Canada set to lift restrictive citizenship by descent norms; Indian diaspora to benefit say experts

2024/05/27 Leave a comment

Seems like immigration source countries are looking at the implications of the change more than Canadian media: “open up the chain of citizenship without end…:”
 
…Pavan Dhillon, immigration attorney illustrates the first- generation limit. Mrs. A was born in India and was its former citizen. Subsequently after migrating, she acquired Canadian citizenship. On her return to India, she bore a child – ‘B’. Now, ‘B’ was eligible to be a Canadian citizen through descent. However, subsequently, ‘B’ (a Canadian citizen) could not under the first-generation limit rule pass on citizenship to her child (let’s name him C) if C was also born outside Canada.In other words, the first-generation which was born abroad, did not have the right to pass on citizenship by descent to the second-generation that was born abroad. This set of individuals, who were denied citizenship by descent are referred to as ‘Lost Canadians’.

According to the proposed amendment children born abroad to Canadians since 2009, would automatically be granted citizenship. A new substantial connection test would be created for those born outside Canada, after the new law comes into effect.

Those Indians who post enactment of the proposed legislation are eligible to become Canadian citizens and want to opt for it, will have to give up their Indian citizenship, as dual citizenship is not permitted.

The proposed provisions require that “Parents born abroad who have or adopt children also born outside Canada will need to have spent at least 1,095 cumulative days of physical presence in Canada prior to the birth or adoption of their child to pass on citizenship”.

Ken Nickel-Lane, founder of an immigration services firm , told TOI, “This announcement, at least on initial reading looks like it will open up the chain of citizenship without end as long as the parents have spent at least 1,095 cumulative days (approximately three years) of physical presence in Canada prior to the birth or adoption of their child to pass on citizenship. So, this could be very significant to a large group of individuals worldwide, notably Indian Nationals given that they are our largest source of new Canadians.”

However, it could be another immigration hot issue, as in some quarters it may be perceived that the floodgates to a wider pool of new immigrants have been opened, adds Nickel-Lane.

“The proposed legislation intends to ensure that Canadians who have substantial ties to Canada are not limited in their ability to pass on their citizenship to their children. The new legislation will greatly benefit the diaspora with significant ties to Canada,” states Dhillon .

Minister Miller summed up, “The current rules generally restrict citizenship by descent to the first generation, excluding some people who have a genuine connection to Canada. This has unacceptable consequences for families and impacts life choices, such as where individuals may choose to live, work, study, or even where to have children and raise a family. These changes aim to be inclusive and protect the value of Canadian citizenship, as we are committed to making the citizenship process as fair and transparent as possible.”

Canada’s immigration agency has stated that if the bill passes in Parliament and receives royal assent, it will work as quickly as possible to implement these changes and will provide more information for eligible individuals on its website.

Source: Canada set to lift restrictive citizenship by descent norms; Indian diaspora to benefit say experts

Some coverage as well in the Nigerian press but with limited analysis by Daniel Béland: Canada restores citizenship rights to “lost Canadians”

Filed under C-71, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Lilley: Trudeau extending Canadian citizenship to grandchildren and illegals

2024/05/27 Leave a comment

Different take from Lilley in the Toronto Sun than Selley in the National Post. Agree with Lilley that there are alternative methods such as greater use of ministerial discretion for hardship and statelessness cases, rather than casting a broader net:

….On the issue of extending birthright citizenship, the Liberals made it sound like they had no choice, blaming a court decision last December. The truth is, it was a lower court ruling they didn’t appeal because as they stated clearly in their news release they liked it.

“The Government of Canada did not appeal the ruling because we agree that the law has unacceptable consequences for Canadians whose children were born outside the country,” the news release stated.

The court ruling was in response to a number of families who challenged a law which stated that you could only pass on citizenship to a Canadian born outside of the country by one generation. With this change, grandchildren of Canadian citizens will be extended full Canadian citizenship.

This isn’t standard practice in the United States, Britain, France, Italy or a number of peer countries, which with rare exception cap passing on citizenship to the first generation born outside of the country.

