MALCOLM: The hypocrisy of Trudeau's citizenship policy
A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, right? That’s the line Justin Trudeau and his band of Liberal lackeys have repeated, ad nauseam, since the last federal election campaign.
Trudeau pushes the idea that citizenship is an inalienable right, while also defending citizenship revocation in cases of fraud or where people lie to get citizenship.
The Trudeau government was stripping citizenship from fraudsters at a rapid pace when Liberal cabinet minister Maryam Monsef admitted that her family had come to Canada without being honest about where she was born. Oops.
Trudeau never addressed this double standard and anyone questioning this hypocrisy was maligned by Liberal henchman as — you guessed it — being “racist.”
Trudeau’s hyper-partisan immigration minister Ahmed Hussen continues to boast that his government has “restored the principle that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”
What he means is that the Liberal government scrapped a Conservative law to strip citizenship from convicted terrorists who also have citizenship in another country. If you commit high treason or acts of war against Canada, the thinking goes, you’ve forfeited your right to be Canadian.
The Liberals disagreed, and they quickly scrapped the law after winning the 2015 election. In doing so, they restored citizenship to the ringleader of the al-Qaida-inspired Toronto 18 terrorist cell — a group of men who worked towards a plot to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange, shoot up the CBC headquarters and storm Parliament Hill in Ottawa. They wanted to behead then-prime minister Stephen Harper.
The issue of defining Canadian citizenship popped up again last weekend when Conservative Party delegates voted in favour of a clunky-worded policy motion to “fully eliminate birthright citizenship in Canada unless one of the parents … is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada.”
Although the motion doesn’t specifically mention it, it’s aimed at combating the growing phenomenon of birth tourism. Wealthy women from Europe, Russia, China and elsewhere fly to Canada late in their pregnancy, give birth in a Canadian hospital, collect their newborn child’s passport and fly home.
The problem is especially acute in Vancouver, where one hospital said 22% of babies are born to non-resident mothers.
Without missing a beat, Trudeau’s top aide and principal spin doctor Gerald Butts started pushing misinformation about the conservative motion, stating “they committed to give the government the power to strip people born in Canada of Canadian citizenship.”
This is not true. There was nothing in the motion that mentioned stripping citizenship — that’s Trudeau’s own policy.
Butts’ dishonest approach to public debate is shameful, but Trudeau’s own thinking on citizenship rights is even worse.
Trudeau thinks Canadian citizenship is inalienable and can never be taken away, especially if you’re a terrorist. At the same time, his government has stripped citizenship from hundreds of people, while not applying the same rules to a cabinet minister in his government.
Trudeau believes that being born in Canada makes you Canadian — no questions asked. Except, his government is in court right now fighting to strip citizenship from a young man who was born in Canada but — unbeknownst to him — his parents covertly worked for the Russian government.
It’s almost as if Trudeau agrees with the Conservatives that there are practical limits to our openness — and that Canada shouldn’t reward those who break our laws and manipulate our generosity.
If it weren’t for double standards, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would have no standards at all.
