There's not a word in the Quran or the Hadith that requires that women cover their faces. To the contrary, the only requirement is that they uncover their faces when they're doing the haj.

You go to a lot of small communities in rural Alberta and you'll find a degree of diversity that probably hasn't existed in terms of immigration for a century - you'll find the Filipino grocery store, and the African Pentecostal church and maybe a mosque. Albertans are pro-immigration; they're also pro-integration. In my years in this province I cannot recall more than a handful of expressions of xenophobia or nativism that I've encountered. It's the land of new beginnings and fresh starts - it is rare Albertans who trace their roots here back more than a generation or two.

Sometimes the government has to answer questions with ambiguous language.

Finally, as I've said, this is - why are you talking about Jewish women's wigs and people wearing turbans? That has nothing whatsoever to do with niqab.

Naheed Nenshi is a friend of mine. We - he - knows how close I am to all of the cultural, ethnic, and religious communities in Canada, particularly his own Ismaili community. By the way, the vast majority of Canadian Muslims, particularly Ismaili Muslims that I know, strongly support our government's reinforcement of the public nature of the public citizenship oath.

There's not a word in the Quran or the Hadith that requires that women cover their faces. To the contrary, the only requirement is that they uncover their faces when they're doing the haj.

You ought not to accept the claim that this is a religious practice. I think that's, frankly, problematic for Islam, for well-intentioned Liberals like you to say that this is a religious practice when the overwhelming consensus of Islamic scholars around the world, and the overwhelming majority of Canadian Muslims, believe this has absolutely - that the niqab as face covering, that this symbol of misogyny has nothing to do with Islam.