Yet when a number of families, some with stories similar to mine, challenged Canada’s citizenship laws, Justice Jasmine Akbarali found the law to be unconstitutional. In her ruling she found that the law violated section 6 mobility rights and section 15 equality rights.

In one of the cases, two Canadians who had moved to Switzerland to work and had a child while there, sued in the off chance that in the future their daughter also moves abroad and has a family that they could pass on citizenship. That’s deciding a case and overturning a law based on a hypothetical, something judges love doing but isn’t a serious way to determine court cases.

In another case, a man born in the United States to a Canadian mother got married and started a family while living in Asia. He wanted to pass on the citizenship to his child, but the law didn’t allow it.

When he moved back to Canada with his family, his daughter applied for and was granted Canadian citizenship.

Bottom line is that in all the cases before Justice Akbarali there were solutions, like applying for citizenship, that didn’t involve watering down our rules. She decided the first generation cut off was arbitrary.

But if a one generation rule is arbitrary, what’s to say a future court won’t find the second generation cut off arbitrary. Parliament must choose a cut off at some point, otherwise, why have citizenship, why have borders, why have rights and privileges open to citizens and not others.

This was a bad court ruling and it has now been followed by a bad government policy. It extends automatic citizenship to people who have little to no connection to Canada and cheapens the value of our citizenship.

Knowing now that the Trudeau Liberals want to extend citizenship to people in the country illegally, their moves shouldn’t be surprising.

The only question left is how far will the Liberals go in terms of devaluing what it means to be Canadian?

Source: Trudeau extending Canadian citizenship to grandchildren and illegals

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ICYMI: Statistics Canada findings buck trend on over-educated immigrants

2024/05/27 Leave a comment

Some good news:

The rate of immigrants hired in jobs they are overqualified for has dropped to the lowest rate in 20 years, says a new Statistics Canada study.

Using census data, researchers examined the educational achievements of immigrants and the educational requirements for their occupations. Overeducation or education-occupation mismatch is defined as when someone with at least a bachelor’s degree is employed in a position requiring no more than a high school education.

The 2021 census found only 26.7 per cent of recent immigrants were over-educated for their jobs, down from 31.1 per cent in 2016. Those in jobs fitting their qualifications went up to 44.4 per cent from just 40 per cent over the same five-year period.

“Selecting immigrants with high levels of education increases their chances of economic success,” said Statistics Canada in the report released on Wednesday. “Immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher are more adaptable to changes in the labour market and have steeper growth in employment earnings than those with a trades or high school education.”

But in reality, many immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher have occupations that underutilize their skills, which harm their employment income, productivity and well-being, it said.

The report attributed the progress to Canada’s job growth in high-skilled occupations between 2016 and 2021, compared to the previous 15 years, as well as reforms to the immigrant selection system in recent years that have put more emphasis on positive immigrant attributes such as Canadian education and work credentials contributing to better economic outcomes.

Census data from 2001 to 2021 showed the number of Canadians age 25 to 64 with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased to six million people from 5.2 million, with immigrants accounting for 60 per cent of that growth.

In 2021, about 55.3 per cent of recent immigrants and 39.8 per cent of established immigrants had at least a bachelor’s degree, while 32.6 per cent of their Canadian-born peers age 25 to 34 and 24.8 per cent of those age 35 to 64 had the same education level.

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Yakabuski: The federal public service is broken. Is it too late to fix it?

2024/05/27 Leave a comment

Good long if dispiriting read with no easy or quick fixes:

…Canada is hardly the only parliamentary democracy to witness the degradation of its public service and concentration of power in the prime minister’s office, with a resultant decline in the quality and effectiveness of public policy. Britain’s Commission on the Centre of Government recently released its own report on deleterious impact of this phenomenon. “The centre [of government] in recent years has become far too dominant yet far too ineffective. It has scooped out initiative and all but emasculated Whitehall departments, which alternately try to second-guess what the flip-flop centre thinks and are micromanaged by it,” the commission’s deputy chairman, historian Sir Anthony Seldon, wrote in The Sunday Times. (Whitehall is British shorthand for the public service.)

