Chris Selley: Liberals’ failed citizenship bill will soon be the Conservatives’ problem

2025/01/14 Leave a comment

Conservatives should simply introduce a bill similar to C-71 but requiring the residency requirement be met within a five-year period as per permanent residents:

There is much for conservatives to celebrate about the death of the Liberals’ legislative agenda, which is one of the chief effects of proroguing Parliament: Every government bill in progress “cease(s) to exist,” as the House of Commons’ procedural website puts it, and would in theory have to start at square one once Parliament returns on March 24. In practice, of course, the only real order of business then will be bringing down the government. It is an ex-legislative agenda.

The death of Bill C-71, however, which would have amended the Citizenship Act with respect to so-called “second-generation-born-abroad” children of Canadian citizens, is potentially a serious problem. It’s at the very least a problem, and it’s one the Conservatives need a plan to solve starting on Day One.

I’ll try to explain the issue as simply as I can.

Once upon a time, Canadian citizenship could be passed down through the generations essentially forever: So long as you were a Canadian citizen, no matter how much time (if any) you had spent here, your children had an automatic birthright to citizenship. The Harper government changed the law in 2009: People who were born as Canadian citizens in other countries could no longer pass on citizenship to any of their children who were also born abroad.

The law has produced some maddening and very sad situations, which I have written about in the past. But most cases are probably more like my friends Tim and Emily’s — not disastrous, just arbitrary and pointless.

Tim and Emily were both born in Canada as Canadian citizens; both were raised and educated in Canada. They moved to Dubai for a few years to work, as tens of thousands of Canadians do, and had their daughter Tina there. Tina automatically became a Canadian citizen. They then moved back to Canada, where their son Mike was born. (These aren’t their real names.)

Were Mike to have a daughter in Dubai in the future, she would automatically be Canadian. Were Tina to have a daughter in Dubai in the future, she would not automatically be Canadian, because she would be the “second generation born abroad.”

(Bizarrely, Tina has lesser rights in this respect than a naturalized citizen. If you immigrate to Canada and become a citizen, the Citizenship Act considers you to have been born in Canada for the purposes of passing on citizenship.)

In December 2023, Justice Jasmine Akbarali of the Ontario Superior Court struck down this rule, which lives in a single section of the Citizenship Act, as unconstitutional. She gave the government six months to craft a legislative remedy.

That remedy was Bill C-71, which allowed people like Tina  to pass on citizenship to children born abroad so long as they could demonstrate a “substantial connection” to Canada — namely having spent 1,095 days in the country over the previous five years. It’s exactly what we require immigrants to demonstrate before they can receive citizenship. It seemed reasonable enough to constitutional lawyer Sujit Choudhry, who represented the applicants at the Ontario Superior Court.

“We thought that was fair. It was simple, it was equitable. It’s a rule that (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) administers every day in relation to permanent residents who are naturalizing,” says Choudhry.

For some reason the Liberals decided to go much further. Most notably, Bill C-71 grants “citizenship by descent (to) all persons who were born outside Canada … to a parent who was a citizen” before the new law took effect. That’s an awful lot of people with the stroke of a pen — no one really knows how many; last month, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated 115,000 — at a time when people want more control over immigration, not less. It also doesn’t cut off at the second generation: Third and fourth generations born abroad could receive citizenship if a parent could demonstrate this substantial connection.

The Liberals having lost any ability to govern, Justice Akbarali granted the government three extensions to her original six-month deadline. The third she granted “reluctantly,” emphasizing her displeasure at the government’s lack of “legislative diligence” but noting that “the interests of the public will be negatively affected if (her ruling) comes into force without replacement legislation in place.”

And there, for the Conservatives, is the rub. If the section of the Citizenship Act that Akbarali struck down simply disappears with nothing to replace it, we wouldn’t return to the status quo circa 2022. We would return to the status quo circa 2008: unlimited hereditary citizenship, which no one wants or is asking for.

“Allowing (my ruling) to take effect without replacement legislation would … result in … an unknowable number of people becoming automatic Canadian citizens,” Akbarali wrote.

That third extension expires on March 19, before Parliament could even theoretically get back to work on the file. In light of that, and of Akbarali’s previously stated concerns, odds are the government will ask for and receive another extension. But all that does is punt the ball to Pierre Poilievre’s first citizenship minister, who most certainly will not want to be seen opening the floodgates to any real or perceived “citizens of convenience.”

