This is not a veiled threat. This is a real opportunity because I am a sharing kind of guy.
Since we cannot insist that all Canadian citizens have a driver's licence or any other standard visual identification, there is no connection between showing one's face and the forms of ID that are available to people. People may as well be told to show their left foot or their belly button. None of them make any sense. We are not here to promulgate laws that are unnecessary nor are we here to deal with illogicality and a lack of principle.
Finally, if we want to get into the general oddity of this bill, there is what I call the English patient clause. For those who saw the film The English Patient, they will remember the guy lying in his little villa covered with bandages. Apparently, we are worried about him. There are four references to The English Patient in the bill. One is “bandaged people”. Bandaged people will not be treated like anybody else. There will be discrimination between people who are bandaged and those who are not.
The bandaged people will need to produce a piece of ID saying that they really need the bandage. One has a sort of strange image of people getting off their deathbeds, crawling out from their Italian villas, like in The English Patient, and casting their vote. However, it does not treat all voters the same, so why do we have The English Patient exception and yet we go on about this other non-problem?
All in all, this is a silly bill. It is silly and dangerous because it promulgates a false idea that there is somehow a problem and that problem is somehow associated with Muslim women, the very people we are trying to get to be citizens, along with everyone else in this country.
We should not be passing the bill. It is unnecessary, silly and illogical.