More than ever, in our darkening age of political polarization, we need a neutral and non-partisan public service to guide major policy decisions. And we need competent public servants to implement them without fear or favour. The Trudeau Liberals have done themselves and Canadians a disservice by failing to recognize that a policy-capable and operationally efficient public service is any government’s best asset. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who speaks disparagingly of “gatekeepers” of all sorts, has given no indication he understands that either.

What future does that suggest for a country that faces chronic (and related) budget and productivity deficits and desperately needs to develop sustainable, affordable and equitable policies to address them both? We cannot expect them to come out of the PMO. Its dominance is partly what got us into this mess.

Source: The federal public service is broken. Is it too late to fix it?

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Canada’s temporary foreign worker program is archaic. Here’s how the Senate wants to change it

2024/05/27 Leave a comment

A start:

The federal government must modernize its archaic temporary foreign worker program by allowing migrant workers to change employers within their industry and overhauling the complicated enforcement system, says a Senate report.

To better support both workers and employers, a Migrant Work Commission should be established to oversee the program, advocate for migrant workers in Canada and serve as a single point of contact for reports of abuse and mistreatment as part of its mandate, says the study released on Tuesday.

“With so many cooks in the kitchen, it is only logical to have a head chef,” Ontario Sen. Ratna Omidvar, chair of the Senate social affairs, science and technology committee, told a news conference.

“This commission would serve as a one-stop shop for migrants who need help in asserting their rights and for employers seeking support in navigating the labyrinth of red tape, and even for government departments seeking to make their operations more efficient.”

The recommendations, however, have received a cold reception by advocates, who criticized the Senate for failing to address the structural issues of the temporary worker program.

“The fundamental power imbalance is the temporary migration system itself,” said Syed Hussan of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. “So long we have a system of temporariness, there’s going to be inequality, injustice, abuse and exploitation.”

The Senate launched the study in late 2022 into Canada’s temporary foreign work program, which was introduced in 1973 as a stopgap measure to address the country’s labour shortages but has since grown to be an indispensable part of the Canadian labour market….

Source: Canada’s temporary foreign worker program is archaic. Here’s how the Senate wants to change it

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Removing religion as hate speech defence worth exploring: anti-Semitism envoy

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Worth consideration but of course not without contention (Andrew Bennett, the former ambassador for religious freedom, currently at Cardus, appears to be ruling it out, unlike Lyons):

Canada’s special envoy for combating antisemitism is “very interested” in exploring the idea of removing religion as a possible defence against hate speech charges, she said Thursday, raising concern about creating a possible chill on religious expression.

Deborah Lyons, whose title also includes preserving Holocaust remembrance, made the comment before a parliamentary committee that is studying antisemitism on university campuses.

“I am very interested in exploring (it) as an option because I think, frankly, we are seeing it used in this country and in other places as a defence that frankly does not stand the ground in these very difficult times,” she testified Thursday.

Still, Lyons said she is not ready to offer a final opinion on the matter, and is still discussing it with Justice Department officials.

Jewish leaders, students and faculty have for months been voicing concerns over an increase in hate speech and violence since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war last fall.

Lyons said she believes universities’ equity, diversity and inclusion strategies are “failing Jews in this country” because they don’t make much mention of antisemitism specifically.

Her office is working to develop better training to counter anti-Jewish discrimination, which she hopes institutions, including governments, will use.

Members of Parliament also asked Lyons about the role police and prosecutors play in laying hate speech related charges, and whether Criminal Code changes are needed.

They pointed to a recent decision by Quebec prosecutors not to charge Montreal imam Adil Charkaoui over comments said during a prayer — a scenario Lyons says she is discussing with the government.

The comments were delivered at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Montreal, and led to a complaint alleging threats and incitement of violence, which was investigated by the RCMP.

Leading a prayer in Arabic, Charkaoui had called on God to “take care of aggressor Zionists,” adding “O God, don’t leave any of them.”

Last week the province’s director of public prosecutions announced that a committee of three Crown attorneys found the evidence insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the words amounted to an incitement of hatred toward an identifiable group, as defined in the Criminal Code.

Using the case as an example, Bloc Québécois MP Rhéal Fortin asked Lyons whether she supports his party’s proposal to eliminate a section of the Criminal Code that allows the use of religious beliefs or a religious text as a defence against the promotion of hatred and antisemitism.

The Criminal Code states that people shouldn’t be convicted of the willful promotion of hatred or antisemitism — defined as downplaying or denying the Holocaust — if, “in good faith,” they expressed an opinion “on a religious subject” or “based on a belief in a religious text.”

Fortin says his party wants to ban “exceptions” to hate speech based on religion.

“Certainly I think that it’s something we’ve got to continue to examine,” Lyons said.

Justice Minister Arif Virani’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He is already seeking to increase the punishments for existing hate-related offences — including increasing the maximum consequence for advocating genocide to life imprisonment — in the Liberals’ legislation against online harms, tabled back in February.

The stiffer criminal justice reforms have fallen under harsh scrutiny from critics, including civil liberty advocacy groups, who say it could stifle free speech. Justice officials say criminal charges would only be laid in the most extreme examples.

Removing religion as a possible defence to a hate speech charge would likely be welcomed by those who oppose religion, but would create “genuine fear” for those who have deeply held religious beliefs about what they could say in the public square, said Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett, who works at the public policy think tank Cardus.

“Often, religious people privatize their faith because they’re afraid that if I speak about what I believe, in good faith, in the public square, I’m going to be cancelled, or I’m going to be shut down,” said Bennett, Cardus’s faith communities program director.

He says if a “chill” is placed on religious expression it risks marginalizing a sizable part of the population, including many new Canadians for whom “religion is not just some sort of cultural relic” but “informs all aspects of society.”

“In many cases, they’ve come here because of the religious freedom we enjoy, and so to then say to those new Canadians in particular, ‘Oh, by the way, you can’t speak about your religion publicly for fear of being censured,’ I think that’s a very bad message to send.”

Bennett said the debate raises questions of how hate is defined and what makes a hateful view “different from a peacefully-held opinion that someone might profoundly disagree with?”

In the case of Charkaoui’s comments, Marco Mendicino, a Liberal MP, said he found the call by Quebec’s Crown not to press charges against the imam “incomprehensible and deeply problematic.”

Charkaoui’s comments were “perhaps one of the most egregious offences that I have seen” he told Thursday’s committee.

Mendicino, a former prosecutor who previously served as public safety minister, also cited other examples of demonstrators chanting offensive language, including glorifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.

He believes “Zionists” fit the Criminal Code’s definition of an identifiable group, which refers to “any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or mental or physical disability.”

Source: Removing religion as hate speech defence worth exploring: anti-Semitism envoy

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , , ,

Montréal et Gatineau, l’immigration et les jeunes accélèrent le déclin du français, selon Québec

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Ongoing concern one without easy solutions particularly for youth:

Malgré un maintien relatif de l’utilisation de la langue dans l’espace public, le déclin du français se poursuit, accéléré par l’immigration, par les habitudes de consommation des jeunes Québécois et par la situation à Montréal, indique le ministre de la Langue française, Jean-François Roberge.

« J’aimerais ça vous dire : “Oui, oui, c’est réglé !” Ce n’est pas le cas encore », a lancé l’élu caquiste à sa sortie du Salon bleu, mercredi, une petite heure après avoir déposé en chambre le plus récent Rapport sur l’évolution de la situation linguistique de l’Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF).

Rendu public tous les cinq ans, ce document fait une revue multidisciplinaire de l’usage de la langue de Molière au Québec. On y apprend notamment que le français dans l’espace public — une statistique sur laquelle s’appuyait le commissaire à la langue française, Benoît Dubreuil, dans un rapport en septembre — a très légèrement reculé entre 2007 (79,1 %) et 2022 (78,7 %).

Il y est aussi relevé que la proportion de personnes travaillant principalement en français est passée de 81,8 % en 2001 à 79,9 % 20 ans plus tard, en 2021. Sur la même période, l’anglais a progressé, passant de 12,3 % à 14 %.

