The Director-General of Elections has changed his mind, and face coverings must be briefly raised for identification if you want to vote in Quebec.

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, only a tiny minority of women in Quebec cover their faces. Hijab, covering the hair and usually tucked under the chin, is vastly more common, and doesn't cause any identification problems. But there is no question that we chiefly identify strangers by face, and that a fully hidden person must be vouched for in other ways which are not usual in Western society.

But in the current atmosphere of anxiety over accommodements raisonnables – a mood in which people are getting riled by something as inconsequential as how a privately owned hotel allocates its resources for a week and a hospital that has given good service for years is made to change its policy because eating a ham sandwich is suddenly a human right – something like this looms much bigger than it really ought. There's some pertinent and amusing thoughts about the whole thing here.
posted at 12:18