Cruz still a Canadian; experts confused by his hesitation
OTTAWA — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz vowed months ago to renounce his Canadian citizenship by the end of 2013. It’s now 2014, and the Calgaryborn 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, said in a recent interview with the Dallas Morning News.
He didn’t dispute holding dual citizenship: “Not at this point,” Cruz told the paper.
That’s confounding Canadian immigration lawyers. Renouncing Canadian citizenship, they say, is a simple, quick and straightforward process — there’s even an online, four-page 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.
“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.”
Stephen Green, an immigration lawyer in Toronto, was equally perplexed.
“It’s not complicated at all,” said Green, whose firm, Green and Spiegel, reached out to offer help to Cruz at one point but never received a return phone call from the senator’s office.
“They make sure you understand what you’re doing, that you’re not going to become a stateless person, and then you’re rock ’n’ roll, and good to go. I would assume that if he’s retained counsel, this could have been done by now.”
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, who gave up his citizenship in 2001 to accept a peerage in the British House of Lords.
Cruz’s office didn’t immediately respond for a request for comment.
The thorny issue of the Tea Party darling’s birthplace has been a headache for the senator, given some in the neo-conservative movement have accused U.S. President Barack Obama of being born in Kenya — his father was Kenyan, his mother American — and insist he’s therefore illegitimately leading the country.