Beau­ti­ful British Co­lum­bia be­comes more beau­ti­ful for the Sikh Cana­di­ans as BC Fer­ries make a pol­icy de­ci­sion to al­lows the  hun­dreds of Sikh pas­sen­gers who fre­quently use the mod­ern fer­ries be­tween the main­land and the coastal and in­land town, to wear the Kir­pan while trav­el­ling, as al­ready al­lowed in Cana­dian trains, court­rooms and else­where. 

Fol­low­ing up on re­quests from Sikh pas­sen­gers who were asked to re­move their Kir­pans, the World Sikh Or­gan­i­sa­tion, con­tin­u­ing its ad­vo­cacy role fol­lowed up with BC Fer­ries and per­suaded them to evolve and im­ple­ment a Kir­pan ac­com­mo­da­tion pol­icy. 

The BC Fer­ries Kir­pan ac­com­mo­da­tion pol­icy states that the “prac­tic­ing at all times while on board, the Kir­pan must be kept sheathed, worn un­der­neath cloth­ing and must not be vis­i­ble to other pas­sen­gers.

Ex­press­ing sur­prise that BC Fer­ries did not have an ac­com­mo­da­tion pol­icy for the Kir­pan hereto­fore, WSO Vice Pres­i­dent for British Co­lum­bia Aman­preet Singh Hun­dal said, “while the law is clear that the kir­pan must be ac­com­mo­dated in Canada, we still see ex­am­ples of where Sikhs are told they can­not wear their ar­ti­cles of faith.  We are grate­ful to BC Fer­ries for hav­ing worked with us to en­sure Sikhs wear­ing the kir­pan can travel while freely prac­tic­ing their faith and we also thank the in­di­vid­u­als who were af­fected for hav­ing reached out to us so we could re­solve this not just for them, but for the en­tire com­mu­nity.”

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Sur­rey, 14 No­vem­ber 2018, WSN News Desk