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Welcome to Canada! Now, here’s what we expect.

We expect you to at least have the intention of living here and not treat a Canadian passport as an insurance policy.

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We expect that your commitment to Canada includes paying your fair share of taxes.

We expect that if you can’t speak one of Canada’s two official languages that you will do all you can to gain a working knowledge of it, regardless of your age.

That means more than just taking language classes. We expect you to try to speak English or French whenever you can so you’re not exiled into a language ghetto or complicit in building one.

Because you can vote here, we expect that you’ll pay at least as much attention to the local news as you do the news from your homeland. And we do not expect, but we hope, that your interest in your homeland will diminish as the years go by.

We expect that you learn more about Canada than the minimum required to pass the citizenship test. Canada is no more the place that you came from than it is the United States or even the Canada you might think you know from television and the movies.