My impression of the Conservatives on this file is that they don’t want to be seen supporting what could be viewed as more generous citizenship laws. They want citizenship to have more value, not less, both practically and philosophically — and I’m all for that. But there is nothing remotely unpatriotic about working abroad for a few years, even if you happen to have been born abroad while your parents did the same. And it doesn’t bolster the value of citizenship to make life difficult for people who follow this very common life path.

The Liberals were most of the way to a perfectly reasonable remedy. The Conservatives should adopt the “substantial connection” test as their own, probably with a cutoff at the second generation, ditch the weird blanket citizenship-grant, pass it quickly and move on to tougher issues.

Source: Chris Selley: Liberals’ failed citizenship bill will soon be the Conservatives’ problem

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Chris Selley: The perils of ‘defining’ bigotry

2024/11/16 Leave a comment

A valid dissenting view. Although I find illustrative examples are helpful improving understanding and can be the basis for conversation:

…This is the world we live in. If Holocaust denial is illegal (or sort of), then, the thinking goes, why shouldn’t denying the Nakba or the disastrous effects of the residential school system be illegal (or sort of) as well? A reasonable person could give a reasonable answer to that question. But governments aren’t reasonable people.

As I say, I totally understand Jewish groups’ concern. Some of the definitions of anti-Palestinian racism out there certainly seem studiously, deliberately vague. Citing the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East includes as examples “erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians,” which is meaningless; and “justifying violence against Palestinians,” which could easily include defending Israel’s right to retaliate against Hamas atrocities.

But it should also be noted that Elghawaby welcomed the prospect of a definition, not any specific definition. I see little point in such “definitions” if they’re not going to be enshrined in law. But it would have made much more sense for Canada to craft its own definition of antisemitism instead of signing on to an international one that, in my view, does activate freedom-of-speech concerns. Free speech in Canada is far more protected than in many of our peer nations, and that’s a good thing.

It probably would have made far more sense still to leave all of this alone. Canadian law sets an appropriately high bar for prosecuting hate speech against any group. We don’t need the added confusion and division of “defining” every single form of bigotry.

Source: Chris Selley: The perils of ‘defining’ bigotry

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Chris Selley: Imagine the chaos if Israeli soccer comes to Canada

2024/11/12 Leave a comment

Not an appealing thought experiment:

…It was a terribly grim landmark day for European Jews, and indeed for Europe in general. The World Jewish Congress estimates there are only about 30,000 Jews in the Netherlands: roughly one-eighth as many as in 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust. There might be even fewer than that in very short order, if Thursday’s madness becomes routine. Canadians, Jews especially, are right to wonder whether it could happen here.

The answer is, basically, sure it could. But it could also be prevented. And this should have been. It looks like a colossal failure of policing. It’s easy to say from a desk on the other side of the Atlantic, but this was entirely predictable.

Reports out of Amsterdam Wednesday night were alarmingly and obviously portentous of what occurred the next day. Some purported Maccabi-supporting hooligans had assaulted a taxi driver and ripped down Palestinian flags, while chanting anti-Palestinian slogans.

Even if it weren’t true, the fact those stories were out there in the wild should have been reason enough to expect retaliation — and then some.

Clearly what happened Thursday night isn’t primarily about soccer. It’s about primordial hatred. But alas, soccer incubates primordial hatred. That’s true within the Netherlands: Ajax supporters, few of whom are Jewish, have traditionally embraced the team’s Jewish roots (they often refer to themselves as “the Jews”) and their rivals — especially supporters of Rotterdam club Feyenoord — have often taunted Ajax with antisemitic chants like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas, followed by a hissing noise. From a North American perspective, it’s almost beyond belief.

…It’s not inconceivable that Israel might qualify for the 2026 World Cup, and that it might play one or more games in Toronto or Vancouver. I shudder to imagine what that would look like. Police don’t just need to be prepared for serious Amsterdam-style violence; they, and their political overseers, need somehow to convince Canadian Jews and their friends that they’re actually safe. It’s a tough job, nowadays.

