Evacuation tips: Who’s a Friend, Who’s a Canadian?

The Globe and Mail, Canada
July 25, 2006

By Jeffrey Simpson

Lessons for Canada from the flight from Lebanon: First, don’t kick
your friends needlessly. Second, review dual citizenship.

By way of first things first, here’s a question: which country helped
most when Canadians tried to rescue people from Lebanon? Answer:
Turkey.

With Cyprus filled up, Canada urgently asked for Turkey’s help. The
Turks, whom the Harper government just gratuitously insulted while
playing domestic politics, could have made up all kinds of excuses
by way of payback.

Instead, the Turks turned the other cheek. They took out
Lebanese-Canadian citizens, rented boats, and put their airfield at
our disposal. Have they received an official thank you from Prime
Minister Stephen Harper?

It’s the least Mr. Harper could do after making recognition of the
90-year-old Armenian "genocide" official government policy such a sore
point in Turkey that the Turkish government withdrew its ambassador
to Canada to protest.

The Harper announcement, delivered almost flippantly in April,
made headlines in Turkey. Everybody close to the file knew the
announcement had everything to do with ethnic pandering in Canada,
part of the Conservative’s wider campaign to play ethnic politics.

Now that the Conservatives have been in office for a little while,
perhaps they will realize that a country’s foreign policy interests
should not be subordinated to domestic pandering. They might also
realize that a foreign policy based on realism requires remembering
which countries are allies and friends, because you never know when
friends might come in handy.

As a NATO partner, Turkey is now being asked to contribute to a
peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, a force Canada is not being
asked to join (except by some people in Canada) for the good reason
that this force needs to be robust. Canada does not have robust
forces to spare, what with the two-year commitment to Afghanistan,
a point those urging Canadian participation might remember. The Turks
(who were in Afghanistan before us) and others will have to do the
heavy lifting if NATO agrees to inject a force into Lebanon.

Another lesson concerns dual citizenship. It is way to late to think
of eliminating dual citizenship, even were the elimination desirable.
Australia thought of trying to go that route, and gave up. The
United States once forbade dual citizenship but relented about two
decades ago.

Dual citizenship is a fact of life, but it is a misunderstood fact,
one that a parliamentary committee could usefully explore and explain
to Canadians.

We seem to believe that, because a person carries a Canadian passport,
that person thinks himself as a Canadian and has an absolute right
to assistance from the Canadian government while outside Canada. Both
beliefs are false, and potentially dangerous.

It is worth at least asking whether we have made the acquisition
of Canadian citizenship so easy – divorcing it, once acquired, from
residence in the country – that we have spawned legions of citizens
of convenience. We know that thousands of people worked in Canada,
earned their pension time here, and live elsewhere clipping Canada
Pension Plan coupons.

There’s nothing illegal or inherently wrong with that – retired
Americans in Canada keep getting their Social Security cheques. But
there are a lot of other people holding Canadian passports around
the world whose attachment to this country – measured at least by
time spent here – is, shall we say, somewhat more limited.

We should also understand that a dual citizenship in another country
is not always considered a Canadian. For example, a holder of Iranian
and Canadian passports, or Syrian and Canadian passports, is not
considered by the authorities in those countries to be a Canadian,
but rather an Iranian or Syrian.

Canadian consular help to such dual nationals in those countries is
limited or non-existent, just as Canada might get upset if a dual
national caught doing something we consider illegal in Canada tried
to appeal for help to the Iranian or Syrian governments.

The same applies to China. The migration to Canada from Hong Kong
before the Chinese takeover from Britain produced thousands of dual
citizens, by Canadian law. The Chinese, however, do not recognize dual
nationalities. If things ever got tense between China and Canada,
and dual nationals in China appealed to Ottawa for help, it is not
clear what Canada could do if the Chinese made matters difficult.

All this is to suggest that a gap can arise between the legal realities
of being a dual national and the obligations and expectations of
Canada, especially in times of crisis. jsimpson@globeandmail.com