Accosté par la presse parlementaire, mercredi, le ministre Roberge a tenu à rappeler qu’il « y a plusieurs indicateurs à surveiller ». « Tant mieux s’il y a des secteurs où on recule moins, où on a atteint un certain plateau, mais il reste qu’on n’a pas arrêté le déclin encore », a-t-il dit.

Trois « fractures »

L’élu caquiste a cerné « trois enjeux en particulier » dans le dossier du français. Il cite au premier chef la « fracture régionale » qui existe entre Montréal, Gatineau et le reste du Québec. Selon l’OQLF, 59,5 % des Montréalais s’exprimaient en français lorsqu’ils étaient à l’extérieur de la maison en 2022. Ce chiffre s’élevait à 63 % à Gatineau.

« On voit que Montréal et Gatineau sont des régions où il y a un écart très, très grand par rapport au reste du Québec », a soulevé M. Roberge mercredi.

Selon le rapport de l’OQLF, « la proportion de personnes parlant principalement le français à la maison a diminué dans chacune des RMR [régions métropolitaines de recensement] du Québec » de 2016 et 2021. « Cette diminution a cependant été plus prononcée sur l’île de Montréal, dans la couronne de Montréal et dans la RMR de Gatineau qu’ailleurs au Québec », peut-on lire.

« Maintenant, en ce moment, avec l’arrivée massive de travailleurs temporaires et de demandeurs d’asile, c’est sûr que ç’a un impact », a déclaré M. Roberge. Aux dernières nouvelles, plus de 560 000 immigrants non permanents résidaient au Québec, dont une part importante dans la région métropolitaine de Montréal.

Les données de l’OQLF montrent par ailleurs que tout près d’un tiers (31,6 %) des résidents non permanents ne parviennent pas à entretenir une conversation en français. « C’est une autre ligne de fracture », a lancé M. Roberge mercredi.

« Je l’ai nommé, je vais le redire encore aussi : quand on accueille 30 000, 35 000 étudiants non québécois anglophones au centre-ville de Montréal, qui après ont des emplois étudiants, ça aussi, ça contribue à angliciser les milieux de travail », a-t-il ajouté.

Beaucoup d’anglais chez les jeunes

Selon M. Roberge, la dernière « fracture » est « générationnelle ». D’après une étude de l’OQLF citée dans le rapport, 55 % des jeunes qui utilisent les réseaux sociaux affirment publier leur contenu « soit autant en français qu’en anglais, soit principalement en anglais ».

« Même parmi les jeunes francophones, la part de personnes publiant principalement en français n’était pas particulièrement élevée (52 %) », écrit l’Office.

À la période des questions à Ottawa, mercredi, le chef du Bloc québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, a reproché au premier ministre canadien, Justin Trudeau, d’« affaiblir le français », notamment chez les jeunes, avec ses politiques linguistiques. « On est préoccupés par le déclin du français qu’on voit à travers le pays, y compris au Québec », a rétorqué M. Trudeau, tout en affirmant que « ce n’est pas la minorité anglophone qui est une menace pour le français au Québec ».

Le ministre Roberge, qui a déposé le mois dernier un plan d’action visant à renverser le déclin de la langue, espère quant à lui « changer l’environnement » culturel des jeunes Québécois.

« Un jeune qui a 15, 16, 17 ans, s’il baigne dans un environnement culturel anglophone, bien il a plus de chances, évidemment, d’utiliser l’anglais au quotidien, de publier sur les réseaux sociaux en anglais, a-t-il soutenu mercredi. Quand il ouvre la télé, il n’ouvre pas la télé traditionnelle. Il va aller sur Netflix, il va aller sur Disney, il va aller sur toutes les plateformes de diffusion en continu. »

Alerté par un comité indépendant des risques pour la santé du français du manque de « découvrabilité » des contenus francophones, le gouvernement de François Legault s’est engagé, au début de l’année, à déposer un projet de loi pour forcer les plateformes numériques à mettre en avant davantage de contenus du Québec. « On va faire flèche de tout bois », avait affirmé en janvier le ministre de la Culture et des Communications, Mathieu Lacombe.

