“[A] majority of Canadians [want the niqab banned.]

[O]ne survey has as much as eighty per cent of the population [in favor]…

[Stephen Harper’s] statement that the niqab is ‘not how we do things here’ is not wholly fatuous. Liberal societies are not neutral arrangements of civic services supplied to all. They aren’t just public-service condominiums that pick up trash and direct traffic. They have values. Indeed, their ability to supply those services—their prosperity, the reason everyone wants to come to liberal societies and not to theocracies—is because of those values.

Liberal societies have rules. Those rules, and the values they embody, have been a long and torturous time evolving. One of those values is the value of the agency and autonomy of the individual and, with it, the value—incredibly hard won, over a very long time—of woman’s emancipation, and so with it the belief that you cannot, either literally or symbolically, mask individuals. Women’s right to full autonomy is not optional in our society, and those who regard it as optional are not those who can expect to participate in it as citizens. If you wish to join our group, which will give you maximum freedom for every kind of self-expression and religious practice, you have to respect that the open engagement of one citizen with another—and, in turn, one face with another—is a core value that lets all the other values you enjoy flourish. The face may only be a symbol of our confidence in openness, but our symbols are the things to which we confide our values. As Barbara Kay, a distinguished Canadian journalist with whom I agree on few other issues, writes eloquently, ‘The only societies that mandate the niqab as a social norm are those in which women are considered sexual chattel with virtually no rights. Willed indifference to the niqab is more than tolerance; it is an endorsement of gender-rights relativism in our national home—equality for our women, inferior status for theirs.'”