Some of the evacuees expressed anger at the discomforts of the trip: long queues at the Beirut waterfront; crowded ships that lacked air-conditioning. A Toronto TV station quoted one man: “It’s a humiliation. Is this because we are of Arab origin? The government said ‘trust us’ and this is the trust I put in them?” It soon became public knowledge—although this, too, was never officially confirmed—that nearly half of the evacuees returned home to Lebanon within the month.

Comments like that did not sit well with many people back in Canada. Some politicians and commentators began to speak of “Canadians of convenience”: people who lived permanently abroad, did not pay Canadian taxes, and remembered their Canadian citizenship only when they needed rescue.

As a partial step to addressing these complaints, the government took steps to tighten rules about expatriate citizenship. It began for the first time to seriously enforce the ban on voting by long-term expatriates, people who had lived outside Canada for five years or longer. As Canada headed into a federal election in 2011 under the new rules, two expatriate Canadians filed a lawsuit to demand restoration of their voting rights. That litigation wended its way through the judicial system. In January 2019, the Supreme Court of Canada pronounced an answer: All Canadian citizens may vote in Canadian elections, no matter how long they have lived outside the country. The text of the decision would seem to apply even to those Canadian citizens who have never lived in Canada at all, or who have acquired nationality in another country.

Even before the decision, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau had moved ahead with legislation. I number among those supposedly benefited by the new legislation. In November 2018, I testified to the Canadian Senate against it.

My advice went unheeded, obviously. Yet it’s still worth thinking together: How is democracy supposed to work in a world of dissolving national boundaries and proliferating dual, triple, and quadruple citizenships?

Perhaps you think of Canada as an immigration magnet, but Canada also exports people in large numbers: perhaps 2.8 million people, or about 9 percent of the country’s population. (In contrast, only about 9 million nonmilitary Americans live abroad, or less than 3 percent of the U.S. population.)

Naturalized Canadians are three times as likely to live outside Canada as native-born Canadians, according to the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. About 24 percent of immigrants from Hong Kong return to the territory after acquiring Canadian citizenship, as do 30 percent of immigrants from Taiwan.

You can see the appeal. Hong Kong’s economy is growing much faster than Canada’s. Its income-tax rates top out at 17 percent. Canada does not tax the foreign-source income of nonresident citizens, in effect creating a geopolitical arbitrage opportunity too attractive to miss: the protections of Canadian nationality at low Hong Kong prices.