Leonid Sirota: Even shitty Canadians are Canadians under the law

To punish someone because the people demand it is a form of mob rule, and the antithesis of the rule of law.

By: Leonid Sirota

One increasingly incontrovertible fact about Elon Musk is that he is a bad man. Just how bad, and just how one ought to describe the nature of his badness, is perhaps in question. Is he a fascist, for instance? An interesting question, perhaps, but not for my purposes here.

One other incontrovertible fact about Mr. Musk is that he is a Canadian citizen. His mother was born in Canada — which made her a citizen— as are her children, even though they were born abroad.

A large number of Mr. Musk’s and my fellow Canadians find the coexistence of these facts to be obnoxious. Whether out of anger or embarrassment, they are lining up to sign a petition to Parliament to demand that he be deprived of his Canadian citizenship. As of this writing, the petition has been signed by about 300,000 people. (In theory, these are Canadian citizens or residents, though on the Internet, nobody knows you didn’t actually watch the McDavid goal 97 times on loop.) At least one member of Parliament, the NDP’s Charlie Angus, is supportive.

This is appalling. The reasons given for depriving Mr. Musk of his Canadian citizenship are fundamentally authoritarian, as is the contempt for both the substantive and the procedural legal requirements involved in deprivation of citizenship that the petition manifests. That a member of Parliament is supporting this abomination is especially disturbing (and one reason this whole mess is worth caring about).

To start with the substantive point, the idea that a Canadian could be deprived of his citizenship for political reasons ought to be beyond the pale of polite discussion. It is the sort of thing the Soviets did to Mstislav Rostropovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others. Is Mr. Musk a Solzhenitsyn? Well, no. But so what? The principles at stake here are universal. They do not depend on whether one is a martyr or a millionaire, a genius or a jerk. (Solzhenitsyn, at any rate, was both jerk and genius. So is Mr. Musk. Not that it matters.)

More to the point, do you want the Canadian government to have the power to deprive people of their citizenship for their political beliefs, statements, or activities? If you are okay with a government led by a Justin Trudeau or a Mark Carney having this power, do you agree that one led by Pierre Poilievre should? (Or, of course, vice versa.)

And yes, no matter how patriotic and indignant the people who sign the petition, or support it, may feel, the demand to take away Mr. Musk’s citizenship is political. The first recital of the petition accuses him of having “engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada.” I think the accusation is well-founded. But it is a political accusation: the national interest is a political concept. The petition then claims Mr. Musk “has used his wealth and power to influence our elections.” If he has, that is political action that Canadian citizens are entitled to take, subject to applicable laws, which the petition isn’t even alleging Mr. Musk broke. Finally, the petition claims that Mr. Musk “has now become a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty.” Stipulated. But the actions of this foreign government, no matter how dishonourable, distasteful, and dangerous for Canada, have so far stayed within the realm of politics.

There are those who, like Mr. Angus, think that Mr. Musk “represents profoundly anti-democratic values” or indeed “is a fascist threat to democracy.” Let’s assume that these claims are true; the former surely is. But they, too, are political claims, and one’s agreement with them does not make them any less so.

Some people will outright say that Mr. Musk is guilty of treason or sedition. But they cannot mean this in the legal sense. The Criminal Code defines treason: in short, it requires an attempt on His Majesty’s life, engaging or assisting in war on Canada, attempting overthrow government by force, or selling state secrets. Mr. Musk is not plausibly guilty of any of this. Hostile statements, even musings about annexation, are not war.

The last point to make before moving on to the legal and procedural issues is about xenophobia. Mr. Angus says the quiet part out loud by pointing out that Mr. Musk “wasn’t born in Canada.” Feel free to dismiss this because I too wasn’t born in Canada, but to justify citizenship deprivation by pointing to its target’s foreign birth is as xenophobic ― as much a fruit of the hatred of foreigners ― as pointing to a person’s foreign birth to justify any other sanction or punishment you wouldn’t impose on someone who was born in Canada.

The legal and procedural issues may be more briefly stated. Most important of them is that there is no law that would conceivably allow the government to take Mr. Musk’s citizenship away. The Citizenship Act provides for the revocation of Canadian citizenship that was obtained by misrepresentation or fraud ― and makes a point of saying that in no other circumstances can a Canadian be deprived of citizenship without his or her consent.

The petition’s “call upon the Prime Minister to revoke Elon Musk’s dual citizenship status” is thus a call for illegal behaviour, as well as almost comically ignorant. There is no such thing as “dual citizenship status.” In the eyes of Canadian law, it really is the case that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian ― and that is so regardless of whether he or she is also an annexationist, a fascist, or just a shitty person all around.

Lastly, a point about process. Deprivation of citizenship is very serious business. For those who, admittedly unlike Mr. Musk, live in Canada, it is far more serious than many forms of criminal punishment. Just like criminal punishment, it isn’t something that can be imposed by popular demand. To punish someone because the people demand it is a form of mob rule, and the antithesis of the rule of law.

The demands that Mr. Musk be deprived of his Canadian citizenship for political reasons are a disgrace, and unworthy of the Canada I love and want to remain democratic and independent. They are for the weak and frightened, not the strong and free. Up to a point, they are not surprising. After all, we live in an age of populism, and Mr. Musk is only a face of it, not the face. We live in an age of misinformation, and, as I have argued elsewhere, officials or, in this case, an MP, are a fecund and dangerous source of lies, damned lies, and assorted ignorance.

But there is also something more specific to this particular moment going on as well. I am afraid that Canada is in real danger of adopting just the sort of policies Canadians quite rightly loathe and fear when they are considered and adopted in the United States. At a time when the Trump administration is looking to visit retribution on its political enemies and, not coincidentally, to deny the citizenship of those Americans it deems, for its political reasons, less worthy of it than others, it would be both a tragedy and an unforgivable wrong for Canada to do the same.

Leonid Sirota is an associate professor at the Reading Law School (U.K.) and a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier institute, as well as the founder of the Double Aspect blog, where a longer version of this essay originally appeared.

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