By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

What Montreal City Hall described as a “welcome sign” or a “welcome poster” is finally being replaced. Last week it was actually taken down.

The poster of a hijab-garbed woman had garnered a lot of controversy since its installation at City Hall last fall. The administration first tried to defend it as displaying the city’s diversity, then later acknowledged that the inclusion of a hijab – a religious accoutrement – flies in the face of the province’s secularism policy.

The offending sign looks like a pencil sketch of three people – a young man dressed in an urban style with a long coat, hoodie, and baseball cap; an older man in glasses, and in the middle a woman in a hijab, standing together beneath the phrase “Bienvenue àl’Hôtel de Ville de Montréal!”

The offence came from several directions. The Parti Québécois objected to the image of the hijab as flying in the face of the province’s secularism policy, as did groups like Mouvement laïque québécois. Women’s rights groups like the Association of Iranian Women of Montreal and Pour les droits des femmes du Quebec objected over what the hijab symbolizes for oppressed women. The Canadian Council of Muslim Women, on the other hand, said the sketch was an inaccurate depiction, but just the same, removing the poster sent the wrong message, effectively rendering Muslim women in Montreal invisible.

Mayor Valérie Plante acknowledged, at the time, that the image caused some to be uncomfortable, and that it would be replaced. Last week a spokesperson for the mayor, Catherine Cadotte, reiterated that the reaction to the poster was not what they had hoped, and the project fell short of its intention.

The poster will be replaced not by a new one, but by several in a rotating exhibit that will showcase the work of several young artists from Montreal. n