By arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
Friday, July 21, 2006
Since the Canadian government began evacuating their citizens from Lebanon a debate has begun about whether the government should be paying to bring home all Canadian citizens who were caught in Lebanon when the current hostilities broke out.
The issue was set off by Conservative MP Garth Turner who questioned whether the taxpayers of Canada should be paying to bring those to Canada who, although citizens of this country, are essentially permanent and full time residents of Lebanon and not visiting tourists who just happened to get caught up in the current Middle East conflict.
In a perfect world people would be responsible for their own actions and everyone rescued from Lebanon would be required to pay their own transportation costs — just like they did when they travelled to that country. anyone who chooses to visit, work or study in a country that has virtually no government and is controlled by a terrorist group like Hezbollah and that borders on what Ontario MPP Phil McNeely calls "a rogue state" should have to pay to come back to Canada. But if we demanded that, the next thing you know is that we would require those that run to a doctor every time they have a slight headache to pay for that too and the Canada we know and love would cease to exist. So given that we have to pay for the repatriation of citizens, should we have to pay to bring those that are simply "citizens of convenience"?
Those that argue that a citizen is a citizen is a citizen have a valid point. If Canada means anything then Canadian citizenship has to have some meaning as well and it would be dangerous to have different classes of citizenship. Besides, when the Liberals return to power, and we all know that they will return, people like Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day would become the first in line for second class citizenship. after all, what they and their party believe in has been labelled as "un-Canadian" by former PM Paul Martin and supporters of the former Canadian alliance were called "racists, bigots and Holocaust deniers" by Martin's only intellectual equal, former Liberal cabinet minister Tubby Caplan. any way you look at it, we cannot have different classes of Canadian citizenship.
The focus is now on Lebanese Canadians because of what is happening in the Middle East and the fact that most Canadians were shocked that there were up to 50,000 Canadians in that country when the current fighting broke out. But Canadians of Lebanese descent are far from being the only people that proudly wave their Canadian passports only when they want something.
Prior to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, thousands of Hong Kong residents who had no intention of ever residing here permanently sought Canadian citizenship in case life in the China-controlled Island became unbearable. and there are several "drop off parents" from many countries — middle-aged parents with teenage children who seek permanent residency in Canada, come here as landed immigrants and then obtain Canadian citizenship. They then go back to the country that they never wanted to leave in the first place, leaving their now Canadian-citizen children here.
The only solution to this is to abolish the notion of dual citizenship. anyone who becomes a Canadian citizen must relinquish any other citizenship that they have. Conversely, any Canadian citizen who becomes a citizen of another country would cease to be a Canadian citizen. This would effectively prevent Canadians from permanently residing in other countries, contributing nothing to the Canadian economy, but being able to demand Canadian services when it is convenient to do so.
The abolition of dual citizenship would make incidents such as what happened to Zahra Kazemi three years ago a lot clearer. The dual citizen of Iran and Canada was arrested in Tehran and beaten to death in an Iranian jail. Iran insisted that it was none of Canada's business because she was a citizen of Iran. The Liberal government's tepid response to the killing suggested that they had accepted Iran's argument. Had she been caught up in this situation but had been a citizen of Canada only, there would have been more pressure on our then Liberal government to actually demand redress.
Dual citizenship should be abolished and if it is, the Conservative government must do it; while we are indeed a sovereign nation that makes its own foreign policy decisions rather than being dictated to by Kofi annan and the Useless Nothings in New York.
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