Newspaper photo editors show their creativity when selecting images for this story. Bottom left is from the Star, that actually dispatched a photographer instead of using the file-photo cliché of "eyes peeking through veil"

Quebec is going ahead with its ludicrous ban on religious head-coverings like the niqab and the burka on provincial government property. It’s an astonishing piece of legislation that manages the improbable feat of being baselessly arbitrary and obviously xenophobic. The whole law is crafted to be targeted at a single identifiable—and extremely tiny—minority, but Premier Jean Charest swears up and down that it’s simply intended to ensure that everyone has to show their face to get government services. But everyone understands that the real point of the law is to get a handful of observant muslim women to take off their niqabs—just Google “niqab ban,” and it’s pretty obvious that everyone knows the score. It’s a creepy piece of social engineering, with added bonus dashes of Islamophobia and paternalism.

Constitutional experts called up by newspapers are pretty unanimous in their opinion that this is unconstitional and will be challenged right out of the gate:

“This legislation will probably be considered a breach of human rights,” said Lorraine Weinrib, a leading constitutional expert and professor with the University of Toronto’s law school. […]

By cutting off access to such services to health care and education to women who are following Muslim dress codes, Ms. Weinrib said Quebec is “discriminating” and “disadvantaging” people on the basis of their religion and gender.

“Denying people health care or other government services is such a draconian result, it seems extreme,” she said.

The Law is Cool blog has an extended post today on the niqab law and why it is both legally and ethically untenable. I would encourage you to give it a read — it gives a lengthy primer on some of the core principles of Canadian charter rights, and how they apply specifically in this case. And it goes deeply into the complexities of religious and cultural accommodation: It’s perfectly reasonable to query the religious, social, gender, and cultural dilemmas posed by the niqab. The reasons that some women wear them are numerous and complex—I even believe that quite a few of them are not good reasons, but it’s not up to me.

Cynically, I think the Charest government knows that the law is unconstitutional, and is introducing it to stir the electoral interest of a (depressingly large) segment of society that mistrusts immigrants in general and muslims in particular. There’s nothing like a manufactured bogeyman to spook the base into action.

Cover of the March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine. Click to enlarge.

The March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine will be landing in subscribers’ mailboxes this week and is now on most newsstands coast to coast. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, this is a great time to do it, locking in a great price before the HST comes along. Just sayin’!) As always, the stories will all appear here on the website over the next few weeks. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet interwebby goodness.

On the cover this issue is John Duncan‘s investigation into the Canadian Forces’ future plans in Afghanistan. As the clock ticks down to the 2011 date for pulling out, Duncan finds, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that deadline will be met, and that Canada’s military is quietly prepping for alternate scenarios — including the possibility of Canadian CF-18s supplementing the Nato air campaign. And Aaron Broverman finds that militarization is creeping into other aspects of our lives as well, in the form of a global geopolitical struggle to control the ebb and flow of information on the internet. As repressive regimes abroad—not to mention law-enforcement agencies here at home—look for ever more intrusive ways to monitor civilians online, a small clutch of Canadian hackers are fighting back and working to keep the lines of communication open. And while the Communist Party of Canada has long been in the political wilderness, finds Eric Rail, its leader, Miguel Figeuroa, has been busy anyway, serving as party leader for 17 years and changing Canadian electoral law in some pretty substantial ways in the process.

There’s plenty more: Ashley Holly McEachern sends a postcard from Honduras reporting on the coup that has thrown the country into turmoil; Nav Purewal uncovers the unlikely origins of a Canadian movement to ban the burka; Alison Garwood-Jones reports from January’s Interior Design Show on the designers who are planning for our post-petroleum future; Paul McLaughlin interviews Globe and Mail former Afghanistan correspondent Graeme Smith; Max Fawcett warns that Canada’s looming pension crisis is a demographic time bomb; and Susan Peters profiles the authors of a new graphic novel telling the story of Helen Betty Osborne, a Cree girl abducted and killed 30 years ago, and whose story has largely gone untold until now.

PLUS: Tara-Michelle Ziniuk on The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book; Darryl Whetter on e-books; Allison Martell on the global shipping industry; Joshua Hergesheimer on an innovative Ethiopian aid project withering for lack of funds; Herb Mathisen on cellphone tower radiation; Kelly-Anne Reiss on Craik, Saskatchewan’s new eco-village concept; Alixandra Gould on progressive religions; Bruce M. Hicks on public inquiries; Raina Delisle on the aftermath of the Olympics; Ava Baccari on a literary atlas of Toronto; Navneet Alang on the internet’s high-culture pirates; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s broken aid promises.

With new poetry by Jason Camlot; and new fiction by Jessica Westhead.