The socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) is hedging on its support of the Conservative minority government’s bill to forbid people to vote without showing their faces.  The NDP joined the MPs from other parties in Parliamentary committee in badgering the Chief Electoral Officer for refusing to bar people from voting while hiding their faces, even though there is nothing in the law to give him such authority and even though there was no upsurge of niqab-clad women at the polling places. Now that the Conservatives are introducing a bill to remedy this non-problem, the NDP, which appeared to be supporting the Conservative move, is back-pedaling.  NDP MP Paul Dewar wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail agreeing with the newspaper’s editorial which charged that “the last thing Canada needed was this unnecessary targeting of a minority group that had done nothing to provoke it.” Dewar promises that his party will introduce amendments at the committee level “to fix the bill.”  He also says that his caucus has not yet taken a position on the bill, though it is hard to see how the party can possibly support a bill that engages in “unnecessary targeting of a minority group that has done nothing to provoke it” or how such a bill can possibly be “fixed.”