The revocation of citizenship engages several charter rights, most notably I think section 7, which I described earlier. It may also constitute cruel and unusual treatment or punishment, as the Federal Court has recently defined it in the refugee health care case.
The way in which the previous government formulated citizenship revocation was to predicate it on commission of listed offences. They were, broadly speaking, national security offences. If you were convicted for one of those offences, the minister could further revoke citizenship.
That tells us two things. One is that citizenship revocation is in effect being used as punishment. It is a punishment that is being imposed by a minister outside of a normal minister's legal powers. The power to find somebody guilty of a crime and to punish them belongs to a court and only to a court. A minister doesn't have that authority. That's one problem. Another, of course, is the principle of double punishment, that whoever does it, you can't punish somebody twice for the same offence. These are in addition to constituting it as what I've called cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.
Finally, in earlier jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Canada about denying prisoners the right to vote, the court there said that revoking something as fundamental as a right of citizenship in furtherance of the achievement of symbolic value constituted a breach of the right to vote. If you take that principle and extrapolate it, then surely it applies to citizenship as well.