It’s a law-and-order proposal that speaks to an unspoken disquiet about immigrants in general and dual-nationality immigrants in particular.
There’s a feeling out there that just too many people are using Canada as a country of convenience — that they obtain citizenship to take advantage of programs like medicare but that their real loyalties are elsewhere.
To pander directly to these suspicions is to invite charges of racism. Kenney has been more adroit.
Last year, he argued that citizenship should be not too easy to obtain — a notion that, on its own, is hardly objectionable.
Now he’s taken advantage of a 2012 terrorist outrage in Bulgaria to advance the far more controversial idea of giving Ottawa the right to strip dual nationals of their Canadian citizenship.
And no, such a measure wouldn’t necessarily be limited to naturalized citizens born elsewhere.
Depending on how any new law is written, native-born Canadians who also happen to be dual nationals could have their Canadian citizenship revoked by fiat.
Kenney was given his opening last week when Bulgaria announced that a Canadian may have been involved in an attack last year that killed five Israeli tourists.
Ottawa quickly announced that the unnamed man — who has not yet been located or charged — is a dual Canadian-Lebanese citizen.
Enter Jason Kenney. He noted that both Australia and Britain can revoke the citizenship of people that their governments deem to be terrorists. Why not Canada?
What Kenney didn’t say then is that in both Australia and Britain the criteria for revoking citizenship go well beyond terrorism.
Australia’s government can strip naturalized citizens of their status if it deems that doing so is in “the public interest.” The native-born, however, are exempt.
Britain goes further. Any native or foreign-born Briton who is a dual national may have his British citizenship revoked if the government believes such an action “conducive to the public good.”
The British government makes such decisions in secret. But the Guardianreports that at least one Briton believed to be native-born has been stripped of his citizenship since 2006.
Kenney says he wants to tack his revocation proposals onto a Conservative private member’s bill already working its way through the Commons.
Bill C-425, introduced by Calgary MP Devinder Shory, would allow the government, by fiat, to strip Canadian citizenship from anyone who is also a “citizen or legal resident” of another country and who engages in an “act of war against the Canadian armed forces.”
As written, Shory’s bill would apply not just to dual citizens but to any Canadian working or living legally in another country.
Yet even if the proposed revocation measures were limited to dual citizens, they would be remarkably broad. Many native-born Canadians are dual nationals. Some, such as the Canadian-born children of American parents, carry two passports by choice.
Others are dual nationals because they have no choice. Syria and China don’t easily allow their nationals to renounce the citizenship they were born with. Egypt treats the children of Egyptian-born fathers as its citizens, no matter where they are born. The list goes on.
In short, more Canadians than one might think are dual nationals. Right now, only naturalized Canadians can be stripped of their citizenship and then only if they obtained it under false pretenses. Supporters of the Kenney proposal assume that if this revocation power is expanded, governments will use it sparingly and wisely.
Given our history — a history that includes the forcible internment of second-generation Japanese-Canadians during World War II — this is a heroic assumption.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Thomas Walkom
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