Matter of safety

School bans on ceremonial daggers shouldn't be considered anti-religion

JANET BAGNALL
Montreal Gazette Thursday, February 21, 2002

The family of a 12-year-old Sikh boy, a student at Ste-Catherine-Laboure school in LaSalle, intends to go to court to force the school to allow the boy to carry with him at all times a ceremonial dagger. They will argue that because the Canadian constitution guarantees freedom of religion, the boy must be allowed to wear the dagger, called a kirpan, one of five symbols of faith a baptized Sikh is obliged to wear.

The school's governing board has rejected a proposal by the Marguerite-Bourgeoys school board and the boy's lawyer that he be allowed to wear the kirpan as long as it is wrapped in a cloth sheath. As far as the teachers and parents of the other 430 students are concerned, the kirpan is a knife. Whether it is blunt or covered in a sheath doesn't make it any less a knife, and they don't want a student carrying one.

Is the school overreacting? Is this a question of religious intolerance? Or is the kirpan just another thing Montreal schools have to get used to, like hijabs and turbans and new definitions of personal modesty?

The battle in 1994 over whether Muslim students could wear a hijab to a secular, public school in Quebec went on at fever pitch for months, as first one, then another student was expelled for wearing a headscarf. The principle of division of church and state was held to be at stake. The hijab was criticized as an affront to Western, feminist values of equality. Now, no one in Montreal gives hijabs a second glance.

Will the same prove true of the kirpan? Will it fade into the same kind of visual oblivion that crucifixes or Stars of David on a chain disappear into? Elsewhere in Canada, school boards have accepted - sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not - that their Sikh students will carry a kirpan on their persons. In 1990, the Calgary public school board voted to accept the right of baptized Sikh students to wear kirpans at school. In Ontario, in 1990, a human-rights adjudicator ruled that the Peel school boards policy of banning kirpans violated the rights of students and staff.

All the while this was going on, however, Canada's airlines have been allowed to refuse passengers who insist on wearing a kirpan. Why is it a violation of human rights if a school decides to ban the wearing of the ceremonial dagger, but not if an airline decides to impose an identical ban?

In 1999, two years before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that for an airline to prohibit a Sikh from carrying his kirpan on board constituted a reasonable limit on his freedom of religion. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the right of airlines to prohibit the carrying of a kirpan on board an aircraft is universally accepted, including by the Sikh organization, Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force.

In October last year, it issued a community advisory telling its members that anyone wishing to transport a kirpan should place it in their check-in luggage. The advisory stated, "A kirpan, regardless of the size or sharpness of the blade, will be viewed by airport security authorities as a dangerous weapon." Clearly, the Sikh community itself recognizes that airline safety in today's world requires that reasonable accommodation be made between religious duty and a secular, legal obligation.

Weapons on school property are not a neutral concept. North American schools are rightly sensitive on this score. For years, they were, if anything, too lax about weapons. None of this is the fault of the young Sikh students who want to fulfill a religious obligation, but it is nonetheless a reality. If school officials want to ban weapons, there are good reasons for taking such a decision. To say that such a ban would have to arise from religious intolerance is unfair and wrong.

Schools have first and foremost a duty to keep their students safe from harm. How clear and present the danger is cannot be the point. Who would have thought box-cutters should be banned by airlines? And yet they served the Sept. 11 hijackers' purpose only too well. Compromise solutions to the question of a kirpan on school property exist: carrying a ceremonial knife made of another material, such as plastic, for example, or the use of a miniature kirpan when in school.

The Montreal of 2002 is a far more accepting and multicultural place than it was in 1994 when the battle over the hijab inflamed passions from one end of the island to the next. This time around, both parties are right. There are no absolute principles at stake, just the need to figure out how both points of view can be accommodated. It can't be that hard, especially if you're willing to try.