Citizenship Revocation in the Mainstream Press: A Case of Re-ethnicization?

Abstract

Under the original version of the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act (2014), dual citizens having committed high treason, terrorism or espionage could lose their Canadian citizenship. In this paper, we examine how the measure was discussed in Canada's mainstream newspapers. We ask: who/what is seen as the target of citizenship revocation? What does this tell us about the direction that Canadian citizenship is moving towards? Our findings show that Canadian newspapers were more often critical than supportive of the citizenship revocation provision. However, the press ignored the involvement of non-Muslim, white, Western-origin Canadians in terrorist acts and interpreted the measure as one that was mostly affecting Canadian Muslims. Thus, despite advocating for equal citizenship in principle, in their writing and reporting practice, Canadian newspapers constructed Canadian Muslims as suspicious and less Canadian nonetheless.Résumé: Au sein de la version originale de la Loi renforçant la citoyenneté canadienne (2014), les citoyens canadiens ayant une double citoyenneté et ayant été condamnés pour haute trahison, pour terrorisme ou pour espionnage, auraient pu se faire révoquer leur citoyenneté canadienne. Dans cet article, nous étudions comment ce projet de loi fut discuté au sein de la presse canadienne. Nous cherchons à répondre à deux questions: Qui/quoi est perçu comme pouvant faire l'objet d'une révocation de citoyenneté? En quoi cela nous informe-t-il sur les orientations futures de la citoyenneté canadienne? Nos résultats démontrent que les journaux canadiens sont plus critiques à l'égard de la révocation de la citoyenneté que positionnés en sa faveur. Toutefois, la presse omet l'implication des non-musulmans, des Blancs ainsi que des Canadiens d'origine occidentale au sein d'actes terroristes et considère que le projet de loi concerne principalement les Canadiens musulmans. Même si les journaux canadiens prônent, en principe, une citoyenneté égalitaire, dans leur pratique d'écriture et de reportage ils néanmoins construisent les Canadiens musulmans comme étant suspects et, par conséquent, moins canadiens.

Transcending the boundaries of punishment: On the nature of citizenship deprivation

“…Infrequently used in the last century, the sanction that ousts a citizen from her polity has over the last two decades been (re)introduced and expanded in both European and non-European democracies. Restrictive policies have recently emerged in countries such as the United Kingdom (Choudhury, 2017;Gibney, 2019;Troy, 2019), Germany (Roithmaier, 2019), France (Kingston, 2005;Fargues, 2017;Mantu, 2018), Italy (Vedaschi and di Graziani, 2019), Netherlands (Jaghai, 2017; Boekestein and de Groot, 2019), and Norway (GLOBALCIT, 2019), but also outside of Europe, in Canada (Winter and Previsic, 2017), Australia (Pillai and Williams, 2017;Irving, 2019), and Israel (Lavi, 2011).…”

Muslims as Archetypal Suspect Citizens in Australia

“…31 In Canada, Zakaria Amara, who was imprisoned for his role in the plot to bomb Toronto's downtown in 2006, was stripped of his citizenship. 32 These are only a few examples of citizenship revocations but citizenship revocation laws also exist in many other Western countries, as Travina notes:…”