It was another sad day for Canadian democracy when Bill C-24 became law this week.
The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act does nothing of the sort. Instead, it makes citizenship harder to get and easier to take away and creates a second class of citizen with fewer rights than others.
In particular, citizens with dual citizenship - or even those who are eligible for it - could have their citizenship revoked if found guilty of certain crimes. That would also apply to people born in Canada. That's a dramatic change.
The Conservatives would have us imagine the law applying only to terrorist sympathizers who use their citizenship as a badge of convenience when captured in an overseas hideout. But under the new laws, many regular Canadians could also find themselves "less than" other citizens.
Crimes that could trigger stripping of citizenship aren't just those of people found guilty in Canadian courts but also those convicted in places where the rule of law doesn't apply in the same way.
One immigration lawyer said people handed parking tickets have more rights than those who stand to have their citizenship stripped under this law. That's why the Canadian Bar Association is challenging it as unconstitutional.
More profoundly, the law creates an "us" and "them" - them being people whose families were originally from somewhere else. That's repugnant in a country that is built on immigration. Not many of us can go back more than two generations without encountering that "other."
Banishment as a legal remedy may play to xenophobic fears among the Tory base, but it deserves no place in a modern democracy.
- Guest editorial from the North Shore News
