(Im)possible citizens: Canada's ‘citizenship bonanza’ and its boundaries

Abstract

This article discusses a recent amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act, which retroactively restores or gives Canadian citizenship to ‘hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting foreigners, most of them Americans’ (P. Dvorak, 2009. Canada issues a wake-up call: you may be a citizen. The Wall Street Journal, 17 April. Available from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993183347727843.html) while also restricting the inheritance of Canadian citizenship to the first-generation born abroad. Aiming to redress past discriminations based on gender, marital status and dual citizenship while simultaneously curtailing modern citizenship's dubious ius sanguinis provision, the new law might be interpreted as perpetuating Canada's reputation as a world leader in interethnic relations and human rights. A contextual analysis of the new law, by contrast, shows that the opposite is the case: the boundaries that are being drawn by Canada's new citizenship regime follow the now common trend of re-ethnicization and securitization. Specifically, they conflate kinship and Whiteness, thereby leading, on the one hand, to the construction of possible citizens whose authenticity and loyalty to the nation are unquestioned. On the other hand, within the logic of the new laws and their surrounding discourses, non-White, non-Christian ‘impossible citizens’ emerge, whose lack of loyalty and instrumental use of their Canadian passport are said to be eroding the value of citizenship from within.

Keywords::

• birth
• friend/enemy
• making citizenship
• securitization
• unmaking citizenship
• identity

Acknowledgements

The author gladly acknowledges funding for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She is particularly grateful for the very insightful and generous comments by the journal's three anonymous reviewers; their suggestions have undoubtedly improved this article. All remaining errors and shortcomings are the authors'.

Notes

^1. These stipulations had been rectified in the 1977 Citizenship Act, but not in a retroactive way. This led to the phenomenon of the Lost Canadians, which will be further explored below.

^2. A poutine is a Québécois dish: fries/chips with gravy and cheese.

^3. Aiming to counter minority nationalism and raise the ‘visibility’ of the federal government in the province of Quebec, the federal Liberals had become entangled in a ‘sponsorship scandal’ with dubious expenditures. They were reduced to a minority government in 2004, removed from power in 2006 and, in 2011, lost Official Opposition status to the New Democratic Party.

^4. When the test was first implemented in March 2010, the federal government anticipated a passing rate of 75% (down from 94%). However, when the failing rate amounted to over 30% of the candidates in the first 6 months, the test questions were adjusted a year later, resulting in reducing the failure rate to 20%.

^5. For a critical view on how racism and exclusion continued even through the point system, see Simmons (1998).

^6. Less well known internationally, but equally important for Canadians was the 1995 enactment of the Employment Equity Act that requires employers to increase the representation of four designated groups: women, individuals with disabilities, Aboriginal peoples and ‘visible minorities’. Since the 1960s and early 1970s were also the apex of liberal progressivism and the development of the Canadian welfare state, Brodie reminds us that the citizen at the time was ‘very much a product of the welfare state’ (2002, pp. 59–60).

^7. Before 1996, citizenship applicants met initially with a citizenship officer and were then scheduled for a hearing or a personal interview with a citizenship judge.

^8. Elsewhere I have argued that this time lag was, in part, caused by the apparent de-coupling of communitarian claims (as ascribed to ‘old-style’ Québécois nationalism) from dominant interpretations of multiculturalism (Winter 2011).

^9. For example, in order to reduce the risk of creating stateless persons, in 2005, the 1977 Citizenship Act was amended to relieve people who lost their citizenship as minors between 1947 and February 1977 because they or their parents became citizens of another country; these people no longer had to become permanent residents of Canada in order to resume Canadian citizenship. See Section 11 (1.1) of the Canadian Citizenship Act (Canada 1977).

^10. As long as the children were born before 17 April 2009.

^11. The black Mountie speaks English without an accent and is clad in a uniform that identifies him as Canadian; hockey is privileged over Canada's national sport, which is Lacrosse; the representation of Canada's two official languages amounts to nothing more than a bilingual calendar.

^12. The amendments do address the loss of citizenship that stems from pre-1947 laws and policies. They do not redress the status of individuals who have lost Canadian citizenship under the provisions of the 1977 Citizenship Act because they failed to retain it by the age of 28 years. However, for Canadians of the second- or subsequent-generation born abroad who have not yet lost their citizenship (i.e. they are younger than 28 years on 17 April 2009), the new amendments eliminate the requirement to apply for citizenship retention.

^13. Exceptions are made for children of parents working abroad with the Canadian Armed Forces, as federal public servants or in the service of a province.

^14. There are no official statistics on the number of Canadians living abroad, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (2006, p. 1) estimates that their number is about 2.7 million or 9% of the total domestic population. Furthermore, it is estimated that approximately one-third of immigrants to Canada return to their countries of origin after becoming Canadian citizens (Bramham 2009).