Excerpt:
Quebec’s new guidelines on religious accommodation have failed to ease concerns about whether Muslim women will be able to access public services — such as riding a bus — if they wear a niqab or burka.
The guidelines were released earlier this week, and are meant to become part of a law that requires Quebecers to leave their faces uncovered in order to give or receive public services.
They state that exemptions to the law can only be granted on religious grounds if the demand is serious, doesn’t violate the rights of others and doesn’t impose “undue hardships.”
But they also leave it up to individual public bodies to decide how to handle requests, and require each body to appoint an official to make these decisions.