btw this isn’t like a change.org or other third party petition, this is a petition that goes straight to the canadian government. there is an actual shot at revoking musk’s citizenship here.
to be clear, this also means that it can be signed by canadian citizens and residents only otherwise it would be invalidated
There is absolutely no chance of revoking his citizenship, because there’s no part of Canadian law - THANK FUCKING GOD - that allows the revocation of Canadian citizenship status.
“Before they could move to do this, they would need to introduce legislation, there would have to be amendments to the current Citizenship Act,” said Ramo, former chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration section. “There’s no provision that would allow them to pursue revocation of citizenship of a Canadian birth, by virtue of his birth to a Canadian mother.”
And there absolutely should not be. EVER.
I cannot stress how fucking bad it would be if it were possible to pull Canadian citizenship based on even a fully convicted major crime, let alone the public perception of wrongdoing against the country. What a dangerous, horrible weapon that would be, and what a dangerous exploitable precedent it would set.
This is not an honorary degree or other meaningless thing, and especially within our system of law and precedent this is NOT a symbolic act that could be safely limited to him.
I’m actually embarrassed that the one NDP MP is apparently ignorant enough to not realize that.
Ugh. Not knowing anything about his background past ‘South African’, I assumed that any Canadian citizenship had been bought in much the same way as the New Zealand one, and as such may have some legitimate way of taking it away again.
Unfortunately, as a resident of a country which decided some 20 years ago that it was ok to remove the citizenship of dual nationals in some circumstances (initially only “if the Secretary of State was satisfied they were responsible for acts seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom or an Overseas Territory”, later expanded to include fraud or deception in acquiring the citizenship and changing the first part to the Secretary of State believing that “deprivation is conducive to the public good”), yeah no you don’t want to get into taking away birthright citizenship. Sorry.
Under those initial rules it was very clear that British citizenship could not be taken away if it would make a person stateless. And then in 2014 the government of the day made another fun paragraph in another law which decided that it was ok take away any kind of British citizenship and send a person into some kind of medieval stateless exile if the Secretary of State had 'reasonable grounds’ to believe that they would theoretically be eligible to get citizenship anywhere else instead, e.g. if one of their parents was born overseas. And if I don’t think that’s ok for Shamima Begum, unfortunately I don’t think it’s ok for That Guy either.
(for clarity: I believe that if Shamima Begum has committed crimes for which she could be convicted in a UK court, she should be returned and tried. If there’s evidence that could be used against her in some other jurisdiction, sure, go for it. Making her into a legal Someone Else’s Problem when she was born in London and has no other citizenship is wrong in every possible way.)
