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But reversing the law “because a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” isn’t a reason. It’s a slogan. And not even a particularly original or even logically consistent one.

McCallum’s declaration may sound familiar because it was a talking point spoken by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during last year’s foreign policy debate, in reply to former prime minister Stephen Harper’s defence of the Tory law, Bill C-24. And it’s illogical because there are already grounds in place to strip Canadians of their citizenship, and there have been for years. There goes the talking point.

Some grounds for revoking citizenship are generally uncontroversial. If one lies or commits fraud while seeking to obtain Canadian citizenship, the government has long held that such citizenship cannot be said to have been properly obtained. Revoking it later, according to this logic, is simply removing something that never ought to have been obtained in the first place. More controversially, however, Canada has also stripped away the citizenship of immigrants who were later found to have been war criminals.

After the Second World War, thousands of citizens of defeated enemy nations — Germany, Italy, Japan — moved to Canada. These immigrants included many who had served in the armed forces of those nations, and perhaps had even fought against Canadians. Mere military service in a once-hostile nation was not, and should not have been, found to be sufficient cause to deny them citizenship once the war was over. In some rare cases, however, Canada later discovered (or was told) that people living here as naturalized Canadians had been involved, for instance, in the Holocaust. These individuals, once convicted of their war crimes, had their citizenship taken away and were returned to their original countries of origin to face justice.