The Conservative government stands poised to pass a law empowering the minister of Citizenship and Immigration to expedite the citizenship of certain permanent residents and to strip Canadians of their citizenship for misconduct as citizens. This is part of a larger campaign to increase the value of Canadian citizenship by making it harder to acquire, harder to pass on to your children, harder to retain, and easier to lose. Each is a solution in search of a problem: Has Canadian citizenship been devalued? By what measure? In comparison to what? What tangible (as opposed to symbolic) benefits will these changes confer, on whom, and at whose cost? The expedited citizenship provision will lop a year off the residency requirement for permanent residents who serve in the Canadian Armed Forces. Under existing citizenship law, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration already has the discretion to expedite the citizenship application of people considered exceptionally deserving, including those who serve in the Canadian military. Moreover, a quick trip to the Armed Forces recruitment website reveals that the first requirement for joining the Armed Forces is Canadian citizenship, so the gesture is not only redundant, it is meaningless. The more pernicious part of the bill revives the medieval punishment of banishment into contemporary law. Canadian citizens who commit acts that, in the view of the minister, demonstrate repudiation of "Canadian values" warrant revocation of citizenship and expulsion. The list of offences that qualify for such punishment are provided by the minister in his version of the proposed law, which were introduced in committee and will never be debated in Parliament. They include terrorism, treason, membership in an armed group engaged in conflict against Canada, etc. The problem with the list is not only that it is vague and arbitrary, but that it is radically underinclusive: The list of criminal offences that are “inconsistent with Canadian values" is potentially endless. One could just as easily argue that the acts of the child abuser, murderer, embezzler, drug trafficker, rapist demonstrate repudiation of Canadian values. The point, of course, is that we deal with this conduct through the criminal justice system. Banishment was popular in antiquity and medieval times, before the rise of penal systems that enabled states to segregate, punish and rehabilitate wrongdoers within the state. For good and obvious reasons, no liberal democracy empowers its executive to try people accused of crimes, to convict them, and to sentence them. This is a practice rightly associated with tyranny. The separation of powers demands that that we assign those tasks to an independent judiciary. Appointing the minister of Citizenship and Immigration to act as prosecutor, judge and executioner for alleged “crimes against citizenship” is, to borrow from the language of his recently revised Citizenship Guide, a barbaric practice. Read more..