Citizenship snag strikes out athlete
CANADIAN PASSPORT APPLICATION FOR AMERICAN SOFTBALL PLAYER REJECTED
Kristen Brown has been working out with Canada’s national softball team and would love to join her prospective teammates as they try to qualify for next year’s Olympic Games.
There’s only one hitch. The Levittown, N.Y., native is not actually Canadian — yet.
Canadian Olympic officials are urging Ottawa to expedite citizenship for the American woman, illuminating a littleknown facet of elite-sports recruitment
— and of the country’s convoluted citizenship rules. Brown, whose father and grandfather have Canadian citizenship, was rejected last month after applying for a passport herself under a rarely used fast-track provision of federal law.
Her value to the country is “speculative” and there’s no proof the team must have her services to make the Olympics, an Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Canada employee ruled.
Neither the 24-year-old athlete, a former member of the U.S. national “elite team,” nor her family responded to the National Post’s request for comment.
But officials from the Canadian Olympic Committee and Own the Podium — the non-profit group dedicated to boosting the country’s medal haul — wrote letters last week urging Ottawa to speedily issue a positive decision.
The Canadian Olympic officials ask that Brown “receives her citizenship status and subsequent eligibility to compete for Canada at the 2019 Pan American Games, for which registration takes place in late-June.”
Passports have, in fact, been handed out under such circumstances before, typically with little fanfare. In the past “few years” alone, Canada has granted fasttrack citizenship to a handful of foreign athletes, an Immigration spokesman told the Post.
A home-run-hitting star on the University of North Carolina team, Brown was selected in 2016 for the U.S. elite team, a second tier of the national squad that competed in the World Cup of Softball.
Brown’s Canadian roots stem from her grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1940 at about four years old, according to the Immigration Canada decision. Laws passed here later confirmed him as a Canadian, and legislation implemented in 2009 extended citizenship retroactively to his son, Bobby, born in the U.S. in 1965.
But that law doesn’t apply to second-generation children of citizens like Brown’s grandfather, meaning Kristen remains solely an American.
Immigrants normally can’t apply for Canadian citizenship unless they first become permanent residents and live here for three of the previous five years.
Anxious to play on the Canadian team, however — and knowing the Pan-Am Games and Olympic qualifying tournament are coming up later this year — Brown applied last November under section 5(4) of the Citizenship Act, which lets the ministry grant citizenship to address statelessness, alleviate unusual hardship or “reward services of an exceptional value to Canada.”
Don Chapman, who has long advocated for people who lost their Canadian citizenship and is helping the Brown family, said it makes little sense that second-generation children like Kristen born outside Canada should be denied.
And he said section 5(4) has often been used to turn valued athletes from other countries into Canadians, frequently when they have far fewer links to this country.
“It’s done all the time,” he said.
Chapman noted that even Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar was granted citizenship by the previous Conservative government after acting as a tourism ambassador for Canada in India, and campaigning for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. (Tony Clement, then a minister in Harper’s government, denied Kumar’s citizenship was granted in exchange for his efforts on the campaign.)
In the last five fiscal years, Canada has handed out citizenships under section 5(4) to 229 people including “less than five” athletes, said Immigration Canada spokesman Peter Liang.
Rare past examples that have become public include ice dancer Piper Gilles, an American by birth who got her citizenship just in time to compete at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, and China native Eugene Zhen Wang, who was granted a passport so he could represent Canada in table tennis at the 2012 London Olympics.
In a lengthy response to Brown’s application, an Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Canada official defended the 2009 law, saying it was meant to end “the possibility of Canadian citizenship being passed down indefinitely to people who have little or no connection to Canada.”
The letter also dismissed Brown’s claim to feel an attachment to this country, saying her submissions “are modest at best and suggest only a minimal connection to Canada.”
And while she seems to be a good softball player, the value of her services are “based on future possibilities,” with no indication that the team’s success in making the Olympics hinges on Brown playing, said the “senior decision maker.”
And this country is not unique, with one Canadian academic documenting the “remarkable development” of citizenship becoming a potent Olympic recruiting tool for nations worldwide.
In a 2011 paper called Picking Winners: Olympic Citizenship and the Global Race for Talent University of Toronto law professor Ayelet Shachar suggested the phenomenon does not need to be banned. Citing some particularly questionable examples, however, she argued it should be better regulated to prevent aggressive talent poaching.
“This practice,” Shachar wrote in the Yale Law Review, “potentially leads to situations in which individuals serve as sports ambassadors for a nation to which they have nothing but the flimsiest of links.”