Source: Chris Selley: Imagine the chaos if Israeli soccer comes to Canada

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Chris Selley: Latest outrages over Muslims give a preview of Quebec’s next referendum

2024/10/26 Leave a comment

Sigh:

…One might ask him the same about all manner of other religious rites parents impose upon their children, and one might even get a consistent answer. Quebec feminist icon Louise Mailloux once equated baptism and circumcision with rape. When Mailloux ran for the PQ in 2014, then leader Pauline Marois said she “respect(ed) the fact that she has that point of view.”

St-Pierre Plamondon complained, too, about a sign welcoming people to Montreal’s City Hall that features a woman wearing the hijab. “Clearly the issue of religious invasion of public space does not stop at Bedford School,” he wrote.

So, yet again, the goalposts have shifted. The old deal was if you speak French and integrate into society, you’re welcome to practice any religion you like. The more recent deal, under 2019’s Bill 21, is that if you want to wield state power for a living — as a police officer, Crown prosecutor, prison guard or teacher — then you also have to remove any religious symbols while you’re on the job.

Now the mere presence of a hijab on a little girl in a library, or anywhere in public, is problematic in Quebec.

Those who’ve always believed Bill 21 wasn’t punitive enough, including St-Pierre Plamondon, have concluded that Bill 21 must be toughened in response to the scandal at the Bedford elementary school. And it all could have been avoided if the school board had just done its bloody job.

Expect a third referendum to boil down to this: linguistic and religious freedom versus restrictions thereof. That can’t not be ugly — and it won’t work for the Yes side. The referendum would fail, and Canada would still include an even-more-divided Quebec that’s even more out of step with the rest of Canada’s concepts of linguistic and religious freedom.

Source: Chris Selley: Latest outrages over Muslims give a preview of Quebec’s next referendum

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Colby Cosh: Lululemon’s sweetheart deal for temporary foreign workers

2024/09/16 Leave a comment

Of note. The vast majority of those hired under the TFWP are low-wage workers:

…It is easy to imagine that the decision to approve the permits was a no-brainer for B.C., Ottawa, and the federal ministers who quarterbacked the exemption. And, yes, Lululemon is a brand Canadians surely feel positive about, leaving aside that little blip with the terrible Olympics outfits.

But, you know, those positive feelings are surely strained just a tad when you hear about those jobs Lululemon couldn’t fill from the vast reservoir of educated and enterprising humanity that is the Lower Mainland of B.C. The company’s TFW exemption is allowing it to hire people for positions that no Canadian could conceivably fill, to wit: “graphic designers, advertising and marketing managers, computer systems managers, retail wholesale buyers, pattern-makers and industrial engineers.” This list includes some jobs I’ve seen friends move to Vancouver to do! Either things have changed a lot human-capital-wise out on the coast, or Lululemon just wanted a backdoor subsidy in exchange for maintaining its visible connection with Canada.

To be sure, companies have to fight their corner ferociously against the perpetual efforts of governments to drink their blood, but Vescera’s story observes that Lululemon also battled his team’s efforts to obtain documents about the exemption through the province’s freedom of information law. The company half-successfully tried to invoke the “harmful to third-party business interests” provision that is present in B.C.’s FOI law, along with those of most provinces. This, to me, is genuinely irksome practice—made worse because, although the Investigative Journalism Foundation received redacted documents, nobody will explain what third party’s interests are being protected, or why.

Indeed, I cannot fathom a reason for any “business interests” provision in any FOI law at all. The inherent danger in all dealings between businesses and governments are an overwhelmingly important reason for freedom of information law to exist. Allowing suppression of information on the grounds that some teat-sucking client of the state might be embarrassed or compromised is simply a license for the concept of FOI to be nerfed to death

Source: Colby Cosh: Lululemon’s sweetheart deal for temporary foreign workers

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Chris Selley: Canada’s ‘immigration consensus’ endures, despite Ottawa’s worst efforts

2024/09/12 Leave a comment

Correct interpretation IMO. However, the current government’s approach undermines public trust in government competence in immigration and other areas, even as some corrective action is taking place:

….Environics also inquired as to why the shift occurred. And it’s very obviously for one major reason: The housing crisis. In 2022, 15 per cent of respondents agreed that “immigrants drive up housing prices (and lead to) less housing for other Canadians”; in 2023, 38 per cent agreed.

And they’re right. Add demand for a scarce product and prices go up. Canada absolutely should be able to cope with current or higher levels of immigration, and indeed thrive off of it. We’re not exactly short on land or high on population density. But our politicians have never been more motivated to address housing scarcity, and the results have been utterly dismal. For heaven’s sake there were fewer home starts in June 2024 than in June 2022, according to CMHC data.

