Article content

Serious people can disagree about serious issues. When to hold elections, for example, or how to oversee surveillance, or where to build schools. What’s not in serious question is the very existence of the fundamental rights underpinning these issues: democratic rights, privacy rights and education rights, among others.

In the universe of universal human rights, most rights orbit around the right to citizenship. To get married, own property, and even have your birth and death registered, you must be drawn into the gravitational pull of some citizenship framework.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Gormley: The right to have rights Back to video

So when Canada’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander announced this year that, “Citizenship is not a right, it is a privilege,” most human rights advocates couldn’t take him seriously. He may as well have declared that the curvature of the earth is merely an optical illusion and the world is indeed flat, or that the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to his government, which can perpetually stay in power whether or not its ministers fuel it with statements deserving serious consideration.