Summary

A Canadian parliamentary petition to revoke Elon Musk’s citizenship has gathered over 150,000 signatures.

Launched by author Qualia Reed and sponsored by MP Charlie Angus, the petition accuses Musk of undermining Canada’s sovereignty due to his ties to Trump, who has repeatedly suggested annexing Canada.

Musk is a Canadian citizen through his mother. The petition will be presented to the House of Commons, which resumes on March 24.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 hours ago

    I would be surprised if this sort of thing was possible and I’m pretty sure it’s not and im pretty sure it’s a good thing that it’s not

    • @Olap
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      193 hours ago

      Sadly, it is. Britain did it a few years ago to some kid that joined IS. She held rights to a passport to a country that she had never been even visited and that was enough for the Home Office to yank her British one.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamima_Begum

      A pretty tragic tale imo

      • @[email protected]
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        150 minutes ago

        She didn’t have the passport at that time, while musk has probably a bunch of them stashed away. What the British did was directly going against the UDHR, but musk can suck it.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 hours ago

        Probably did her a favour not letting her back.

        Not seen such a prominent figure of hate since Cat Bin Lady.

        • @Olap
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          83 hours ago

          Dunno, stateless in a refugee camp currently as Bangladesh won’t let her in either. Think I’d opt for keeping a low profile in Britain instead, change name, get the hair dye and sunglasses on and move to a shitty wee town somewhere

    • @[email protected]
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      2 hours ago

      I would be surprised if this sort of thing was possible and I’m pretty sure it’s not and im pretty sure it’s a good thing that it’s not

      It isn’t in the US, but the US is not all countries.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk

      Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily.[1][2][3] The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a man born in Poland, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim’s right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court struck down a federal law mandating loss of U.S. citizenship for voting in a foreign election—thereby overruling one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier.

      EDIT: I haven’t previously read up on citizenship law for Canada, so I don’t know if this is missing relevant Canadian citizenship law, but a quick search suggests that Canadian law doesn’t permit for executive removal of citizenship either:

      https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-29/page-3.html

      Loss of Citizenship

      Marginal note:No loss except as provided

      7 A person who is a citizen shall not cease to be a citizen except in accordance with this Part or regulations made under paragraph 27(1)(j.1).

      None of that section nor paragraph 27 looks like it provides for involuntary removal of Canadian citizenship.

      That being said, there is a question of whether this is ordinary federal law or constitutional law. I don’t know how one determines that.

      In the US, Afroyim v. Rusk found that the US Constitution disallowed removal of citizenship. There is a high bar to modify the US Constitution – a majority of both legislatures in a three-quarters supermajority of state legislatures need to approve of a constitutional amendment. This is considerably higher than the bar to pass ordinary federal law, which is just a simple majority in the House, Senate, and the President, or a two-thirds supermajority in both the House and Senate.

      Canada’s constitutional situation is complicated. Canada started out following the UK model, where Parliament can change any law it wants to as easily as any other – there is no “higher law” like a constitution. At the time that Canada got split off from the UK at a constitutional level, some of Canadian law was decided to be part of the constitution and some not…but it was never defined exactly what law was and what wasn’t, so I understand that courts have been working that out ever since. The constitution isn’t simply a separate document, as in the US.

      Also, different parts of Canada’s constitution have different bars for amendment.

      So I don’t know for sure how strong this constraint is; it might be that the Canadian legislature could remove this bar as readily as they would a typical law.

      EDIT2: Someone else pointed out the Shamima Begum case below, where the British executive removed someone’s citizenship. I followed that and commented on it when it happened, and it is definitely possible for the executive to strip a citizen’s citizenship in the UK; the law explicitly provides for it.

      I was fairly concerned about this at the time it was in the news, because most other legal rights depend on citizenship. If you can remove someone’s citizenship, you can remove most of their other legal rights and protections.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 hours ago

      “Oh no, how do we make sure Diet Hitler stays a Canadian citizen?”

      Wtf is your thought process, my dude?

      • @Zron
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        352 minutes ago

        More like there’s systems in place to prevent countries from creating a stateless person, who would have no rights anywhere.

        Just because it sounds nice to happen to people you don’t agree with, it’s still something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

    • @Aqarius
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      53 hours ago

      …Especially since the alternative could be just charging him with treason or something.

      • @[email protected]
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        13 hours ago

        The gov’t doesn’t have to charge him with treason to revoke his citizenship. They only have to prove that he committed it.