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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

You know, I am a Canadian PR too and while nowhere near as bad as the US temporary worker situation, the transition from PR to citizen is not easy if you have the audacity to travel. And, thanks to this wonderful new bill, you can be stripped of your citizenship basically any time the government wants to without judicial oversight.

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Waho, that's bad, do you have more details?

I'm a Canadian citizen (but I live in the US), so I think I know what' hes' referring to.

With Bill C-24, whether you were born in Canada or were naturalised, if you qualify for another citizenship or hold citizenship from another country, the government can take away your Canadian citizenship if it considers you to be a terrorist or threat to the country.

I'm against it.

To quote https://bccla.org/2015/06/its-official-second-class-citizens...

The new provisions allow officials to take away a person’s citizenship based on criminal convictions that occur outside of Canada, regardless whether the regime or judicial system under which the person was convicted is undemocratic or lacks the rule of law.

WTF Canada?

The last place I would have guessed would tier class to provide unequal protection under and application of the law would be Canada.

Are they really more worried about the abstract idea of Jihadist Muslims than America?

Nah, Harper's worried about environmentalists, and other possible threats to the dangerous pipelines his friends from the oil business want to put it.

C-51 allows them to brand people as terrorists, and C-24 lets them ship'em out to one of the USA's torture facilities.

And, I think, bill C-51 considerably widens the definition of 'terrorist or threat to the country'.

Why is this shocking? Most countries will do this. Look at all the former Nazi's who had their citizenship revoked in Canada and the US.

That's why they ask (at least in the US citizenship application) "Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?". If you answer "no" and turn out to be one, they say you lied on your application and your citizenship is revoked.

The issue is it broadened it to a political instead of a judicial decision. Your citizenship can be revoked on the basis of a foreign country's conviction (say... Saudi Arabia perhaps?), which didn't used to be the case, and the decision happens from the office of PM.

Prior to C-24 there was a mechanism for stripping citizenship for treason and terrorism, but the bar was higher and at least potentially less political.

Actually most western European countries wont do this. They will try to re-socialize terrorists.

France: "French Court Rules It's Not Wrong To Revoke Citizenship Of A Convicted Binational Jihadist"

http://www.ibtimes.com/french-court-rules-its-not-wrong-revo...

Britain: Britain Increasingly Invokes Power to Disown Its Citizens

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/world/europe/britains-powe...

Other countries include: Netherlands, however it looks like many don't as well.

http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/networks/eur...

French court. Nothing is wrong with that. The new Canadian bill removes the court from the equation.

The citizenship-stripping issue is obviously off topic, although I don't disagree that it's a bad law.

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