Torontoist vs. Torontoist in...Non-Citizen Voting! [Torontoist]

Certain commie-Christians not Canadian?

Mennonites may lose Canadian citizenship over 1920s glitch - "Those who are in Canada when they discover this, government usually does not deport them, it looks for a way of getting them reinstated. But it's a cumbersome, and sometimes expensive and very inconvenient process." [CBC]

Challenge 'em to a dual

According to the CBC: 41 current MPs were born outside of Canada, and while many would be able to hold multiple passports, only 10 report that they maintain dual citizenship.

Apparently this is an issue in light of Stephane Dion's Canadian/French dual citizenship, the Governor General's decision to renounce her own French citizenship, and the allegedly burdensome cost of 'consular assistance' (read: war zone evacuation Lebanon-style) and, eventually, health care for dual citizens. The populist angle is that many 'expat' Canadians now living abroad are really and truly just crafty foreigners who made a stopover in Canada for convenience's sake.

Who cares? I may, but only as a matter of trivial interest. My wife is eligible for American citizenship, after all, and I enjoy the irony of normally (outwardly) pro-multicultural commentators thinking deeply about the supposed loyalty implications of such arrangements.

Did anyone bat an eye at John Turner's British citizenship when he was PM? For many of the paranoid types beating the drums now, I imagine such ties to the Mother Country were probably a plus at the time.

The 'conflict of interest' angle just doesn't make sense. The idea here is that if Dion were PM, and a diplomatic issue arose with France, there would appear to be a conflict of interest. True. But that conflict would appear even if he had previously given up his French citizenship. Who thinks that the formality of bailing on citizenship, especially when pressed to do so by others, would so easily destroy the affinity that was presumed to affect his judgment? In other words, if you don't trust his loyalty enough to let him retain dual citizenship, why would you accept that, by giving it up, he's satisfactorily proven that loyalty?

That's not logic or prudence. It's senseless, nationalist acid-testing.

Having a foreign passport is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for treason. The question is : are all people with any kind of multi-national affiliation whatsoever inherently untrustworthy? If so, the paranoiacs may have underestimated the enormity of the unalloyed, unquestionable loyalty gap.