One increasingly uncontrovertible fact about Elon Musk is that he is a bad man. I deliberately say this rather blandly. There will be people who think you need to describe his badness in just the way they like, because they really don’t understand how sick and tired most of their fellow human beings are of being told that it’s not enough to oppose bad things and bad people, but that one must describe one’s opposition just so. But the exact nature of Mr. Musk’s badness is beside the point for my purposes. As I explain below, you can call him a fascist or a traitor or whatever else you please, and that won’t change my argument.
Another incontrovertible fact about Mr. Musk is that he is a Canadian citizen. His mother was born in Canada, which made her a citizen, and her children, even though they were born abroad.
A large number of Mr. Musk’s and my fellow Canadians find the coexistence of these facts to be obnoxious. Whether they are embarrassed or angry about Mr. Musk being a bad man and a Canadian at the same time, I am not sure, but be that as it may, they are lining up to sign a petition that is (presumably) meant and (widely) understood to demand that he be deprived of his Canadian citizenship. As of this writing, the petition has been signed by more than 250,000 people (though of course one might wonder how reliable that figure is), and is being pushed and supported by at least one member of Parliament, the NDP’s Charlie Angus.
This is appalling. The reasons given for depriving Mr. Musk of his Canadian citizenship are fundamentally authoritarian, as is the contempt for both the substantive and the procedural legal requirements involved in deprivation of citizenship that the petition manifests. That a member of Parliament is supporting this abomination is especially disturbing (and one reason I’m taking the time to write this post).
To start with the substantive point, the idea that a Canadian could be deprived of his citizenship for political reasons ought to be beyond the pale of polite discussion. It is the sort of thing the Soviets did to Mstislav Rostropovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others. Is Mr. Musk a Solzhenitsyn? Well, no. But why exactly would that entitle Canada to treat him in that way? The principles at stake here are universal. They do not depend on whether one is a martyr or a millionaire, a genius or a jerk. (Solzhenitsyn, at any rate, was both jerk and genius. So is Mr. Musk. Not that it matters.)
More to the point, do you want the Canadian government to have the power to deprive people of their citizenship for their political beliefs, statements, or activities? If you are ok with a government led by a Justin Trudeau or a Mark Carney having this power, do you agree that one led by Pierre Poilievre should? (Or, of course, vice versa.)
When I made these points online, people objected to my saying that the demand to take away Mr. Musk’s citizenship was political. But that’s precisely what it is. The first recital of the petition accuses him of having “egaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada”. I think the accusation is well-founded. But it is a political accusation: the national interest is a political concept. The petition then claims Mr. Musk “has used his wealth and power to influence our elections”. I’m not sure that’s actually so, but if it is, this is political action, and political action that Canadian citizens are entitled to take, subject to applicable laws, which the petition isn’t even alleging Mr. Musk broke. Finally, the petition claims that Mr. Musk “has now become a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty”. Let’s stipulate that the facts are true. The action of this foreign government, no matter how dishonourable, distasteful, and dangerous for Canada, has so far been in the realm of politics.
Some people will outright say that Mr. Musk is guilty of treason or something of that nature. But they cannot mean this in the legal sense. Under section 46 of the Criminal Code, high treason requires an attempt on His Majesty’s life, “lev[ying] war against Canada or … any act preparatory thereto”,or “assist[ing] an enemy at war with Canada”. And no, “war” here does not mean a war of words. Treason tout court means the use of “force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province”, the selling of state secrets, or conspiracy to commit one of the aforementioned forms of treason high and low. Mr. Musk is not plausibly guilty of any of this. Of course the word treason is often used in a more metaphorical sense. I’m not fanatically against this ― I’m not even fanatically against using “literally” to mean “not literally” ― but that use only serves to make political claims.
Finally, there are those who, like Mr. Angus, think that Mr. Musk “represents profoundly anti-democratic values” or indeed “is a fascist threat to democracy“. Let’s stipulate that these claims are true; the former surely is. But they are, once more, political claims, and one’s agreement with them does not make them any less so.
