What does "citizen" mean?

Anyone who questions Stéphane Dion’s patriotism is either a fool or a scoundrel. After the service he has done this country, after the abuse he has suffered in its name, to cast even the slightest doubt on his loyalty to Canada shames those who would try.

But. Mr. Dion is no mere private citizen, nor even a minister of the Crown. He is now the Leader of the Opposition, and may one day become Prime Minister. As such he has certain obligations, in keeping with the position of public trust he occupies. He sets an example for others. Within certain limits, his private life is also his public life.

Viewed in this light, Mr. Dion’s decision to remain a citizen of another country, France, even as he seeks to govern this one, is a legitimate public issue. It would be absurd to suggest this places him in any real conflict of interest. But it is fair to ask: what is the message this sends to other Canadians?

The message one hopes public figures would wish to send is this: that Canadian citizenship is a precious thing; that it is not only a gift, but a vow; that we are a nation, or must be if we hope to amount to much -- a compact, if you like, binding all 32 million of us to each other in common cause. We do not merely populate this half of the continent; we are, rather, engaged in a great collective venture, the construction of a society based on justice and committed to do its part in advancing the human prospect.

For such a venture to succeed, it demands some elementary measure of commitment. We cannot just opt in and out of the social contract as we please, obeying some laws but not others, paying some taxes but not the rest. Either you’re in, that is, or you’re out -- you can be one or the other, but not both at the same time. And the seal on that commitment is that we forswear all other allegiances. The things we value are the things that cost us something, and the price of a Canadian passport is -- or should be -- that you cannot carry another.

Mr. Dion objects, reasonably enough, that identities are multiple, that “the hearts of people are big enough to accept different identities.” And so they are. The proposition is at the very foundation of a liberal society: that each individual person is the unique intersection of all the many groups to which each of us belongs; that as such the individual is, far from the rootless atom of caricature, the greatest common denominator of social cohesion. Our uniqueness as individuals, the perfect singularity of every human consciousness, is in fact what we have in common.

(What parades in the name of “diversity,” the obsession with particular group memberships -- racial, sexual, and so on -- that is the hallmark of identity politics, is thus revealed as a fraud. The truer, deeper diversity extends all the way to the individual. Anything short of that is not really about diversity, but homogeneity: not differences between groups, but sameness within the group. As it oversimplifies, so it divides.)

But identity is a different thing than citizenship. Identity is internal, a matter of the soul. Citizenship is external, a set of rights and privileges we expect for ourselves and acknowledge in others. In other nations, this is understood implicitly: try to imagine the Americans electing a president who was also a citizen of another country. Perhaps that makes us more advanced than them. Or perhaps it explains why we have been perched on the brink of dissolution for forty years, enervated, irresolute, unable to move this way or that for fear of triggering our own destruction: a country in which it is considered business as usual for its several parts to blackmail and threaten each other. Perhaps, that is, we have simply forgotten what it is to be a nation, or what citizenship means.

But even in this country, we understand that it is necessary sometimes to choose. It is unlikely, as others have pointed out, that Mr. Dion could have been elected leader of the Liberal party were he also a member of the NDP. Can it be otherwise for the leader of the country, that he should also be a citizen of another?

We may or may not wish to change the law governing dual citizenship, and if we do we may or may not wish to apply it retroactively. But it would send an important signal if Mr. Dion were to renounce his French citizenship, as the Governor General earlier did hers. Or if that is too much to ask of this good man, of whom so much has been asked already, we might at least reflect upon the issues his situation raises, in the fullness of time.