Toronto Sun: Our 'lost' Canadians

By PETER WORTHINGTON

16th November 2009

You could call them the last of the lost Canadians -- 81 people who slipped through the cracks when Canada's new citizenship laws came into effect in April and acknowledged that hundreds (if not thousands) had been denied their Canadian birthright.

It was vindication for Canadian-born Don Chapman, a commercial airline pilot in the U.S. who's fought for years to have his Canadian citizenship acknowledged and led the battle for other lost Canadians that has now mostly been won.

Chattel

As a kid after the Second World War, Chapman lost his Canadian citizenship when his father moved to the U.S. and took out U.S. citizenship. In those days, children took the father's nationality. Wives and mothers were chattel.

Chapman's great-grandfather was a Father of Confederation, his dad was a colonel in the Canadian army in the Second World War, his family trust has donated millions to Canadian universities. This record made it difficult to deny Chapman's Canadian roots.

During last month's citizenship week, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney proclaimed: "No matter where you came from ... Canadian history becomes your history and Canadian values your values ... such as rule of law and equality of men and women."

Noble words that ignored the 81 Canadians being denied citizenship. They fall in three categories: The age 28 rule; gender discrimination; out-of-wedlock cases.

A Canadian born outside of Canada after Feb. 14, 1977 to second-generation Canadian parents must apply to retain citizenship before his/her 28th birthday or lose citizenship. Chapman says 63 Mennonites were unaware of this ruling and have forfeited citizenship, despite appeals to the present federal government which ignores them.

Others also are penalized. In September, Allen Ussher tried to get his passport renewed and was told since he hadn't applied for citizenship before his 28th birthday he was now stateless -- a violation of international law as he has no other nationality. The little-known age 28 rule is grotesquely unfair.

Bad luck

Prior to the 1947 Citizenship Act, Canadian women who married foreigners lost their Canadian citizenship as did their children.

Subsequent changes restored citizenship to women, but not their children unless they were born out of wedlock. So-called illegitimate children took the mother's nationality, legitimate kids, their father's.

In February, Second World War vet Guy Valliere died a rejected Canadian because his Canadian mother married an American and he was born in wedlock.

Had he been born out of wedlock, he'd have died a Canadian. Marcel Gelinas, 87, and Arch Ford had the bad luck to be born in wedlock and have also been denied citizenship.

James McClelland, born before the 1947 Citizenship Act to a Canadian mother and American father, is not considered Canadian, but his young brother and sister, born after 1947, are both viewed as Canadian.

The government ignores Federal and Supreme Court rulings in citizenship cases and also ignores the UN Convention that a person "cannot be deprived of nationality if such deprivation would render him stateless."

Former Tory MP John Reynolds says the rejection of "still lost Canadians" could be rectified "with the stroke of a pen."

But no one picks up the pen.

Click here to read the article in the Toronto Sun

Youtube; Don Chapman Speaks About Guy Valliere, War Veteran.

In this Youtube Video Shot on November 13, 2009 Don Chapman Speaks about the disgraceful treatment of Guy Valliere, a Canadian born, WWII Veteran who served his country when he was asked but when he asked for his citizenshi, the Minister of Citizenship Jason Kenny refused.

Who stands on guard?

Who Stands on Guard?

by William Bothwell

Since the first aboriginal people crossed the Bering Strait from Asia and their descendants made their way across the continent, to the time of the most recent arrivals, immigration has been basic to the growth and character of Canada. Some newcomers do not stay long.


Two questions are being asked. 1) Are we becoming a cost-tocoast to-coast condominium in which diverse and isolated groups of people live but seldom meet? We all know large buildings in which hundreds of people come and go without either seeing or speaking to one another. Such places are store-houses not neighbourhoods.

2) Is this country a revolving door through which people enter only soon to leave again? I have friends who joke that they met one another in a turnstile and have been going around together ever since. Contrariwise, statistics show that naturalised 'New Canadians' leave us to live elsewhere at triple the rate than do native-born Canadians.

The implications are far-ranging. Canadian citizens have the right to return at any time.

They my have contributed little to our national life or economy but their right to come back puts pressure on our health care and welfare systems.