Plan d’action

Voilà deux ans presque jour pour jour que le gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec a adopté la loi 96. Cette vaste réforme de la loi 101 agit dans plusieurs sphères, avec pour objectif de protéger la langue française.

Le mois dernier, le ministre Roberge a rendu public le résultat des travaux du Groupe d’action pour l’avenir de la langue française. Dans son plan d’action, le gouvernement Legault s’engage à rehausser les fonds pour la francisation, à légiférer dans le domaine de la culture et à renforcer les exigences de français imposées aux nouveaux arrivants, entre autres.

« Donnons-nous le temps d’implanter nos mesures et de voir ce qu’elles vont changer. Si on doit aller plus loin, on le fera », a dit M. Roberge mercredi.

Interrogé au moment du dépôt de son plan d’action, l’élu caquiste avait refusé de se fixer un échéancier d’inversion du déclin du français. « Je pense qu’on va [l’]inverser […] très rapidement », avait-il dit.

Source: Montréal et Gatineau, l’immigration et les jeunes accélèrent le déclin du français, selon Québec

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France is proud of its secularism. But struggles grow in this approach to faith, school, integration

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Interesting long read (with influence on Quebec approach):

Brought into the international spotlight by the ban on hijabs for French athletes at the upcoming Paris Olympics, France’s unique approach to “laïcité” — loosely translated as “secularism” — has been increasingly stirring controversy from schools to sports fields across the country.

The struggle cuts to the core of how France approaches not only the place of religion in public life, but also the integration of its mostly immigrant-origin Muslim population, Western Europe’s largest.

Perhaps the most contested ground is public schools, where visible signs of faith are barred under policies seeking to foster a shared sense of national unity. That includes the headscarves some Muslim women want to wear for piety and modesty, even as others fight them as a symbol of oppression. 

“It has become a privilege to be allowed to practice our religion,” said Majda Ould Ibbat, who was considering leaving Marseille, France’s second-largest city, until she discovered a private Muslim school, Ibn Khaldoun, where her children could both freely live their faith and flourish academically.

“We wanted them to have a great education, and with our principles and our values,” added Ould Ibbat, who only started wearing a headscarf recently, while her teen daughter, Minane, hasn’t felt ready to. Her 15-year-old son, Chahid, often prays in the school’s mosque during recess. 

For Minane, as for many French Muslim youth, navigating French culture and her spiritual identity is getting harder. The 19-year-old nursing student has heard people say even on the streets of multicultural Marseille that there’s no place for Muslims.

“I ask myself if Islam is accepted in France,” she said in her parents’ apartment, where a bright orange Berber rug woven by her Moroccan grandmother hangs next to Koranic verses in Arabic. 

Minane also lives with the collective trauma that has scarred much of France — the gripping fear of Islamist attacks, which have targeted schools and are seen by many as evidence that laïcité (pronounced lah-eee-see-tay) needs to be strictly enforced to prevent radicalization.

Minane vividly remembers observing a moment of silence at Ibn Khaldoun in honor of Samuel Paty, a public school teacher beheaded by a radicalized Islamist in 2020. A memorial to Paty as a defender of France’s values hangs in the entrance of the Education Ministry in Paris.

For its officials and most educators, secularism in public schools and other public institutions is essential. They say it encourages a sense of belonging to a united French identity and prevents those who are less or not religiously observant from feeling pressured, while leaving everyone free to worship in private spaces.

For many French Muslims, however, and other critics, laïcité is exerting precisely that kind of discriminatory pressure on already disadvantaged minorities, denying them the chance to live their full identity in their own country.

Amid the tension, there’s broad agreement that polarization is skyrocketing, as crackdowns and challenges mount for this French approach to religion and integration.

While open confrontations are still numbered in the dozens among millions of students, it has become common to see girls put their headscarves back on the moment they exit through a public school’s doors.

“Laws on laïcité protect and allow for coexistence — which is less and less easy,” said Isabelle Tretola, principal of the public primary school whose front gate faces the door to Ibn Khaldoun’s small mosque.

She addresses challenges to secularism every day — like children in choir class who put their hands on their ears “because their families told them singing variety songs isn’t good.”

