Wells: Justin Trudeau takes Ottawa’s debates to Washington

2016/03/14 Leave a comment

Interesting snippet from Paul Wells’ account of Trudeau in Washington:

The other striking moment came when Trudeau raised, by himself, his decision to repeal the provisions in the Conservatives’ “Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act,” C-24, that stripped some convicted terrorists of their Canadian citizenships.

“One of the things the right-wing had done was put forward a bill that took away the citizenship of convicted terrorists,” he said. “A number of countries have done that around the world. It seems like a fairly obvious thing to try and do. If someone’s gonna commit an act of war, an act of terrorism against the country, they probably shouldn’t deserve to keep Canadian citizenship if they’re doing that.”

This is indeed a decent paraphrase of the arguments Conservatives made in support of C-24. Trudeau said his opponents “felt they were on very, very safe ground” with their policy.

“The problem is, as you scratch into that a little deeper, you realize it only really applies to citizens who have, or could have, a dual nationality. So a kid who was born in Canada, and only has a Canadian citizenship — but whose parents were born, for example, in Pakistan — could lose his citizenship if he committed an act of terror, [whereas] a kid who was tenth-generation Canadian home-grown terrorist could never lose his citizenship. And suddenly we’d made citizenship conditional on good behaviour. Or on non-heinous behaviour, which comes down to the same thing. And that devalues the citizenship — made two classes of citizen.”

Trudeau’s tone suggested he knew this was not, on the face of it, a winning issue for him. “And it came to the point where, in one of our largest debates, I was standing on stage against the former prime minister. And he was telling people that I was willing to stand up and restore the citizenship of the one Canadian who, under this law, had had his citizenship taken away.

“He knew he had me on that one. I’m actually standing there defending the right of a Canadian — stripped of his citizenship for terrorism — to become, once again, a Canadian citizen. And I stood there, and I defended that principle, that you should not be able to take away citizenship from anyone. And our government would be, because we’d reverse that law, restoring the citizenship of someone who was convicted of terrorism in Canada.

“And that’s a perfect narrative for the politics of fear and aggression. And yet it’s me sitting here as Prime Minister of Canada, not Stephen Harper.”

Source: Macleans

Filed under Citizenship, Revocation Tagged with , ,

Citizenship: 2015 Full-Year Data – Backlog largely eliminated

2016/03/11 Leave a comment

Citizenship - Conference Board April 2016.001My quick analysis of the 2015 operational data released a few days ago.

  • The increased funding of $44 million provided in Budget 2013 to address the backlog has clearly worked: 235,000 in 2015, slightly down from 263,000 in 2014, but significantly greater than earlier years when it dropped as low as 113,000;
  • The backlog has been reduced from a high of 396,000 in 2013 to 130,000 in 2015, a major achievement;
  • In election year 2015, significantly more citizenship ceremonies were held (3,300) compared to previous years averaged around 1,900, likely reflecting a conscious decision to do more ceremonies, smaller in numbers, in more places; and,
  • While the number of applications appears less (130,000) compared to 2014 (198,000), the data is often revised as any delayed or incomplete applications originally not entered into the system are backdated to the original date of the application (the 2014 data, originally showing 130,000 was revised only in the third quarter of 2015).
  • While it would be premature to declare a trend, logic suggests that the various changes made by the previous government, including the fee increase to $630, would result in a decline of applications.

As the proposed changes to residency and testing in Bill C-6 need to go through the parliamentary process, followed by coming-into-force provisions, these unlikely to be implemented much before 2017.

Filed under C-6, Citizenship, Citizenship Act

Laura Track: Citizenship comes with the same rights and responsibilities, regardless of birthplace

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

Citizenship - Conference Board April 2016.001Laura Track of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association supporting the Government’s planned repeal of the revocation for terror or treason provisions (the above chart has been revised with full-year data for 2015):

Critics point out that the government can still revoke someone’s citizenship on the basis that they lied or committed fraud in order to obtain it. How can that be a more serious offence than terrorism, some wonder? However, the two scenarios are fundamentally different. Citizenship obtained by fraud is a citizenship that should never have been granted. Revoking it is akin to correcting an error. Revoking citizenship from a Canadian based on a crime they committed after citizenship was legitimately obtained is a punitive response that amounts to the ancient punishment of exile. Such medieval practices have no place in a rights-respecting democracy.

It’s no secret who would have been targeted by the law: new Canadians of colour who arrived in Canada only one or two generations ago. This unequal treatment is why the BC Civil Liberties Association and Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers challenged the law in court last summer, arguing that it is discriminatory and violates key constitutional rights. It is also poor security policy, and fundamentally wrong.

