From Settler Society to Warrior Nation and Back Again: Canadian Citizenship in Transition
J. Mann (ed.), Citizenship in Transnational Perspective, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53529-6_15
31 Pages Posted: 12 Apr 2017
Date Written: April 11, 2017
Abstract
This paper focuses on the evolution of Canadian citizenship under the Conservative government (2006–2015), and makes three claims. First the Conservatives systematically resiled from the citizenship policies that typify a settler society, and this was congruent with contemporaneous changes to Canadian immigration policy. Second, citizenship law furnished an ideal platform for staging the re-branding of Canada as Warrior Nation, a pet Conservative project.
Third, the role played during the Fall 2015 federal election by one particular citizenship policy (the ban on niqabs while swearing the citizenship oath) reveals a lingering, and perhaps chronic, ambiguity about the character of Canadian citizenship in an era where forces of globalization and nationalist retrenchment impose competing pressures on state citizenship regimes.
Keywords: canada, citizenship, niqab, immigration, settler society, multiculturalism, law
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