Thank you very much for inviting me back to speak to the committee.
I have many things to say, as do many people here, but I'll respond directly to Mr. Bissett's comments, for the purposes of discussion.
The act, as it is currently written, proposes to permit the right to revoke citizenship in cases where an individual who possesses dual citizenship engages in a range of “acts against Canada”, and where they allegedly fraudulently attain citizenship in Canada. The government claims, as does Mr. Bissett, that this law would put Canada in line with what many other countries do. In fact, very few comparable states reserve the right to revoke citizenship in cases of terrorism, treason, and so on. The U.K. is the clearest example of a state that does grant this right, but in the last few years the United States and Australia have both considered and rejected implementing such a provision. In those states that do allow revocation—Malta, Lithuania, Cyprus, Estonia—it is worth noting that it is in complete disuse. Rather, the trend is to repeal revocation laws, as Luxembourg did in 2008, and to consign them to an era of history in which totalitarian governments assumed the authority to make citizenship decisions with impunity.
As the government acknowledges, the law is limited by the European Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, signed in 1961. The revocation provisions in this bill thus apply only to Canadians who are dual citizens. In Canada, 75% of dual citizens are naturalized Canadians. At least 150,000 Canadians are dual citizens by birth, including me. Yet while this requirement formally protects Canada's commitment to the convention, it imposes an inequality, I do believe, between citizens who hold dual citizenship and those who do not. It does generate a second class of citizens who are more vulnerable to the powers of the Canadian state. In particular, dual citizens and single nationality citizens subject to the same crime will be subject to different penalties. Those with dual citizenships—including me—convicted of crimes can be subject to disproportionately severe sentences, since they include the revocation of a status justly acquired. If punishment in Canada for severe offences is good enough for native-born Canadians, it is good enough for dual citizens.
Finally, the bill grants the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration the discretion to revoke citizenship in too many cases. Currently, as written, the bill would give the minister discretion to revoke citizenship in cases of fraud, but there is no requirement—as there was in the previous bill, or as currently enacted now—for a court to evaluate if fraud in fact did occur. If the revocation provisions are kept, every such decision must be considered by, or appealable to, a court, even in cases where citizenship is revoked under suspicion of fraudulent applications. This is for at least two reasons. First, some forms of apparent misrepresentation are made for legitimate reasons—that is, to escape genuine and real harm. Second, judicial proceedings provide the only mechanism to protect against the otherwise inevitable suspicion that the minister is using fraud as a reason to revoke citizenship of people who are suspected of aiming to harm Canada where the proof doesn't exist.
The 1961 convention states that the only conditions under which revocation can be just are where the affected individual is entitled to a trial, even in cases of fraud. The consequences of such citizenship revocations can be severe, regardless of the reasons for revocation. In two recent cases, as we all know, the U.K. denationalized two citizens, Mohamed Sakr, who was a British citizen by birth, and Bilal al-Berjawi, who were subsequently killed by American forces in Somalia. Sakr's lawyer reported that, “It appears that the process of deprivation of citizenship made it easier for the U.S. to then designate Sakr as an enemy combatant, to whom the U.K. owes no responsibility whatsoever.”
In my view, the right to revoke citizenship is a fundamentally corrupting power. The U.K. is now considering an even more drastic step of permitting citizenship revocation even where it would lead to statelessness. We should avoid going down this road by removing this denationalizing power from the bill entirely.
Thank you.