On the issues more typically associated with anti-immigration sentiment per se, the Environics data show no alarming spikes at all. Only four per cent of respondents cited “security risk” as a factor influencing their desire for less immigration. One-quarter said “immigrants are a drain on public finances (or) cost too much,” or are “bad for (the) economy (and) take jobs from other Canadians” — up from 23 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively, which is hardly any change at all in the polling world.

In 2022 and 2023 alike, just 19 per cent of respondents told Environics there were “already too many people in Canada” — the strongest suggestion, I submit, that what we’re seeing here isn’t a backlash against immigration, let alone against individual immigrants and immigrant populations, but a call for some restraint until we get our crap together. Just nine per cent of respondents told Environics they thought immigrants make their community worse; 42 per cent said they make it better.

For 30 years, Environics has asked Canadians whether they think “there are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values” — something you hear often from people who could fairly be called anti-immigration. In 1993, 72 per cent of Canadians agreed with that proposition. Three decades later, amid this so-called “backlash,” the figure was 48 per cent.

Especially at a time when Canadians seem more angst-ridden about the country’s economic future than I can ever remember — potentially fertile soil for xenophobic sentiments, as history shows — these don’t strike me as alarming numbers at all. That’s especially true considering we’ve been admitting more immigrants per capita than at any time since the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and watching tens of thousands of people traipse illegally across the Canada-U.S. border claiming asylum, and been lectured about racism and intolerance by a government that has basically conceded all of its opponents’ points on the immigration file.

Wanting less immigration isn’t inherently a “backlash” unless the optimal number of immigrants is infinite, which it obviously is not. We have enough problems to deal with without inventing new ones. The immigration consensus lives, despite the federal government’s worst efforts.

Source: Chris Selley: Canada’s ‘immigration consensus’ endures, despite Ottawa’s worst efforts

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Chris Selley: Gaza makes strange bedfellows — and maybe that’s a good thing

2024/08/14 Leave a comment

Of interest. Interesting type of intersectionality:

…Barely veiled threats aside, there’s nothing surprising about any of the foregoing. Few religions are bullish on things like homosexuality and gender fluidity, and Islam is no exception. When the Environics Institute last surveyed Canadian Muslims’ attitudes about the country, in 2016, it found just 36 per cent of Muslims felt “homosexuality should be accepted by society,” versus 80 per cent of Canadians overall. Just 26 per cent of Muslims felt it “should … be possible to be both an observant Muslim and live openly in a … same-sex relationship.”

And they’re allowed to think that. We put freedom of religion in the Charter and everything.

In some ways this just highlights the absurdity of left-versus-right thinking. Your opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really should have no bearing on your opinions about same-sex marriage or the appropriate age, if any, for gender-reassignment surgery — or indeed vice versa. They are entirely unrelated issues.

I don’t consider myself especially conservative or right wing, so I’m not here to rep “my side” or score any points. But I will note that people on the left are often obsessed with bedfellows: If someone nasty agrees with you on something, that’s somehow a reflection on you. It’s a reason to reconsider your position.

It’s not a judgment progressives would want to invite on themselves, in this case. But if they’re capable of locking arms with social-conservatives to advance a common cause, I’m tempted to see it as a good thing more than a bad thing. We should all be able to look past our differences, even visceral ones, to make a better country.

Source: Chris Selley: Gaza makes strange bedfellows — and maybe that’s a good thing

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Chris Selley: Can Quebec’s language vultures not leave hospitals alone, at least? ATIP translation

2024/08/01 Leave a comment

On ATIP, the government should just move to automated translation as it is getting good enough to be used for ATIP. From a client service perspective, would address timeliness, from a government perspective, would address costs:

…In other bilingualism news, journalist Dean Beeby reports that federal official languages commissioner Raymond Théberge has launched an investigation into the CBC proactively posting online its responses to journalists’ access-to-information requests.

That’s an undisputed best practice in the world of access-to-information, a field in which Canada (and the CBC in particular) ranks somewhere below South Sudan and Myanmar: If you’ve released information to one journalist, there’s no earthly reason to make other journalists request it again and go through the whole rigmarole. Just send them a link to the response, or they can find it themselves.

