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December 07, 2006
If it ain't broke...
Over at Macleans.ca, I have taken a shot at a few questions that don't get asked much amidst all our hand-wringing about dual citizens in Lebanon, in Stornoway, and everywhere in between: Why do we have dual citizenship in the first place? What effect has it had on Canadian society? What might happen if we got rid of it?
The answers aren't as concrete as one might hope, but nor can anyone definitively blame any social phenomenon on dual citizenship. People like Andrew Coyne think it would be a bold symbolic gesture to say that being Canadian requires an exclusive commitment to this country, but as you'll see in the article, people who have studied it suggest the symbolism of dual citizenship - of multiple identities - is an integral part of the success story that is immigration in Canada.
As for Mr Dion, it isn't even clear to me that he is a French citizen in any technical sense - though he certainly hasn't denied it. If he is to be believed - and I think that he is - he has no French passport; he's never voted in France. Seems to me the only thing he has to renounce is his eligibility for French citizenship, and I'm not even sure that's possible. Dion's situation right now is exactly the same as British-born John Turner's was - well, except that Turner was a "dual citizen" (or dual citizen-eligible) Prime Minister, not just a dual citizen Liberal leader. And no one made a peep.
It's all very well to speculate about what positive, unquantifiable things abolishing dual citizenship might do. But to actually advocate that move - as Coyne has done - surely there's a burden to prove that it's actually causing a problem. If the Conservatives had just followed existing government policy and charged those it evacuated from Lebanon for the service, one has to wonder if we'd even be discussing this.
Posted by Chris Selley at December 7, 2006 08:41 PM
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Comments
Good article, Chris.
Posted by: Eric at December 8, 2006 06:49 PM