“You can’t force them to sing, but teachers tell them they can’t cover their ears out of respect for the instructor and classmates,” Tretola said. “In school, you come to learn the values of the republic.”

Secularism is one of four fundamental values enshrined in France’s constitution. The state explicitly charges public schools with instilling those values in children, while allowing private schools to offer religious instruction as long as they also teach the general curriculum that the government establishes.

Unlike the United States, where fights over what values schools teach cleave along partisan lines, support for laïcité is almost universal in France’s political establishment, though some on the right criticize it as anti-religion and on the left as a vestige of colonialism….

Source: France is proud of its secularism. But struggles grow in this approach to faith, school, integration

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Ottawa veut étendre la citoyenneté aux enfants nés à l’étranger de Canadiens, Chris Selley: Finally, an easy fix to the Citizenship Act, 18 years in the making

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Limited commentary to date:

…Professeur en droit de l’immigration, des réfugiés et de la citoyenneté à l’Université d’Ottawa, Yves Le Bouthillier accueille favorablement le nouveau projet de loi, affirmant que les nouveaux changements pourront encourager la mobilité internationale des Canadiens.

« Pour les femmes, si elles voulaient vraiment préserver le droit de leurs enfants de transmettre leur citoyenneté, il fallait rester au Canada pour accoucher », donne-t-il comme exemple.

Les parents nés à l’extérieur du pays devront avoir passé au moins 1095 jours cumulatifs (trois ans) au Canada avant la naissance ou l’adoption de leur enfant pour lui transmettre leur citoyenneté canadienne.

« Je pense que c’est une limite raisonnable à ce qui constitue un lien substantiel avec le Canada », a expliqué le ministre.

Le professeur Le Bouthillier indique que le seuil de 1095 jours est assez souple comparativement aux critères d’autres pays. Aux États-Unis, par exemple, un parent doit être un citoyen américain et avoir passé au moins cinq ans physiquement aux États-Unis avant la naissance de l’enfant pour lui transmettre la citoyenneté. Au moins deux ans de cette présence physique doivent être après le 14e anniversaire du parent.

Le projet de loi canadien favorise ainsi la rétention et l’acquisition de la citoyenneté à travers le parent, analyse le professeur.

Un nouveau test pour les enfants nés après l’entrée en vigueur de la réforme sera aussi mis en oeuvre pour « évaluer les liens manifestes » avec le Canada….

Source: Ottawa veut étendre la citoyenneté aux enfants nés à l’étranger de Canadiens

Chris Selley in the NP has a valid point regarding exercising ministerial discretion, rather than arguably broader measures than needed to address particular cases:

….If citizenship ministers had been willing to exercise their broad discretion and grant citizenship to people like the infant Burgess son, it might not have been a problem. There aren’t thousands of these cases, though there are more than a few. I know two Canadian children who (as it stands) won’t be able to pass on Canadian citizenship to their children, should their children be born abroad. One of them has a brother who will be able to pass on Canadian citizenship to his children, should they be born abroad, because he happened to be born after his parents moved back to Canada.

This is not coherent. Bill C-71 offers the promise of coherency.

Source: Chris Selley: Finally, an easy fix to the Citizenship Act, 18 years in the making

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The Liberals strike a blow for government secrecy

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Sigh, but so endemic of all governments in undermining ATIP:

…A system predicated on the notion that everything but the most classified government documents and data ought to be public has become a tool for Canadians governments to do what they instinctively do best: hoard information.

Let’s be blunt about why they do this: to keep information out of the hands of citizens, because an informed citizenry is an empowered citizenry. Governments aren’t so much jealously squirreling away information as they are sucking the lifeblood out of the democratic system.

Mr. Trudeau came to power vowing to set a sunny example by making information open by default to all Canadians. Then he discovered what every new prime minister discovers: that the default preference in Canada’s halls of power is to keep voters in the dark.

He could still restore his reputation on this issue. He should allow the independent review of the system and restore the Commissioner’s funding. It’s not too late for the Prime Minister to live up to what are still very good ideals.

Source: The Liberals strike a blow for government secrecy

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