We applaud the government for taking the first steps towards bringing about the law’s demise. The reforms are not perfect, and still leave too much power in the hands of government bureaucrats to revoke citizenship in cases of fraud or misrepresentation, without the involvement of a judge. But it’s a step in the right direction — the direction of equal rights for all Canadians.

Source: Laura Track: Citizenship comes with the same rights and responsibilities, regardless of birthplace | National Post

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Kelly McParland: McCallum’s plan to rewrite guide book is a historical stumble

2016/03/08 Leave a comment

Predictably, and legitimately, concern has been raised regarding the plans to revise Discover Canada, the citizenship test study guide.

When providing advice to the Conservative government on the guide in 2009, I argued for greater balance in their choice and treatment of elements, along with messaging, aiming to ensure a guide that would survive any possible change in government (while there was an advisory committee, it never met together to have a fullsome discussion and debate).

In terms of McParland’s particular concerns, while military history is important (and not just the previous peacekeeping focus), so is social history, which Discover Canada largely downplayed. It was a deliberate political choice to downplay the Liberal narrative in favour of a more Conservative one.

The wording of  ‘barbaric cultural practices’ was largely chosen to attract media attention (it worked!). Arguably, it also was a precursor to the Conservatives use of identity politics, seen in the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act and the late unlamented proposed ‘snitch’ line announced by former Ministers Leith and Alexander.

The same points can be made more effectively in the context of the history of women’s equality rights and how ‘honour’ killings and the like are against the law.

While Discover Canada was a marked improvement compared to the ‘insufferable lightness’ of its predecessor, A Look at Canada, my hope that the Liberal government, in revising and renaming the guide, doesn’t make the same mistake. Hopefully, it will keep some of the stronger points in Discover Canada while ensuring a broader narrative, one that lives up to the diversity and inclusion commitment, and speaks to those with both conservative and ‘progressive’ values:

Canadians continue to celebrate the people and events of the time despite the Liberal government’s apparent perplexity. Re-enactments are held each summer. Streets, schools and universities have been named in commemoration of its key figures. Reminders of the war are dotted across regions that are among Canada’s most popular tourist areas.

Handout

HandoutLaura Secord became one of Canada’s first heroes for warning of an impending American attack. featured in The War of 1812.

There is an unfortunate and dispiriting tendency in current culture to try and re-interpret the past. Oddly, it is deemed inappropriate to honour the events that made Canada a country and set the foundation for the culture we’ve become. We would prefer to condemn previous generations for lacking our own views, as if 19th century Canadians should somehow have shared the perspective of a future society they could never imagine.

The Liberals have shown an eagerness to roll back any initiative they view as too reflective of their Conservative predecessors. McCallum would do well to recognize that Canada’s history does not belong to any particular political party. He should be expanding efforts to acquaint Canadians with their history, not trying to erase it from guidebooks for the sake of a cheap political snub.

Source: Kelly McParland: McCallum’s plan to rewrite guide book is a historical stumble

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Time to rewrite Citizenship Act, ‘Lost Canadians’ advocate says

2016/03/08 Leave a comment

Don Chapman continues his crusade for the few remaining cases of ‘Lost Canadians.’

It appears that the main focus of his efforts is more with respect to posthumous recognition of Canadian citizenship and their descendants. There do not appear to be any hard numbers showing this is a significant issue (at least that I have seen) although there are a few anecdotes that he cites:

When it comes to immigration law, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likes to say, “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” — but one advocate says it’s actually not that simple.

The Liberal government should be taking more steps to help law-abiding people whose road to citizenship is blocked by the existing law, said Don Chapman, a longtime champion for so-called “lost Canadians.”

It’s time for the Citizenship Act to be scrapped and rewritten, Chapman said — and he believes the upcoming 150th anniversary of Confederation is the perfect time.

Those born in Canada were considered British until the definition of Canadian citizenship was established in 1947– which is where the problems began.

For instance, a baby born to a Canadian woman outside the country’s borders would not have been deemed Canadian if the mother was married to a man of a different nationality, but would be if the mother was unmarried.

In 1977, an updated law created new issues. It established the concept of dual citizenship, but did not restore Canadian citizenship for those who lost theirs when they switched under the earlier law.

The consequences of these two pieces of legislation were people who became known as “lost Canadians” — mostly those who believed themselves to be citizens, but by law were not.

The act has been amended several times. There are now 18 definitions of what makes a person a Canadian citizen with more than a dozen caveats, linked to everything from what year they were born to whether their parents were Canadian diplomats or soldiers.

