The Observer - Canadians say: lift the veil

Canada should ban burkas in public, according to more than half of the people polled exclusively for QMI Agency. The Leger Marketing online poll found 54% of people surveyed said the government should follow France's lead and not allow women to wear burkas in public for safety and transparency reasons.

Morton Weinfeld, a sociology professor at McGill University, said the strong response in Quebec could be a result of spending 50 years cutting down the place of Catholicism in the province. "Why should they fill that void with Islam?" he said. "Quebec is perhaps the most strongly feminist place in Canada and the burka is a strongly anti-woman phenomenon."