https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_dh8VdVm8EY
I’m from Montreal, although I’ve been in Vancouver for more than two years now. I still follow the news over there from time to time, and I was wondering what were your thoughts on Bill 62, which the Quebec government calls an act to foster adherence to state religious neutrality and, in particular, to provide a framework for religious accommodation requests in certain bodies. So for those who are not familiar with it, here’s what you need to know. Here’s an excerpt of the bill. Personnel members of bodies and public services must exercise their functions with their face uncovered unless they have to cover their face in particular because of their working conditions or because of occupational or task-related requirements. Similarly, persons receiving services from such personnel members must have their face uncovered. So the fear here is that this bill only targets Muslim women who wear the niqab. This vision of a secular society is closer to what the French have in France and is often perceived as latent racism in the rest of Canada. Of course, the libertarian side of me doesn’t want the government to tell anyone what they can or cannot wear, but at the same time, I recognize that the niqab is a symbol of oppression and it carries values that are contrary to those of our society. How do you reconcile the two? Is it okay to force freedom on people with laws that, in a way, restrict that same freedom? Yeah, well, I guess I’m the kibikwaw. I don’t have a solution for that question. I think that I do have a thought, and I have a thought about what our societies are kind of based on, and I think that one of the – the idea of the face, of encountering someone’s face, it’s a very, very deep part of what our world is based on because it has to do with trust, it has to do with this capacity to encounter people, and so the whole idea of a democracy or a free society has to do with that capacity to encounter someone. And so I think that the niqab, like, veiled – like, I’ve never – I’ve never mined, like, veiled people, but my – the first time that I encountered a woman in niqab, it was very odd because it – my first reaction, it’s not even thought out, but, like, my intuitive reaction is that it’s difficult to see that that’s a person, and I know it is. Obviously, I know it’s a person, but the grammar that we use, like, that Western society has used forever to know that you’re interacting with someone is not there, and so I can understand the difficulty with especially the face covering. I can understand the difficulty that society is trying to figure out, like, how do we do this? How do – in a society that’s based on trust, on automatic trust, right? That’s how our society is based on automatic trust. The first reaction you have to someone when you meet them on the street is to trust them, and I’ve lived in places where that is absolutely not the case, and so for me, it’s a question. Like, I don’t necessarily think, like Jordan said, I think that I live in Quebec, and I know how left-leaning the Quebec government is and how it loves to really put its fingers down into people’s private lives, and so I also have a tendency in myself to say back off, but I think as a bigger question in terms of our, like, kind of essential values, I think it’s something that has to be played out, and like Jordan said, we’ll see how it plays out.