10 Daiva Stasiulis onus,” whereby individuals have to prove that they are not citizens elsewhere in order to retain their citizenship in Canada. In the 2015 federal election campaign, the Harper government acted on the controversial new law, and moved to strip the Canadian citizenship of several men convicted of terrorist-related charges who were either incarcerated or had recently been released after serving their criminal sentences. The string of revocation notices provoked both human rights and security questions regarding the implications of banishing convicted terrorists, the revival of the medieval practice of “exile” as appropriate punishment in the “age of global terror,” and the use of “double punishment” (incarceration and deportation) by the government in its actions against its citizens convicted of terrorism (Macklin, 2014; Macklin & Bauböck, 2015; Forcese, 2014; Lenard, 2016). The augmented conditionality, distinctions among different “classes” of citizens, and revocability of citizenship were in keeping with the views, articulated by then Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, when sponsoring Bill C-24, Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, that “Citizenship is not a right, it’s a privilege” and that it is not and never was inalienable (quoted in Black, 2014, n.p.). Since the October 2015 federal election, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, whose election promise was to restore equality among all Canadian citizens, has moved quickly to make good on its promise to repeal the parts of C-24 that applied to those convicted of terrorism-related crimes, ensuring that they can keep their Canadian passports.14 An important question that arises with the shift from the Conservative to the Liberal policies governing citizenship is what happens to those persons, such as Budlakoti, deprived of Canadian citizenship under the Conservatives and now caught in the transition between these two citizenship regimes? 14 At the time of writing (December 2016), Bill C-6, An Act to amend the Citizenship Act and to make consequential amendments to another Act had passed final reading in the House of Commons and was in the process of second reading in the Senate (www.parl.gc.ca/Content/Sen/Chamber/421/Debates/077db_2016-11-28-e.htm?Language=E#37) – Bill C-6 halts the government’s ability to strip citizenship from convicted terrorists and those who commit treason against Canada. Critics have charged, however, that Bill C-6 has failed to fix the lack of procedural fairness and safeguards for individuals facing citizenship revocation due to misrepresentation or fraud by ensuring that they have the right to an independent hearing and to consideration of compassionate and humanitarian factors (Kwan, 2016). It is also striking that the Trudeau government was reported as more aggressively pursuing citizenship revocation than the Harper Conservatives. According to Dyer (2016, n.p.), “the 184 revocation decisions of the first 10 months of the Trudeau government nearly match the total number of decisions over a 27-year period between 1988 and the last month of the Harper government in October 2015.” As Jenny Kwan, NDP immigration, refugees and citizenship critic, argues: “It also does not matter that the misrepresentation is a result of an honest mistake even if you are a child and your parent presented misinformation on the application for whatever reason. Your citizenship could still be revoked and you cannot argue your case based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. This is wrong” (Kwan, 2016). Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017