Bill C-24

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For ten years, Stephen Harper has used the same electoral strategy:

1. Campaign from the centre, hold a kitten, don’t say much
2. Let opponents destroy each other
3. Govern from the far right
4. Repeat

It was a strategy that served him well and even gave him a majority government. He had no reason to change it, until a few weeks ago.

For the first time in a long time, it looked like the Conservatives were going to lose, badly. Harper’s own efforts to scare his opponents into accepting Bill C-51 had made this possible.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau took the bait. NDP leader Tom Mulcair didn’t and fought hard against it. This encouraged many progressives to abandon the Liberal brand and get behind the next Orange Wave.

A mostly united left in a country that is predominantly centre-left is a real threat to Harper. He recognized it and decided to send his campaign manager back to Ottawa and bring in Lynton Crosby, known to many as the Australian Karl Rove.

Crosby didn’t waste too much time:

Post-Crosby Conservative mailout (via Twitter)
Post-Crosby Conservative mailout (via Twitter)

Canada is now getting a federal George Bush-style campaign of fear.

The Niqab Debate is Back On

A few months ago, before the campaign was even launched officially, people were talking about the Niqab. It all stemmed from the case of one woman who wanted to wear hers while taking the oath of citizenship but was denied because of a rule imposed by Harper’s Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.

When the rule was overturned, the Conservatives wanted to bring it back, the NDP didn’t and the Bloc Quebecois, under the leadership of Mario Beaulieu, tried to make it their wedge issue against the NDP.

It stayed in the public eye for about a week and then most people forgot about it. The Bloc changed leaders and started attacking the NDP from the left on pipelines.

Fast forward to the week leading up to the first French language debate. The Bloc, reeling in the polls, brought the non-issue back up and in the debate, Harper pounced on it.

Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair in a heated exchange during the French language debate (Radio-Canada/YouTube)
Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair in a heated exchange during the French language debate (Radio-Canada/YouTube)

In a heated debate, Mulcair got off a great one-liner: “Stephen Harper is trying to hide his failed economic policy behind a Niqab.” Elizabeth May echoed that statement. Bottom line, this is a distraction pure and simple.

Mulcair is right. Very few women actually wear the Niqab in Canada. I have seen maybe three people wearing Niqabs in my life and I live in Montreal. Only one woman fought for the right to wear one during a citizenship ceremony. Also, during the French debate, “What is a Niqab?” was the top Goolge search in Canada.

But yet, this non-issue is somehow THE issue for the moment.

You’re Either With Us or You’re With the Guy Who’s Already Serving a Life Sentence

When the Conservatives brought in Bill C-24, making it possible to strip citizenship from anyone convicted of “terrorism” or “treason” who could be considered the citizen of another country as well, most people, to put it mildly, weren’t impressed. Harper had just created second-class citizens and seeing as C-51 made it possible to define anyone the government didn’t like as a terrorist or terrorist promoter, it was now possible to have political opponents deported.

Harper`s new strategist Lynton Crosby
Harper`s new strategist Lynton Crosby

C-24 fell to the backburner quickly, but now that Crosby’s in charge of the campaign, the government decided to apply the law. They picked Zakaria Amara, one of two leaders of the so-called Toronto 18, a group of home-grown terrorists who planned to detonate several bombs in Toronto.

A dual citizen of Canada and Jordan, Amara was stripped of his Canadian citizenship on Friday. He was informed of this via a letter sent to the prison in Quebec where he is currently serving a life sentence. That’s right; our government boldly declared that someone serving life is no longer a citizen, though he will be staying here as long as his sentence lasts.

For him, that punishment means, wait for it, absolutely nothing. He’s still behind bars and will be for a while. Sure, if he gets paroled while he is still alive, he could be deported to Jordan, or, theoretically, Jordan could ask for his extradition before his sentence is up. After all, we are now holding a Jordanian citizen in one of our prisons. It was so much simpler when he was just a Canadian arrested and convicted under Canadian law.

It was a purely symbolic move. One designed to bring support to C-24 and the Harper government. Forget “sure it restricts freedoms, but it gets the bad guys,” this is more like “sure it restricts freedoms, but it allows us to turn the bad guys we’ve already caught into a political prop.”

Will It Work?

So, the big question is: will a right-wing wedge issue and fear-based campaign actually work federally in Canada? I don’t think so and seriously hope not.

I hope that the predominance of the Niqab debate is just spin from a mainstream media desperate for divisive issues. While I trust the Bloc’s statistic that 90% of Quebecers they surveyed are against permitting the Niqab at citizenship ceremonies (for now), I wonder how many of those people care enough about the issue to make it a primary voting concern.

If voters consider all the facts including the amount of women who actually wear the niqab in Canada, the fact that there are procedures in place at citizenship ceremonies to ensure proper identification and the fact that denying someone citizenship does nothing to protect them against coercion (in fact, it has the opposite effect), then the only way they can vote for a niqab ban is if their own cultural prejudices trump everything else. I seriously hope that’s not the case with my fellow Canadians.

I also hope that we can all see through the charade of picking someone who is already doing life and making him the poster child for an ill-conceived law that does not affect the guilty and harms honest Canadians who only want their voices heard.

I don’t think my countrymen and women are that fucking dumb. I don’t think Canadians will fall for a Karl Rove strategy. But I guess we’ll all find out on October 19th.

* Fetured image: feelguide.com

NewsPolitics

I was born in Canada and I have no other country that I could theoretically be considered a citizen of. I guess that means I’m safe. Unfortunately, there are quite a few people who do not fit this bill. Even if you were born in Canada, if you could conceivably claim citizenship in another country, you are now a second-class Canadian citizen under the law, thanks to Harper`s Bill C-24, the so-called “Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act,” which passed on June 11th.

