ShareThisBy PETTI FONG
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Canadian immigrant groups say fear is building in their communities over whether a federal review of dual citizenship will lead to people having to choose which passport to keep.
They say Canadians with dual citizenship will face excruciating personal decisions if the government revokes the practice.
"I think the majority of the members of our community are very concerned," said Svetlana Litvin, a leader with the Russian-speaking community in Montreal.
Some of these members are business owners who travel back and forth from Canada to Russia and neighboring countries, said Litvin, director of projects for the Russian-speaking community reference center in Montreal. The organization represents about 55,000 Quebeckers originally from 15 former Soviet bloc countries.
"For somebody who has a (business) branch in Russia and in Canada, dual citizenship facilitates operations like administration and taxation," she said.
Samuel Young, an Edmonton, Alberta, accountant who is on the national board of the Hong Kong Canada Business Association, said that with business opportunities expanding in China, any changes to citizenship requirements will have an impact.
"That gives me an advantage that someone else might not have," he said. "I value my dual citizenship and I know many, many people do as well."
The federal government has not specifically said it is looking into revoking dual citizenship, which allows people to hold more than one passport, but a spokeswoman in the office of the minister of citizenship and immigration said a review is under way.
"We will be reviewing the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in the upcoming months," said Pema Lhalungpa, in Minister Monte Solberg's office. She declined to say whether a report is being prepared or what kind of information is being canvassed as part of the review.
The review was ordered after the government spent $75 million to evacuate 15,000 Lebanese residents, Canadian-passport holders and dual citizens from the region during the war with Israel in August.
Since 1977, Canada has allowed citizens to live and maintain citizenship in other countries without losing their passport. An estimated 500,000 Canadians living in Canada have dual citizenship, according to the Statistics Canada agency, but there are no figures of how many Canadians with dual citizenship live outside the country.
There are approximately 50,000 Lebanese-Canadians who live in Lebanon and of the 15,000 evacuated during the conflict, about half have reportedly returned to that country. In Hong Kong, where about a quarter-million Canadians live, reports of changes to dual-citizenship requirements have been on the front page of newspapers and on radio programs.
"People are talking about it as if they have to make a choice, and among my friends, it's a real dilemma," said Danny Ma, who moved to Toronto at the age of 12 and returned to Hong Kong five years ago for work. "There are opportunities here for me, especially with the mainland opening up, that I wouldn't have in Canada. My head would say stay in Hong Kong and my heart would say go back to Canada, if I didn't have a choice."
