Let's play a game for a second.

Imagine, if you will, the premier of Saskatchewan proposing a law that specifically targets religious minorities and regulates what they can wear if they want government services.  Pretend for a second, that this imaginary premier was forbidding, say, women to wear the niqab to get a health card.  Now, this premier has done so in the middle of a national leadership race for the NDP.

Pretty easy to see where that goes, yeah?

The candidates push and shove their way to be the first to denounce the racist westerner for not accepting that Canada is a multicultural place, where people of all races and religions are accepted.

This is all fiction, of course.  The premier of Saskatchewan is doing no such thing.  It's the premier of Quebec, Phillipe Coullard, who's government has proposed banning people wearing religious face coverings — read: Muslim women in a niqab — from receiving public services.

But that's not the only fiction in our little game.  The NDP candidates aren't fighting to be the most vocal in their denunciations.  Two of the candidates have gone so far to bend themselves in all sorts of knots to avoid denouncing it at all.

Meanwhile, Charlie Angus and Jagmeet Singh have both soundly rejected the bill, showing a bit of spine.

The cowardice of the other candidates hoping to woo support in Quebec by equivocating on the law is quite stunning.  Guy Caron said he doesn't care for the bill, but respects the right of Quebec's majority to dictate what minorities should wear.

Sorry, sorry. I'm paraphrasing.  What he actually said in a press release, according to HuffPost, was: "Quebec's different view of secularism from the rest of Canada is not a minority current, but a broad consensus among the province's political class…I am making it clear that, above all, an NDP leader must respect Quebec's national character."

The "national character" in this case Quebec's virulent secularism, which opposes all symbols of religion, unless they are giant crucifixes.  Those are fine.

And it's becoming increasingly clear that this "national character" also includes an ugly and violent strain of Islamophobia.  Just this week, the leader of a Quebec City mosque — where six men were shot and killed in a mass murder — had his car torched.  This followed the now familiar, and disgusting, tactic of vandals leaving a pig's head and blood on the mosque's front step.  That was in addition to a shredded Qur'an and the shit smeared on the front door of the place of worship.

Caron didn't do that.  But he's accepting of a law that by definition singles out a the same group of people who are so brutally harassed.

Niki Ashton is not much better.  Her initial response to Bill 62 stuck the same spineless balance.  "There is a consensus in Quebec's political leaders emerging on secularism, and the Canadian government should respect the will of Quebecers on this matter."

After being hammered for an obvious double standard, Ashton backtracked as best she could, saying in a series of tweets, "I will not compromise on rights, freedoms, & personal agency."  But she wouldn't outright say she opposed the bill, instead hiding behind the idea that because the final version of the bill hasn't been tabled, her campaign manager said she wouldn't comment on a "hypothetical."

Which is nonsense, because while the bill may or may not be finished, its intent is clear.  You either think it's a bad thing, or you don't.

It's surely coincidence that most of Quebecers' discomfort is toward non-Christian religious displays.

Quebec has played footsies with this kind of policy before.  Readers may remember the last provincial election, where the Parti Quebecois proposed a "charter of Quebec values."

The idea was roundly criticized at the time for, quite obviously, targeting minorities.  Many pundits have hung their hat on the idea the PQ lost that election over the charter, but it clearly does represent the values of many Quebecers.  I'm repeating myself a little bit here, but it's worth hammering home: If the charter didn't really represent the values of Quebecers, the Liberal government wouldn't feel the need to introduce their own version of it.

So Angus should be commended for his stance on the bill: The government shouldn't be legislating what clothes anyone wears are or aren't acceptable.  It's a simple concept that shouldn't be so hard to get behind.

But in many ways Singh's denunciation of Bill 62 is particularly noteworthy.

Singh has been told, over and over, how his turban and the public display of religious devotion that it represents, is a non-starter in this province, and he'll never be a viable leader of the party because of this.

Instead of readily condemning a bill that obviously targets minority groups, NDP leadership candidates are equivocating.  This should be easy, yet here we are.