Still, Chapman said he hears from people nearly every day who have suddenly learned they aren’t citizens, or can’t get the decades-old birth certificates of their now-deceased parents to prove that they are. They end up in endless battles with the government or before the courts, and need a citizenship ombudsman who could help, speeding up the system at the same time.

And yet the first thing the Liberals did with the Citizenship Act was to restore the status of a convicted terrorist, Chapman said.

They did it with Bill C-6, introduced last month to revoke a provision of the existing law that allowed dual citizens to be stripped of their Canadian citizenship if convicted of terrorism or other crimes against the country.

A government spokesman said changes to the Citizenship Act in 2009 and 2015 restored or granted citizenship to the “vast majority” of lost Canadians.

And there are ways to address cases that weren’t covered, Immigration Department spokesperson Nancy Caron said in an email.

“The minister has the authority to grant citizenship on a discretionary basis to alleviate cases of special and unusual hardship,” Caron said. “Those cases are assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

Source: Time to rewrite Citizenship Act, ‘Lost Canadians’ advocate says | CTV News

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Why stripping citizenship is a weak tool to fight terrorism: Roach and Forces

2016/03/07 Leave a comment

Usual good analysis and assessment:

First, even assuming that citizenship revocations produced the removal of dangerous people from Canada, that strategy would amount to anti-terrorism NIMBYism. More concretely, Canada would embark of a policy of catch and release – setting up today’s convicts as tomorrow’s foreign fighters, with travel to foreign locales facilitated by the Canadian government. It seems unlikely other countries would embrace the “return” of people converted to violence in Canada, and deposited on their doorstep because of a potentially tenuous residual link of nationality.

Nor would it be sensible to assume that deported former Canadians would thereafter be unable or uninterested in engineering acts dangerous to Canada and Canadians. Operating far from Canada and its security services, they would enjoy a greater freedom to do so than would those kept closer to home, under watch and potentially more invasive strictures, such as peace bonds.

Second, the provisions only applied to dual nationals. The rationale for this focus was simple – making someone stateless would violate Canada’s international obligations. But this focus on a small subset of Canadians encouraged the dangerous delusion that terrorism is (or can be made into) a foreign threat and problem. The so-called Toronto 18 plot, the terrorist attacks of October, 2014, and the 1985 Air India bombing underline the fact that terrorism is a Canadian phenomenon. Some of those plotters were dual nationals, others were not. In almost all of the recent terrorism cases, the violent radicalization of plotters was made-in-Canada, not the product of residence in some foreign locale.

Citizenship revocation for dual nationals is at best a capricious and close to arbitrary tool, focused not on a class of people who are the most objectively dangerous, but on a population most legally vulnerable to the extraordinary revocation power.

Third, the law now being repealed would in most cases commit Canada to long and costly battles about whether it can deport a convicted terrorist to countries such as Iran without the person running the risk of torture. This is a path we have been down before, with the infamous (and to date fruitless) security certificate disputes – legal proceedings that have consumed millions of taxpayer dollars and have yet to result in the removal of any of the five foreign-born men accused of terrorism and subjected to removal orders after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The costs here stem not only from the extensive litigation but also from the reputational hit Canada incurs when it risks complicity with torture. The O’Connor and Iacobucci inquiries into the role of Canadian authorities in contributing to the maltreatment of Canadians in foreign jails are now a decade old, but their lessons remain acute. Stripping someone’s nationality before sending him to a foreign jail in a torturing country does not change in the least the ethical or legal implications of such conduct.

Fourth, the prospect of deporting terrorists who have served their prison terms provides Canada with another excuse not to dedicate resources to problems of prison disengagement from terrorism and rehabilitation. The Western world is slowly awakening to the reality that many people convicted under broad, post-9/11 laws enacted to prevent terrorism before it happens will eventually be released. The idea of citizenship stripping encourages the illusion that Canada can displace the risk of terrorism, rather than take responsibility for fighting it through programs that counter violent extremism, including for people convicted of terrorist plots.

All of these points condemn citizenship revocation even without considering questions of constitutional law and principle. But those, too, are ripe – not least, the issue of whether our courts would have followed their U.S. counterparts and condemned citizenship revocation as an underhanded supplemental punishment for things a citizen did, while still a citizen.

Source: Why stripping citizenship is a weak tool to fight terrorism – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Citizenship, Radicalization, Revocation Tagged with ,

Canadian Citizenship: From “Harder to get and easier to lose” to a new balance

2016/03/07 Leave a comment

This presentation made at Metropolis 2016 analyzes citizenship test and take-up data, reviews the policy changes and impact of the 2010 and 2014 Conservative government changes and assesses the likely impact of the Liberal changes announced February 2016.

