I thought: “Really?” My mother’s ancestors have been traced as far back as Mackinac Island in the 1700s, where a French soldier named Bertrand met an Ojibway woman. We don’t know her name, but she was my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother. For the ensuing 300-odd years, the Bertrands, Mitchells, Spaldings, Matthews, Foulds and Selleys have been at worst (hi there!) reasonably productive members of society and at best considerably better than that. My great-grandfather served with the Canadian Engineers in the First World War and my grandfather as a navy pilot in the Second. His service record notes 81 carrier landings, seven at night, and a decoration “for leadership, skill and daring during an air attack on an enemy convoy … on the night of 11th-12th January 1945.”
Mackinac is Yankee territory now (thank you very much, Treaty of Ghent). But my history is Canadian. I was born here. I have never lived anywhere else. I certainly feel privileged, but I also feel perfectly entitled. So it’s somewhat jarring to see Bill C-24 put my citizenship at risk, even in theory.
Having won the genetic quinella, I hold British citizenship through my father, who came to Canada in 1962. Under this legislation, were I to commit treason or terrorism offences, either here at home or abroad, I could henceforth be de-Canadianized and shipped off to the U.K. It smacks of unequal justice: If I only held the one passport, thanks to international agreements on stateless people, Mr. Alexander would be stuck with me.
But of course this bill isn’t about people like me or you, or even the worst of our countrymen — neither Robert Pickton’s nor Paul Bernardo’s Canadian citizenship would be at risk if they held another. No, this bill singles out a very specific kind of baddie, namely a dual citizen who commits “a terrorism offence as defined in section 2 of the Criminal Code” or “an offence outside Canada that, if committed in Canada, would constitute a terrorism offence as defined in that section.” And it would apply retroactively.
I’m not the first to notice how well those circumstances align with those of Canada’s least favourite 27-year-old, Omar Ahmed Khadr, whose father was born in Egypt. And I’m not the first to wonder aloud if that’s partly what the Conservatives are playing at. I imagine pollsters would find the idea of catapulting Mr. Khadr in the general direction of Cairo quite popular. It seems distinctly unlikely that Canadian courts would allow it, but politically speaking that’s beside the point. The longer the issue festered, the better. Every moment Justin Trudeau or Tom Mulcair was standing up for the “James Bond of terrorism” (in Ezra Levant’s memorably laughable formulation) would be a win for the Tories.
Hopefully we will be spared such a spectacle. But in the meantime, Mr. Khadr provides a compelling example of why this law is a bad idea. The notion of deportation is particularly unjust in his case. He was born in Canada; he has no connections to Egypt. Not only did Canada do nothing to stop his parents from raising him a jihadi, Canada did nothing to interfere with his mother raising his younger brother Abdulkareem — only 15 at the time he returned to Canada — after Omar had been captured in Afghanistan, when the full scope of her awfulness was well known. If we couldn’t be bothered to intervene in his upbringing, we could at least have treated him as a child soldier, as he should have been under international agreements.
And say Omar Khadr does represent a serious terrorist threat. We should wish to deport him to Egypt … why? Do we really imagine he would be less of a threat to us and to our friends in the West there, as opposed to under surveillance in Canada? And what if Egypt passed such a law? Or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon? Faced with the prospect of resettling Canada’s terrorists and traitors on some dubious claim to citizenship, why wouldn’t such countries pass such laws? Imagine Iraq uncitizening a terrorist and deporting him to Canada just because he was born here. Sauce for the goose, surely.
Grown-up countries clean up their own messes. You don’t “strengthen Canadian citizenship,” as Bill C-24 purports to, by making it easier to revoke, by kicking your junk into another country’s closet. You strengthen Canadian citizenship by holding wayward or treasonous citizens to account, and by demanding fair and equal treatment for even the most unpopular, thereby reinforcing the obligations they violated. Mr. Khadr’s case showed us how far Canada has to go. The Conservatives propose to take us even further in the wrong direction.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com/
Author: Chris Selley
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