Canada’s proposed new Citizenship Act reeks of mistrust. There’s no other way to put it. It’s an insult to many of the seven million foreign-born people who have settled here, a fifth of the population, and to many of the 250,000 who will arrive this year. Parliament should call the governing Conservatives on this before they ram it into law.

In typical fashion for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s law-and-order obsessed government, the laws promise to “protect the value of Canadian citizenship” by cracking down on problems that largely don’t exist. The vast majority of new Canadians are loyal, honest, law-abiding citizens. They have contributed enormously to the building-up of this nation. But you wouldn’t know it to judge from the unwelcome mat rolled out this week by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander. It’s all about cracking down on the marginal few who turn out to be treasonous, terrorists, criminals or fraudsters, and raising the bar for everyone else.

At its worst the new law devalues the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Canadians who hold dual citizenships. Canadians who commit treason by making war on this country already face life in prison; so do those who commit terrorism or espionage. That’s as it should be. But the new law would go a step further and strip Canadian citizenship from dual citizens who commit such crimes. Why? They’re Canadians, after all. Citizenship is a fundamental status, not something that people have to “deserve” in the government’s eyes.

As the Star has argued before, this discriminatory measure creates two categories of citizenship and disenfranchises naturalized citizens. It may well be unconstitutional. What’s next? Will Ottawa one day be trying to strip citizenship from other classes of criminals? Where does it end?

The opposition New Democrats and Liberals should call out the government on this measure, and demand that it be scrapped. The parliamentary record should note that it faced fierce resistance.

Other aspects of the law, while less objectionable, still raise concern.

The new rules would give Alexander and his successors greater unilateral power to grant and revoke citizenships. That power now resides with the federal cabinet. How sturdy is our citizenship if one minister alone can snuff it out?

Moreover, in future Canadian citizenship can be denied not only to people who pose a threat to this country, or who have posed one in the past, but also to those who may pose one in future. That could be invoked to refuse just about any applicant. How does Ottawa intend to justify such a crystal-ball presumption of guilt?

Going forward people charged with or convicted of serious crimes abroad would automatically be denied citizenship. While that might make sense for an American who is serving time for treason or terrorism, it would also apply to people convicted of offences in places where the courts may be politicized or corrupt and the laws unjust. Plenty of Canadians have been railroaded by unjust foreign courts. Would the “ministerial waiver” that Ottawa has in such cases be applied liberally or stingily?

Ottawa has also raised the bar to citizenship by making permanent residents wait longer before they can apply for citizenship, by cranking up processing fees, and by requiring more applicants to pass language and knowledge tests. If there’s some pressing need to make it harder to obtain citizenship it’s hard to see.

The new laws aren’t all bad. They rightly put Canadian military personnel who are permanent residents but not citizens on the fast track to full citizenship. They extend citizenship to the so-called “lost Canadians” who were wrongly denied it, including some war brides and their children. There’s a welcome crackdown on fraud, whether by citizenship consultants or applicants. And to combat passports of convenience permanent residents will have to physically reside here longer before getting citizenship, and file taxes.

Still, the thrust of the new Citizenship Act is that newcomers should be viewed through a prism of suspicion, and that the bar should be higher. That’s discouraging. Absent a wave of treasonous, criminal fraudsters, the Harper government is “fixing” a problem that exists chiefly in its own mind.