I will update some of the data when full-year 2015 stats are released.

Canadian Citizenship: From “Harder to get and easier to lose” to a new balance

Filed under Citizenship

Cities of Migration and Metropolis Conferences this week

2016/03/02 Leave a comment

Will be busy at the conferences so little blogging for the balance of the week. I will post the deck presentations I will be making on the 2015 Elections and Visible Minorities and on Citizenship: Finding the New Balance later this week.

Filed under Citizenship, Government

Terrorist scumbag doesn’t deserve citizenship | Candace Malcolm | Toronto Sun

2016/03/01 1 Comment

Expressed more simply but using the same strand of arguments as in John Ibbitson’s Dual nationals convicted of terrorism, high treason or spying don’t deserve to keep Canadian citizenship:

Now, the Liberal government is not only saying this man can stay in Canada, but they are also honouring him with citizenship.

Does the Trudeau government plan to send a citizenship judge into Amara’s prison cell to host a citizenship ceremony? Will he be asked to utter the oath of citizenship, and pledge allegiance to Canada and the Queen? Maybe Trudeau will show up for a selfie.

This is an absolute mockery of our citizenship. This scumbag does not deserve the privilege of being Canadian.

And yet, the Trudeau government is going out of its way to grant citizenship to a person who, judging by his actions, has a hatred for Canadians. We are bestowing the privilege and honour of Canadian citizenship upon a radicalized self-confessed Islamic terrorist who conspired to wage war against Canada.

Immigration minister John McCallum justified the move by saying, “Canadian citizens are equal under the law.”

That’s just not the case. In Canada, much like every other Western country, a person convicted of an indictable offence loses many of the rights and privileges that come along with citizenship. Serious criminals are no longer equal under the law.

Amara committed the modern day equivalent of high treason. He should not be treated equally to law-abiding Canadian citizens.

When Amara is released from prison, we should be showing him the door, not handing him Canadian citizenship papers.

Source: Terrorist scumbag doesn’t deserve citizenship | Malcolm | Columnists | Opinion |

Filed under C-6, Citizenship, Revocation Tagged with

Matt Gurney: If deportation is appropriate for war criminals, why not for terrorists?

2016/02/29 Leave a comment

Matt Gurney is unsatisfied with the principle, “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” as an explanation why we revoke citizenship for fraud and misrepresentation but not for terrorism:

After the Second World War, thousands of citizens of defeated enemy nations — Germany, Italy, Japan — moved to Canada. These immigrants included many who had served in the armed forces of those nations, and perhaps had even fought against Canadians. Mere military service in a once-hostile nation was not, and should not have been, found to be sufficient cause to deny them citizenship once the war was over. In some rare cases, however, Canada later discovered (or was told) that people living here as naturalized Canadians had been involved, for instance, in the Holocaust. These individuals, once convicted of their war crimes, had their citizenship taken away and were returned to their original countries of origin to face justice.

If that’s appropriate for war criminals, why not for terrorists?

The legal answer would be, of course, that these individuals weren’t stripped of their passports because they were terrible people who had done awful things, but because they’d lied about having done those terrible things. But while perhaps legally valid, the argument is morally and pragmatically absurd. We don’t exile liars, nor should fraud be somehow treated as a crime worse than, say, genocide. The legal circumstances provided an excuse to what’s really, and rightly, an exercise in morality — denying the honour of Canadian citizenship to those who do not deserve it.

If the Liberals wish to reverse parts of C-24, they of course have that right. They are the government. But concerned Canadians are owed more than slogans. The government should be clear why war criminals can be deported, but terrorists with dual nationalities can keep their passport forever. They may have an answer for it. If so, let’s hear it.

If I were writing the talking points:

  • There is a difference between one’s behaviour before one becomes a citizen and after one becomes Canadian
  • Before, all applicants must meet requirements (residency, language, knowledge etc) in order to take the oath and become citizens
  • Integrity is central to this process
  • Any misrepresentation or fraud, like any government program, means one loses the benefits of the particular program
  • After, all citizens must be treated equally before the law, whether Canadian-born or foreign-born, whether Canadian citizen only or dual-national
  • Current and past cases involve all of these variations, and should be subject to the same punishment. One should not have different punishments for the same crime

Responsive (if asked what about those lying when they take the oath)

  • There is no reliable way to test the sincerity of those taking the oath unlike the other, more easily verifiable, requirements

Comments or suggestions welcome …

Source: Matt Gurney: If deportation is appropriate for war criminals, why not for terrorists? | National Post

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