Now, anyone convicted of “terrorism or treason” could have their Canadian citizenship revoked if they are a dual citizen or there is a chance they could become the citizen of another country. That means if your grandparents were born somewhere else, you could conceivably get citizenship in that country and the law applies.

C-24 Makes C-51 a Whole Lot More Real

If you qualify as a second-class Canadian, you may not be too worried. You’re not planning on committing treason or carrying out a terrorist act and neither are your friends.

Well, now that C-51 is law, it’s not clear just what constitutes terrorism and what doesn’t. The current government is free to label activists they don’t like as terrorists, as is any future government until the law is repealed. Economic boycott, a respectable and effective tactic, could also fall under terrorism according to C-51.

Working in tandem, C-24 and C-51 make it possible for a recent immigrant or someone born here to lose their citizenship for doing something that has been legal up until now and should always be.

Ironic Nightmare Scenarios

Imagine, if you will, a Canadian citizen who could theoretically live in another country. They take part in, say, an Idle No More solidarity action. Harper and company decide to label that terrorism.

This person then gets labelled a terrorist or terrorism promoter under C-51 and then loses their citizenship under C-24. Effectively forced to leave Canada for defending the one group that actually has a right to be here but are treated as second-class citizens already.

Now imagine a Jewish Canadian who participates in the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement criticizing Israel. If the government decides to label this economic terrorism, C-51 would make this person a terrorist.

Now, given that Israel grants a right to return to all Jewish people, this person would be considered someone who could go and live there and therefore could lose their Canadian citizenship under C-24. So, they could be forced to live in the very country they are urging a boycott against.

C51DraftImg3

What C-24 Really Is

Above all, C-24 is an intimidation tactic. As long as the risk of being deported or left in limbo for speaking your mind is present, protesting the government or their friends just won’t seem worth the risk to many.

Revoking citizenship for actual crimes or actual terrorism is one thing. Making the consequences dire for expressing an opinion not in favour with the current powers that be is truly frightening.

Change through the political process is important, but without a grassroots opposition that is free to mobilize, it is irrelevant. When you take away the right to protest and oppose, you’re basically left with a fully democratic, open and transparent dictatorship. Yes, people get to change the dictator every four years (or sooner in a minority situation), but when they’re in power, only parliament and mainstream media pundits can oppose them, not the general public.

This should not be a partisan issue or even a left-right thing. Dictatorship is bad no matter who the dictator is.

I wouldn’t want to live under a Harper dictatorship any more than one run by Mulcair, Trudeau, Gilles Duceppe or even Elizabeth May, though the last one, I have to admit, would at least be entertaining. As long as these two laws stay on the books, that’s pretty much what we’re getting.

I don’t use the “d” word lightly, in fact this is the first time I have used it in relation to Canadian politics. But then again, I don’t take C-51 and C-24 lightly, either, and neither should you or, for that matter, anyone.

News

May 23 marked a century since the Canadian government refused entry to asylum-seekers aboard the steamship Komataga Maru. While Canadians may boast the country as being a ‘multicultural mosaic’, the actual history of immigration is much more insidious.

Today, as Western countries continue to weather poor economic climates and combat non-state actors, these conditions of insecurity affect how policy is reasoned in a variety of fields, especially in the field of immigration and citizenship.

Debates over immigration reform still dominate discussions in both American and European politics. In Canada, the Conservative Government introduced Bill C-24 into the House of Commons. Titled as the ‘Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act’, the bill proposed large-scale reforms to a naturalization process.

Examples of such reforms include: Tripling application fees, stricter language requirements, increasing the residency requirement from three to four years and now require physical presence. The government would be granted the ability to revoke citizenship from persons assessed as never having the intent to live in Canada and from persons with dual citizenship who have been convicted of certain crimes. The bill also seeks to retroactively allow citizenship to ‘lost’ Canadians – those who are entitled for citizenship but either lost, or never received it – and to their children.

citizenship-card-revoked

The government continues to support the bill with the justification that these reforms will streamline the process – currently backlogged two-three years – and better protect against fraud. Security is also a justification – a dual citizen who takes part in an act of terrorism for example, can also have their citizenship revoked.

Since its introduction however, the bill’s constitutionality has been hotly contested. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander has been quoted as referring to citizenship as a privilege. The debate of whether citizenship in itself is a right or a privilege is still taking place in op-eds across the country. At minimum, the act of naturalization and obtaining citizenship is often a ‘merit-based’ process and thus can be construed as a privilege.

However, the main criticism about Bill C-24 is that the privilege would be afforded to less as the reforms would render “Canadian citizenship harder to get and easier to lose”. Furthermore, the implementation of such reforms would “create two classes of Canadians”– those who can have their citizenship revoked and those who cannot. Finally, the loss of the ability to appeal a rejection of citizenship and the ability to revoke citizenship itself accords substantial power in the hands of bureaucrats.

Stephen Harper, Wen JiabaoThe concerns have been voiced in multiple forums by different groups – a petition on Change.org protesting C-24 has amassed over 4000 signatures, professional organizations such as the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers have released lengthy statements outlining their concerns, and the bill continues to be debated in Parliament across party lines. Critics also draw trajectories of C-24 as part of a longer and problematic immigration reform process that is “an accumulation of incremental, seemingly innocuous changes”.

In its attempts to protect against the few who may seek to exploit or threaten, Bill C-24’s broad and sweeping provisions may risk burdening all of those to whom it applies. As Western countries continue to grapple with the realities of a globalized society, it is important to create policies that ensure security and efficiency, but acknowledge the nuances in the complicated processes of immigration and naturalization.