Despite the fuss, senator still a Cruzy Canuck

OTTAWA— U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz vowed months ago to renounce his Canadian citizenship. It’s 2014, and the Calgary-born Republican lawmaker is still a dual citizen.

“I have retained counsel that is preparing the paperwork to renounce the citizenship,” the junior Texas senator, who’s eyeing a run for president in 2016, Cruz said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News.

That’s confounding Canadian immigration lawyers. Renouncing Canadian citizenship, they say, is a simple, quick and straightforward process — there’s even an online, fourpage PDF form on the Government of Canada website to get the ball rolling without the help of lawyers.

“Unless there’s a security issue that hasn’t been disclosed, unless there’s a mental-health issue that hasn’t been disclosed, there’s no reason for anything other than a lickety-split process to occur,” Richard Kurland, a Vancouver-based immigration attorney, said in an interview Friday. Concerns about Cruz’s taxes might also be holding up the process, Kurland added, but the Canadian government is not to blame.

“If he’s attempting to bring our system into disrepute by suggesting it’s lengthy and complex, it’s just not true. Revocation is one of the fastest processes in our system.”

Canada’s best-known citizenship renouncer, Conrad Black, said in an email Friday that it “doesn’t take long” for the revocation process to work. He added Cruz may come to regret the move. “He’s making a mistake; he’ll never go higher in the U.S. electoral system than he is now and Canada’s a better-governed country than the U.S.,” said Black.

Cruz, 43, was born in Calgary when his parents were working in the oil business. His mother, Eleanor, is a native-born American, while his father, Rafael, is a Cuban who didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 2005.