The politics of un-belonging: lessons from Canada’s experiment with citizenship revocation

ABSTRACT

Citizenship revocation has returned to the political agenda. In recent years, many Western democracies have either legislated or considered legislating citizenship revocation for terrorism offences. This paper analyses how Canada’s short-lived experiment with citizenship revocation was represented in political, media and online discourses. Specifically, it identifies who has been interpreted a presumed candidate(s) of citizenship revocation, and analyses the discursive strategies employed to associate these targets with specific ethnic, national, or religious groups. We find that references to Muslims dominated public discourses on citizenship revocation. The articulation of these references reveals that Muslims were targeted not as individuals but as a category, indirectly branding them as less Canadian, and thereby symbolically un-belonging them from Canadian citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Denationalisation
• citizenship revocation
• Canada
• Muslims
• terrorism

Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without the generous funding of the Kanishka Project, Public Safety, Government of Canada (2013-2016). One of the authors acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Centre of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Integration”, University of Konstanz, Germany. The helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers made this paper better, and the remaining errors and omissions are solely ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The UK is an outlier in this respect. In 2014, the power of the Secretary of State for the Home Department to deprive dual nationals of citizenship when this would be ‘conducive to the public good’ was extended from dual to mono citizens who acquired UK citizenship via naturalisation and who could thereby be rendered stateless if deprived of UK citizenship (Mantu 2018).

2. Similar rhetoric was used by the UK Prime Minister Theresa May in 2013 when a statement from the Home Office said: ‘Citizenship is a privilege, not a right, and the Home Secretary will remove British citizenship from individuals where she feels it is conducive to the public good to do so.’ (Shaw 2018).

3. In 2011, only 2.9% of Canadians held multiple citizenships, 79.5% of these were indeed foreign-born, with most frequently reported other countries of citizenship being the United States (20.3%), the United Kingdom (12.9%) and France (9.6%) (Statistics Canada 2011). Among those born in Canada, 0.7 had multiple citizenships, with the United States (20.3%), the United Kingdom (12.9%) and France (9.6%) being the most frequently reported other countries of citizenship (Ibid).

4. The issue of citizenship revocation was not high on the radar of French-language newspapers. We resume that it was overshadowed by the debates about an important provincial bill, the so-called Charter of values, presented by the Parti Québécois during the same time frame.

5. The comments posted in the conservative-leaning newspaper the National Post outnumbered those published on the websites of the more liberal-leaning newspapers The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. As noted earlier, however, even though online comments may be perceived as a cue to the public opinion, they are not statistically representative of the political leanings of Canadians. Moreover, and in line with previous research (Lee and Yang 2010), our analysis revealed that the comments often diverged from the political affiliations of the newspaper or the slant of the article.

6. In marking a national group as Muslim-majority or non-Muslim-majority, we used official statistics on the religious composition of the state. For instance, while referring to Lebanese or Egyptian Canadians as ‘Muslim’, we also acknowledge the multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of their ancestral homelands. We also acknowledge that national groups marked as ‘non-Muslim’, e.g. China or the US, are populated by Muslim minorities.

7. Robert Pickton is a Canadian serial killer sentenced in 2007 to life in prison for murdering six women. Paul Bernardo is a Canadian serial killer and serial rapist sentenced to life in prison in 1995.

8. Omar Khadr is a Canadian who was detained at the United States detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for ten years, from the age of 16. He pleaded guilty to the murder of an American soldier, but later appealed his conviction claiming he only signed the plea agreement so that he could return to Canada. In 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada found that Khadr’s constitutional rights had been violated. He was transferred to Canada in 2012 and released on bail with strict conditions in 2015. In 2013, Khadr sued the Canadian government for infringing his rights. The government settled the lawsuit in 2017 with a $10.5 million payment and an apology.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elke Winter

Elke Winter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa, research director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Citizenship and Minorities (CIRCEM) and, in 2019-20, the William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Professor Winter’s research is concerned with questions of migration, ethnic diversity, integration and citizenship.

Ivana Previsic

Ivana Previsic received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Ottawa in 2018. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral thesis explored the post-9/11 experiences of Bosnian and Albanian Muslim immigrants in Canada.