Evacuation tips: Who's a friend, who's a Canadian?

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Evacuation tips: Who's a friend, who's a Canadian?

JEFFREY SIMPSON

Lessons for Canada from the flight from Lebanon: First, don't kick your friends needlessly. Second, review dual citizenship.
By way of first things first, here's a question: Which country helped most when Canadians tried to rescue people from Lebanon? Answer: Turkey.
With Cyprus filled up, Canada urgently asked for Turkey's help. The Turks, whom the Harper government just gratuitously insulted while playing domestic politics, could have made up all kinds of excuses by way of payback.
Instead, the Turks turned the other cheek. They took our Lebanese-Canadian citizens, rented boats, and put their airfield at our disposal. Have they received an official thank you from Prime Minister Stephen Harper?

It's the least Mr. Harper could do after making recognition of the 90-year-old Armenian "genocide" official government policy, such a sore point in Turkey that the Turkish government withdrew its ambassador to Canada in protest.
The Harper announcement, delivered almost flippantly in April, made headlines in Turkey. Everybody close to the file knew the announcement had everything to do with ethnic pandering in Canada, part of the Conservatives' wider campaign to play ethnic politics.
Now that the Conservatives have been in office for a little while, perhaps they'll realize that a country's foreign policy interests should not be subordinated to domestic pandering. They might also realize that a foreign policy based on realism requires remembering which countries are allies and friends, because you never know when friends might come in handy.
As a NATO partner, Turkey is now being asked to contribute to a peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, a force Canada is not being asked to join (except by some people in Canada) for the good reason that this force needs to be robust. Canada doesn't have robust forces to spare, what with the two-year commitment to Afghanistan, a point those urging Canadian participation might remember. The Turks (who were in Afghanistan before us) and others will have to do the heavy lifting if NATO agrees to inject a force into Lebanon.
Another lesson concerns dual citizenship. It's way too late to think of eliminating dual citizenship, even were the elimination desirable. Australia thought of trying to go that route, and gave up. The United States once forbade dual citizenship but relented about two decades ago.
Dual citizenship is a fact of life, but it's a misunderstood fact, one that a parliamentary committee could usefully explore and explain to Canadians.
We seem to believe that, because a person carries a Canadian passport, that person thinks of himself as a Canadian and has an absolute right to assistance from the Canadian government while outside Canada. Both beliefs are false, and potentially dangerous.
It is worth at least asking whether we have made the acquisition of Canadian citizenship so easy -- divorcing it, once acquired, from residence in the country -- that we have spawned legions of citizens of convenience. We know that thousands of people worked in Canada, earned their pension time here, and live elsewhere clipping Canada Pension Plan coupons.
There's nothing illegal or inherently wrong with that -- retired Americans in Canada keep getting their Social Security cheques. But there are a lot of other people holding Canadian passports around the world whose attachment to this country -- measured at least by time spent here -- is, shall we say, somewhat more limited.
We should also understand that a dual citizen in another country is not always considered a Canadian. For example, a holder of Iranian and Canadian passports, or Syrian and Canadian passports, is not considered by the authorities in those countries to be a Canadian, but rather an Iranian or Syrian.
Canadian consular help to such dual nationals in those countries is limited or non-existent, just as Canada might get upset if a dual national caught doing something we consider illegal in Canada tried to appeal for help to the Iranian or Syrian governments.
The same applies to China. The migration to Canada from Hong Kong before the Chinese takeover from Britain produced thousands of dual citizens, by Canadian law. The Chinese, however, don't recognize dual nationalities. If things ever got tense between China and Canada, and dual nationals in China appealed to Ottawa for help, it's not clear what Canada could do if the Chinese made matters difficult.
All this is to suggest that a gap can arise between the legal realities of being a dual national and the obligations and expectations of Canada, especially in times of crisis.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com