Is it that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian or is it sometimes that a Canadian is a terrorist who should have citizenship revoked? That’s the question many are asking after the Trudeau government began musing about stripping Ahmed Eldidi of his citizenship.
It very well could happen, but as you will read, if it happens it will be over paperwork, not any terrorist actions alleged or proven.
Eldidi is the father part of the father-son duo arrested and charged for what police say was a terrorism plot. The elder Eldidi is also alleged to have taken part in mutilating a man in a 2015 ISIS terror video before he came to Canada and was able to obtain Canadian citizenship.
There are lots of questions about how this man was able to get access to Canada, and citizenship.
“I think Canadians deserve answers. I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Wednesday.
“I’m also going to take the next step, which is to start the preliminary work with the evidence at hand to look at whether the individual in question’s citizenship should be revoked.”
Wait a minute, Liberals don’t strip terrorists — accused or convicted — of their citizenship. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a point of this during the 2015 election promising to revoke a law passed by the Conservatives that stripped those convicted of terrorism offences, of taking up arms against Canada, if they were dual citizens.
This was something Trudeau leaned into heavily during the 2015 election campaign.
“The Liberal Party believes that terrorists should get to keep their Canadian citizenship,” Trudeau boldly told a townhall in Winnipeg during the 2015 election.
This wasn’t the only time that Trudeau said he believed convicted terrorists should not only keep but be given back Canadian citizenship. During the Munk Debate on foreign policy during the 2015 election, Trudeau and then Prime Minister Stephen Harper were debating the ruling that revoked the citizenship of Zakaria Amara, the mastermind of the Toronto 18 terrorist plot.
“A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian and you devalue, you devalue the citizenship of every Canadian in this place and in this country, when you break down and make it conditional for anyone. We have the rule of law in this country, and you can’t take away citizenship because you don’t like what someone does,” Trudeau bellowed at Harper.
Yet, starting under his own father’s government, successive Liberal governments have stripped Nazis who came to Canada of their citizenship. After the Munk debate, I asked Trudeau during scrums with reporters what the difference was between stripping the citizenship of a Nazi versus someone who pledged allegiance to a terrorist entity or took up arms against Canada for such an entity.
“Revocation of citizenship can and should happen in situations of becoming a Canadian citizen on false pretenses.” Trudeau said. “Indeed, when people have lied as on their applications, those applications get rescinded even years later.”
So, he was admitting he was fine with revoking citizenship over process, over paperwork, but as he explained, not over attacking Canada with an act of terror.
“But this is a very different situation of creating a penalty for someone just because their parents were born in another country. Canada is not a country of fear and division, it is a country of laws and rights,” he said.
Harper’s law said you lost your right to citizenship for taking up arms against Canada. Trudeau rejected that but says you should lose your citizenship for lying on paperwork.
Both are bad but Trudeau will revoke citizenship over process but not acts. If Eldidi’s citizenship is taken away, it will be because of his lack of honesty on his application, not for anything he’s done or plotted to do.