A new Ottawa policy that required secondary inspection of religious headgear, which the Sikhs believed to be discriminatory, has been abruptly reversed.
Transportation Minister Lisa Raitt's office told the CBC on June 16 evening that the new screening protocol, which was quietly implemented on April 15, had been made at the departmental level, and said the procedure would be cancelled immediately for air travel inside Canada.
According to World Sikh Organization (WSO) lawyer Balpreet Singh Boparai, the organization has received dozens of complaints from Sikhs who have been subjected to checks of their turbans and for traces of explosives on their hands prior to boarding a flight.
“It doesn’t matter whether the metal detector (sets off an alarm) or not, he must go through a secondary screening. Individuals wearing non-religious headgear have the option to avoid secondary screening by removing their headgear. Sikhs who wear their religiously required turbans don’t have that choice,” said Boparai.
According to the Canadian Air Transport Security Agency’s recently updated protocol, religious and non-religious headgear were to be treated the same way.
All travellers with headgear must walk through a metal detector, be subject to the ‘pat-down’, and undergo the hand explosive trace detection, whether an alarm is activated or not.
