I would say to the members that none of these decisions can be made in a vacuum. We are living in a world where there are reverberations all around, and I hope the members of this committee and members of Parliament as a whole recognize that there's a huge ferment, a great turmoil taking place in the Muslim world, and Canadian Muslims are not excluded from that turmoil.
The folks who practice the custom of veiling are a minority and are also people who preach a very extreme version of Islam, which would then be sanctioned and would be given approval and legitimacy by an act of Parliament that would then have redounding effects in other spheres of activity right across our society.
Do we want a segregated society?