There are 2.8 million of them. Collectively they could be called our missing province of Expatria. It represents 8% of our population. About 60% of them live in the U.S., the U.K., Australia or Hong Kong. One of them, a 'Pakistani- Canadian', currently living in Chicago, is accused of masterminding a plan to murder employees of the Danish newspaper that in 2005 published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, one of them with a bomb in his turban.

It may seem to be a democratic free choice for recent immigrants to give little thought to their Canadian rest stop before decamping. The egress has, of course, been going on for years. One of my Scottish great-grandfathers had a brother who after a few years in Toronto moved on to California. My grandfather had brothers who spent most of their adult lives in Michigan and Ohio. Their descendants whom I have met share the irritating notion that "America" consists solely of the U.S.A. and that that is the only really free country in the world.

As we allow more and more foreign ownership of our industries and resources, see our professional and managerial classes lured south of the border, our expatriate 'province' will continue to grow. Many of them will return only to the family summer cottages or for medical services to which their Canadian citizenship entitles them.

Just under half of the population of Toronto, to the violence and shallowly-rooted communities of which we in Dufferin County are closely tied, are still essentially aliens in this country. Even if 25% of them or theirs leave to return home or to live elsewhere the cultural and political impact of those who remain will be considerable. Long-time Canadian women give birth to an average of only 1.5 living children. Immigrants, at least in the first generation, are more fertile. That is particularly so of the large, 'visible minority' which is a very small minority in the nearby metropolitan area.

Ronald Reagan said in 1976 that God clearly intended the Americas to be the meeting place for immigrants who cross the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Where that left Australia and New Zealand was not mentioned but, down there as up here, the challenge of the immediate future will be to meld people who have a very different understanding of the delicate balance between law and personal freedom in to a peacefully integrated society. That problem deserves more frank and open debate.

The recent April 2009 amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act became law almost surreptitiously. It restores Canadian nationality to who were forced to renounce it when they became citizens of another country. It also grants it to their children. The process is not automatic; they musty apply for it.

One such was Will Wilkinson, a self-styled "thoroughgoing American" who lives in Iowa. Now, just where is that? Mr Wilkinson is also a 'libertarian' member of the Cato Institute which would abolish all governments and borders. Meanwhile, he has decided to be "a so-called lost Canadian", to sport a Maple Leaf on his backpack when that is advantageous, to keep a Canadian passport handy and to stop disdaining Canada's "socialistic health care system", at least until his real homeland has its own.

Whether people like Wilkinson are other beavers in our lodge or camels with their heads in our tent is the question. His Saskatchewanborn father but long ago pledged allegiance to the Stats and Stripes. Does not that rebel state, born in a revolution that denied the civil rights of United Empire Loyalists, demand absolute and exclusive loyalty and reject any challenge to its independent sovereignty?

The 'Iowa-Canadian' said in a piece in the September "Atlantic" magazine, "I qualify as a Canadian through a weird technicality". Most genuine Canadians have little understanding of and are little informed about the immigration muddle that has recently been made 'muddlier' by the federal government.

When have changes to our immigration policy been adequately discussed in the press or in newsletters we get from our elected representatives?

Auditor-general Sheila Fraser said a week or so ago that there are major problems with Canada's immigration system. Ottawa is making changes with little attention given to their long-term consequences. The Temporary Foreign Workers Act allows in low-skill workers without keeping track of them. Employers use it to bring in relatives who would otherwise not be far down the waiting line.

Peter C. Newman said years ago that a new Canadian citizen should first have been required to cross the country by car, bus or train. That odyssey would remind one that, despite constitutional indigestion, we are part of a national miracle that we should all see with glowing hearts.

It was said up top that two questions are being asked about our immigration policy. Opposite the armed 'Homeland Security' border bulldogs, who stands on guard on our side of the border crossings and at our ports of entry?

YouTube: Lost Canadians and War Brides

In this interview on November 11, 2009, War Bride historian Melynda Jarratt speaks about the Lost Canadian War Bride children who are being treated so shabbily by the Canadian government.

YouTube: Don Chapman Speaks at the Fredericton Cenotaph on Remembrance Day

On Remembrance Day 2009, Don Chapman was in Fredericton, New Brunswick and he gave us these thoughts on Remembrance and Guy Valliere, a World War Two veteran who died in February 2009 disenfranchised because the current Minister of Citizenship, Jason Kenney, refused to grant him his citizenship.

Guy Valliere was born in Canada.