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More than 200,000 Canadians signed this petition sponsored by a Commons MP to "revoke Elon Musk's dual citizenship status, and revoke his Canadian passport".

Some Canadian immigration law firms claim that "serious Misconduct or disloyalty" or that engaging in "acts of war, treason, or other significant violations against Canada" can lead to revocation in the case of dual status, but don't provide any reference or reasoning. Is that so? When I look at the Citizenship Act and related regulations I can only find fraud as a ground for revocation, but I can't look at all statutes or case law to figure out if a rule would apply to someone with a dual citizenship status in such scenarios.

Can you identify what legal rule in Canadian law, if any, would allow for revocation (of either the passport or the dual status, if there is a difference), based on grounds such as "activities that go against the national interest of Canada", "influence our elections", "has become a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty" and "attack Canadian sovereignty" stated in the aforementioned petition, and provide reference?

Kovy Jacob
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Ex-US First
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1 Answers1

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Can you identify what legal rule, if any, in Canadian law would allow for revocation (of either the passport or the dual status, if there is a difference), based on grounds such as "activities that go against the national interest of Canada" ...

"Passport" is often used as a proxy for "citizenship" in casual conversation, but, as noted in the comments, the two are far from synonymous. Many citizens of many countries never obtain a passport, and many countries have provisions for revoking passports so as to restrict a person's right to travel (for example because the person has been traveling to commit certain crimes). Yet these people are still citizens or nationals of their country.

Conversely, pretty much every country issues passports only to people who possess the country's citizenship or other form of nationality, and the loss of that nationality generally leads to automatic revocation of the passport. Canada is no exception here, but no other grounds for passport revocation seem to apply (thanks to user littleadv for the relevant link and analysis).

(Furthermore, mere passport revocation would not be fully responsive to the petition, which asks for revocation of his "dual citizen status" -- something that Canada can only achieve by revoking his Canadian citizenship.)

So the question is whether Musk's Canadian citizenship could be revoked. According to Wikipedia, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act of 2014 provided for the revocation of Canadian citizenship for those who had another citizenship and were convicted of terrorism, treason, espionage, and similar crimes. The article also notes that these provisions were removed in 2017, and the citizenship of at least one person that had been revoked under these provisions was restored.

It seems that the law firms claiming that revocation is possible for these sorts of crimes may be several years behind in reviewing their content to ensure that it is kept up to date. Whether the member of parliament who is sponsoring the petition is doing so because of outdated information or for some other reason, I can only speculate.

phoog
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