But federal government institutions are required to publish everything in French and English; the CBC’s responses are in English. So now we have a federal appointee considering whether this rare attempt at transparency must be published in both official languages.

That would amount to thousands upon thousands of pages of documents. They absolutely will not be translated. The only practical outcome is not to publish the documents at all. I’m quite sure CBC would be happy with that.

And without getting too melodramatic about it — official bilingualism is totally sustainable, in a rational form — I feel like we’re at a crossroads here. There was a time when Canada was fat and happy enough that doing arguably weird and excessive things in the name of official bilingualism didn’t seem like too much of a burden or a hassle. We had plenty of money, debt-to-GDP was fine, pretty much everyone with a decent job had a decent place to live.

That time is not now. This is a broke and broken country, requiring generations of punishingly expensive fixing — not least on the most basic issue of housing — that actually made a controversy out of children’s medicine delivered to Quebec, during a children’s medicine shortage, on grounds the labels weren’t bilingual.

It’s enough, already. Someone just has to say it: “enough.” But no one with the power to change anything ever, ever will.

Source: Chris Selley: Can Quebec’s language vultures not leave hospitals alone, at least?

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Chris Selley: Putting activists on the federal government payroll won’t fix intolerance

2024/07/16 Leave a comment

Tend to agree. More virtue signalling to individual communities rather than fostering integration and reducing intolerance:

…All of this is pretty much beside the point, however, as far as Housefather’s new position is concerned. You can’t fight antisemitism in Canada without engaging the most passionate Palestinian supporters, a good few of whom clearly do mean “Jew” when they say “Zionist,” at least to my and many other Canadians’ eyes and ears. If Palestinian supporters can’t stand the sight of Housefather, surely he’s just wasting his time, preaching to a choir that’s already perfectly cognizant of the problem.

It’s precisely the situation that Amira Elghawaby has faced since her appointment in 2022 as our first “special representative on combatting Islamophobia.”

You can’t fight Islamophobia in Canada without engaging Quebec nationalists, many of whom make no bones about being fearful of Islam and what pious Muslims might do to Quebec society. You can’t fight Islamophobia without talking to the only province that bans teachers and Crown attorneys and police officers from wearing a hijab.

But Elghawaby can’t talk to Quebec, and never will be able to talk to Quebec, because in the past she had disrespected Quebec’s all-consuming victimhood complex. “I want to puke,” she wrote on Twitter in response to a historian’s proposition that French Canadians were “the largest group of people in this country … victimized by British colonialism.”…

Source: Chris Selley: Putting activists on the federal government payroll won’t fix intolerance

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic

2024/06/22 Leave a comment

Valid points:

…On the latter point, especially with a world of information a mouse click away, I am very sympathetic. You can know history’s names and dates and understand nothing about it, for example, or you can draw a blank on the names and dates but have a very firm grasp of history’s overall arc and its relevance for today.

And on that point, this week, Ontario offered up a case study to show where crappy education, especially in history, can lead us. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s executive committee, the last step before city council, approved plans to rename the city’s Yonge-Dundas Square — think Times Square but even more antiseptic and soulless — as Sankofa Square.

Sankofa is a Ghanaian term referring “to the act of reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past, enabling us to move forward together,” CBC reports. The rebranding is framed as a sort of recompense for the city having named it previously after Henry Dundas, an 18th-century abolitionist politician who, among other feats, managed to invalidate all slave contracts on Scottish soil.

But Dundas disagreed with other abolitionists on whether it was best as a practical, political matter to try to abolish slavery immediately or incrementally. And that was enough to get him cancelled in Toronto, just as Egerton Ryerson was cancelled before him on the spurious charge that he helped design an abusive residential-school system for Indigenous children.

Councillors exhibited sub-zero levels of Sankofa in debating the matter, it must be said. Coun. Chris Moisie accused one anti-renaming deputant of being a racist. Non-Black councillor Gord Perks complained that the opponents just don’t understand anti-Black racism.

Well nor does Toronto City Council, if it’s stripping an abolitionist’s name from a public square as an apology for slavery.

Education matters. It separates us from the apes and grounds us in a basic shared understanding of how the world works, and worked in the past, and it informs debate on how it should work in the future. By rights, the COVID nightmare should have produced a call to arms: Let’s get serious about education again. Some, however, seem prepared to use it to speed up a race to the bottom.

Source: Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic

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