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Causing great injury to the whole of Canada, Stephen Harper may soon divide the country’s citizens into two classes: those who can have their citizenship revoked if convicted of a crime like terrorism, and those who can’t.

As Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada tells me, by denying dual nationals the rights of other Canadians, Bill C-24 echoes “a very troubling narrative that we hear often, but don’t expect to see in legislation, which equates foreignness with suspicion.”

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By threatening some people — but not all — with deprivation of citizenship, the Canadian government isn’t alone; it keeps company with other governments that, together, sustain a global climate of paranoia.

But Harper is isolating Canada from its democratic peers. The Economist’s Democracy Index classifies 25 countries as full democracies. Though some have flirted with what Harper proposes, the vast majority only revoke citizenship in cases of fraud, foreign military service or illegal dual citizenship. As Neve suggested may be true, I can find only two national governments in comparable democracies that have recently revoked citizenship as punishment for terrorism-type crimes or have officially proposed laws giving them the power to do so. Canada is one of them.