removed differentiated penalties for mono- and dual citizens. Parliamentary debates leading to the repeal of Bill C-24 emphasized its ideological nature and practical ineffectiveness, as well as its fundamentally discriminatory character: From a political point of view, the bill was ill conceived. It was conducted in haste, and in many ways proposed changes to the law where there had been no demonstrated problem. It was a repeated attribute of the previous Conservative government to make decisions not based on evidence but based on ideology. Bill C-24 was a classic example of that. The bill turned out to be very unfair, divisive, was ideologically driven, and most important it was unfair.152 The SCCA also included provisions permitting citizenship revocation on grounds of fraud through an expedited administrative process affording limited procedural protections. The number of revocation cases skyrocketed after the introduction of an administrative procedure, on the initiative of Jason Kenney, immigration and citizenship minister under the Harper government. Kenney announced in 2012 that using this procedure “his department would cancel the citizenship of more than 3,000 people, in a crackdown against those who had faked the amount of time they [had] spent in Canada.” 153 In 2014, the Harper government then amended the citizenship law again to institute a fast-tracking process for revocations in “non-complex” cases.154 These provisions came under judicial review in 2017 and were quashed as a violation of the Canadian Bill of Rights on the ground that deprivation of citizenship requires an oral hearing before the court or an independent administrative tribunal, a fair opportunity to be heard, the right to an impartial decision maker, and an opportunity to have special circumstances considered.155 A month later, in June 2017, a federal court voided the citizenship revocation of 312 individuals targeted in an operation based on the expedited administrative deprivation procedure, designed to target fraudulent acquisition of Canadian nationality.156 Conclusion The history and case studies examined in this chapter are intended to help place the chapters that follow in historical and comparative relief. The past trends identified in the U.S. context provide essential insight into the weaknesses of U.S. citizenship and immigration laws, and how they have been shaped by periodic bouts of nativism in the country. International legal norms suggest the minimum-level safeguards and guideposts that should apply in cases of deprivation of nationality, drawing on treaty provisions the United States has signed and is 40 UNMAKING AMERICANS

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents