shaikh, said: “Very respectfully, sir: U know full well that the choice of veil in public spaces is protected in Law.”

Kenney tweeted back, “What law would that be? Certainly not under shariah law during the very public Haj, when hiding one’s face is prohibited.”

@CaliphateCop What law would that be? Certainly not under sharia law during the very public Haj, when hiding one’s face is prohibited. — Jason Kenney ن (@jkenney) June 23, 2015

That comment quickly sparked some angry replies, including criticism of Kenney for the timing of his tweet.



Kenney’s spokeswoman, Lauren Armstrong, said in an email that the minister has said repeatedly over the past several years that it is not a religious obligation to be always veiled in public — and in the absence of a religious obligation there’s no merit in framing the debate around wearing a niqab while swearing a citizenship oath as a matter of religious freedom.

“That was the point conveyed in his Twitter posting, that the Koran itself forbids face coverings in certain public settings, a point made to the Minister by many Canadian Muslims who object to this being disingenuously framed as a religious freedom question,” Armstrong said. “It is wrong to conflate an obscure cultural tradition that is derived from the treatment of women as property rather than people with a bona fide religious freedom claim.”

The continued debate over the niqab comes less than a week after the government introduced a bill — likely doomed to die on the order paper once the election writ drops — that would ban the wearing of the niqab during citizenship ceremonies.

Critics, including the National Council of Canadian Muslims, have panned the bill as a cynical move to manufacture an election-year wedge issue.

“It is very disheartening that our government is spending so much time and effort to revive what is essentially a manufactured issue which appears to be being used for political purposes,” Ihsaan Gardee, the NCCM’s executive director, said in a press release after the bill was announced.

Speaking with iPolitics on Tuesday, Gardee said he was surprised by Kenney’s decision to reference sharia law in defence of the government’s position against the wearing of the niqab in citizenship oaths.

“We weren’t expecting that. We live in a pluralistic, secular democracy here and we hope that we can engage people on the issues and really use as our reference point our political system that we have here,” said Gardee.

Gardee said there are others who would disagree with Kenney about the permissibility of full-face coverings like the niqab under Islamic law and that most people who wear it in Canada understand there are situations where it must be removed for security reasons.

However, making the wearing of the niqab into a political issue ignores the diverse spectrum of issues that Canadians want addressed, such as the economy, ethics and the Senate scandal and what to do about the thousands of missing and murdered aboriginal women, among many other concerns.

“These are big issues that really need to be addressed and putting forward a law or proposing a law that would ban a minority of women from taking the citizenship oath seems to be distracting from these issues,” Gardee said.

The issue rose to the forefront of public attention after Mississauga resident Zunera Ishaq challenged a 2011 ban on the wearing of niqabs during the citizenship ceremony on the grounds that it violated her charter rights.

The Federal Court agreed with her and ordered the government to reverse the ban earlier this year, saying it violated the government’s own immigration laws.

“To the extent that the policy interferes with a citizenship judge’s duty to allow candidates for citizenship the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation of the oath, it is unlawful,” wrote Justice Keith M. Boswell.

While the government’s 2015 legislation, the Oath of Citizenship Act, is unlikely to become law, the government has said it was introduced to give Canadians a sense of what the Harper government’s legislative agenda would be if it were re-elected.