There is a further point to make here, before moving on to the legal and procedural issues. It’s about xenophobia. It is sometimes the quiet part in conversations about citizenship deprivations, but Mr. Angus, at any rate, says it out loud by pointing out that Mr. Musk “wasn’t born in Canada”. Feel free to dismiss this because I too wasn’t born in Canada, but to justify citizenship deprivation by pointing to its target’s foreign birth is as xenophobic ― as much a fruit of the hatred of foreigners ― as pointing to a person’s foreign birth to justify any other sanction or punishment you wouldn’t impose on someone who was born in the country. There’s a further element of arbitrary discrimination in that proposals to deprive peolpe of citizenship tend to make exceptions for those whom deprivation would render stateless because they have no other citizenship ― dual citizens, regardless of birth details, are seen as somehow more fair game. Again, so far as I’m concerned, this is rank xenophobia.
These are the substantive reasons for not only opposing but decrying the petition and its supporters such as Mr. Angus, but there are, as I mentioned, legal and procedural ones too. These may be more briefly stated. The legal issue is that there is no authority whatever for depriving someone in Mr. Musk’s circumstances, or anyone who is a Canadian citizen by birth, of citizenship. The Citizenship Act provides for voluntary renunciation of citizenship (s 9) and for the revocation of citizenship in cases where a “person has obtained, retained, … or resumed his or her citizenship by false representation or fraud or by knowingly concealing material circumstances” (s 10(1)). In other words, citizenship can be revoked when the person was never entitled to it in the first place, which is fair enough. But not otherwise. Perhaps unnecessarily, but the more strikingly for it, the Citizenship Act explicitly provides that “[a] person who is a citizen shall not cease to be a citizen except in accordance with” these provisions. The petition’s “call upon the Prime Minister to revoke Elon Musk’s dual citizenship status” is thus a call for illegal behaviour, as well as almost comically ignorant. There is no such thing as “dual citizenship status” (though there is such a thing as xenophobia against dual citizens), not to mention the fact that, were Mr. Musk’s Canadian citizenship revoked, he would still be a dual citizen… of South Africa and the United States.
This brings me to the process point. As Emmett Macfarlane, who has been a forceful if not intemperate critic of Mr. Musk and any Canadian links to his business ventures for some time, points out, “revocation of citizenship should be a legal process, not something done in response to a petition”. Even when the government wants to revoke a citizenship obtained by fraud, the alleged fraudster is entitled to challenge its case in the Federal Court. Yet here we are told that Mr. Musk’s citizenship can be revoked just like that, without further ado. Deprivation of citizenship is very serious business. For those who, admittedly unlike Mr. Musk, live in Canada, it is far more serious than many forms of criminal punishment. Just like criminal punishment, it isn’t something that can be imposed by popular demand. To punish someone because the people demand it is a form of mob rule, and the antithesis of the rule of law.
The demands that Mr. Musk be deprived of his Canadian citizenship for political reasons are a disgrace, and unworthy of the Canada I love and want to remain democratic and independent. They are for the weak and frightened, not the strong and free. Up to a point, they are not surprising. After all, we live in an age of populism, and Mr. Musk is only a face of it, not the face. We live in an age of misinformation, as the Chief Justice will not tire of telling us (I wish he did!) and, as I have argued here, officials or, in this case, an MP, are a fecund and dangerous source of lies, damned lies, and assorted ignorance. But there is also something more specific to this particular moment going on as well. As I wrote here in relation, primarily, to retaliatory tariffs, Canada is in real danger of adopting just the sort of policies Canadians quite rightly loathe and fear when they are considered and adopted in the United States. At a time when the Trump administration is looking to visit retribution on its political enemies and, not coincidentally, to deny the citizenship of those Americans it deems, for its political reasons, less worthy of it than others, it would be both a tragedy and an unforgiveable wrong for Canada to do the same.