Jettisoning honorary citizens not the answer

THERE AREN’T A LOT OF HONORARY CANADIANS. — ANDREW POTTER

When the news broke last week that Parliament was considering revoking Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary citizenship, a friend promptly texted me: “But an honorary Canadian is an honorary Canadian is an honorary Canadian!”

He was riffing on Justin Trudeau’s infamous explanation for why he believed that convicted terrorists who were also dual citizens should get to keep their Canadian citizenship. Yet while my friend intended it as a dig at a supposed double standard, the real hypocrisy is not with Trudeau, but with the whole notion of honorary citizenship.

There aren’t a lot of honorary Canadians. The first was awarded, posthumously, to Raoul Wallenberg in 1985, and there are only five others. So it’s a small group, but it’s also a roll call of some of the world’s great moral leaders: Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, the Aga Khan, Malala Yousafzai … and Aung San Suu Kyi.

But there has always been a studied ambiguity to the whole notion of honorary Canadian citizenship. In conferring this honour on these sorts of people, are we trying to borrow some of their moral authority, or are we trying to loan them some of ours? Are we trying to hitch our virtue wagon to them, or are we offering to help pull them along?

As Canada moves to revoke Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary citizenship, we have the answer. She was a saint, now she’s not, so we’re taking back our gong. This is exactly the wrong thing to do, and it shows how profoundly unserious we are about our actual citizenship.

As it happens, we’ve been having a pretty useful conversation in Canada lately about who should get to be a citizen, and under what circumstances. And while reasonable people can disagree about things like birthright citizenship, or whether dual citizens can have theirs revoked, one thing everyone concedes is that for the vast majority of us, our citizenship is just an accident. It is something we received either by having been born in the right place, or to the right people. The exceptions to this are the immigrants and refugees who came here on purpose and became citizens by choice.

Nevertheless, once you’re a citizen we don’t further categorize you based on how you obtained it. We throw everyone into the mix, so that every citizen has the same rights, and the same freedoms. And crucially, they all have the same responsibilities and the same obligations. Canadian citizenship is a club where we provide a set of collective benefits for one another, while also holding one another accountable.

I think this is what Justin Trudeau was getting at with his line about a Canadian being a Canadian being a Canadian. As he put it, “if you make citizenship for some Canadians conditional on good behaviour, you devalue citizenship for everyone.” That is, if you take away the sense of reciprocity, you undermine its moral foundations.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem with the very idea of “honorary Canadian citizenship,” which is that it is merely symbolic. The recipients don’t take the oath of citizenship, and therefore don’t receive any of the rights, or take on any of the responsibilities, that fall to the rest of us. But this also cuts in the opposite direction: in refusing to bring our honorary citizens into our shared community of fate, we’re also making clear the limits of our obligations to them. We don’t ask anything of them, and we offer nothing in return.

This is a tremendous mistake, and the answer is not (as some have argued) to do away with honorary citizenship altogether. Instead, the proper response is to start treating honorary citizens as citizens, full stop. We should be doing two things: offering the benefits of Canadian citizenship to people who embody the best of the values we hold dear, and making demands on them when they themselves fall short of those ideals.

That would entail going beyond the self-interested cynicism of the current charade, where we try to hop a free ride on the moral authority of people we have no intention of defending or protecting. It would also mean we don’t get to jettison them when their actions or views no longer make us look good.

What would that look like in practice? It’s probably too much to ask our honorary citizens to pay taxes. But why shouldn’t Parliament feel entitled to demand that Aung San Suu Kyi come to Canada and explain herself to Canadians? Another idea would be to treat the honorary citizen club as a sort of Order of Canada but with teeth, where a condition of membership would be a commitment to publicly holding other members to the values and standards that got them accepted in the first place. Maybe Aung San Suu Kyi would be moved by the prospect of being called out in the pages of the National Post by Malala, maybe not. But it couldn’t be any more useless a gesture than simply washing our hands of the problem.

There is no question that there are serious problems with Aung San Suu Kyi’s complicity in the persecution of the Rohingya and the massacres committed by Burma’s military. But the right thing to do here is not to revoke her citizenship, but rather, to hold her to it.

START TREATING HONORARY CITIZENS AS CITIZENS, FULL STOP.