Canadian Citizen Quotes

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: 'Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and programs, citizens and parliamentarians cannot make informed decisions and incompetent or corrupt governments can be hidden under a cloak of secrecy.' When he became prime minister, his attitude appeared to undergo a shift of considerable proportions. It often took the Conservatives twice as long as previous governments to handle access requests. Sometimes it took six months to a year.

My becoming a Canadian citizen was part of the plot.

Thank God for the American Affordable Care Act. It was passed in a limited form right before the Rising began, despite the opposition of one hell of a lot of people who thought that providing health care to their fellow citizens was somehow, I don’t know, inappropriate. Honestly, it was a miracle the thing passed at all, considering that we’re talking about the era of vaccine denial and homeopathic cures for everything from autism to erectile dysfunction. If the Rising hadn’t come along when it did, most of the United States would probably have died of whooping cough before 2020, leaving the middle part of the continent ripe for Canadian invasion. But

Ricky had been born in Canada. His father was Cuban and mother French Canadian. Ricky wasn’t a natural-born American. Hell, he wasn’t even an American citizen. By constitutional law Ricky Guerrero couldn’t be President of the United States of America.

Well, consider this Custer’s payback.” “Since my grandfather killed him,” said Archille, “there is a certain justice to the idea. Still, Thomas here is a bona fide American citizen. I’m Canadian. My brother fought in the trenches. My uncle was at the Somme.

If ordinary citizens knew or ever really [understood] how our political leaders have allowed unemployment to be used as a tool for fine-tuning the inflation rate, they would throw the rascals out and demand a thorough purging of the ranks of government economists.

the Canadian government – the power of each of us as citizens – has been and still is breaking the law. Breaking it by misusing it – by resorting to avoidance, by pretending to be doing what it isn’t, by legalistic and administrative manipulation, by malingering. These are standard tricks far beneath the dignity of the Crown. For

the Honour of the Crown, a concept given its Canadian form in such historic Supreme Court decisions as Guerin in 1984, Sparrow in 1990 and, most recently, the Manitoba Métis case in 2013. The Guerin case is one of those Aboriginal victories at the highest court that have shaped Canada over the last forty years. What is the Honour of the Crown? It is the obligation of the state to act ethically in its dealings with the people. Not just legally or legalistically. Not merely administratively or efficiently. But ethically. The Honour of the Crown is the obligation of the state to act with respect for the citizen.

To be precise, you and I pay government lawyers to fight as hard as they can to get as much Aboriginal land as possible and to give as little as possible in return. They act like rapacious divorce lawyers. Why? We must ask ourselves why they are doing this for us. First, our governments seem to be arguing that these negotiations are all about saving the taxpayer money. This is lunacy. You don’t save money by dragging out complex legal negotiations for twenty-five years. Protracted legal battles are the equivalent of throwing taxpayers’ money away. And you force Canadian citizens – Aboriginals – to waste their own money and their lives on unnecessary battles. Second, our governments more or less argue that a few thousand or a few hundred Aboriginals shouldn’t have control over land that might have great timber or mineral or energy value. They argue as if it were all about the interests of a few thousand Aboriginals versus that of millions of Canadians. As if the Aboriginals were invaders come to steal our land. The question we should be asking is quite different. If there is value in these territories, don’t you want it controlled by Canadians who feel strongly that this is their land? By people who want to live there and want their children and grandchildren to live there? Surely they are the people most likely to do a good long-term job at managing the land. And why shouldn’t they profit from it? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Is there any reason why Canadians living in the interior and in the north should profit less than urban Canadians do in the south? And if those Canadians are Aboriginal, is there some reason why they should profit less than non-Aboriginals?

Moderns maintain a peculiar relationship with rhetoric. We no longer teach it to our young, nor demand it of our wise. What since ancient Athens was considered an essential skill for a free citizen has now largely been consigned to hucksters and to the tarmacs of used car dealerships. The tragedy is that we abandoned the art on purpose. About the same time the Russians flung Sputnik into space, in the name of progress American, Canadian, and British educators tossed the old grammar and style books onto the intergalactic rubbish heap of history. The past was trashed. In a scientific age, so the reasoning went, questions of philosophy, of beauty, of sex, of God, could be set aside in favor of technological solutions. The science was settled. Just the same, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Who would’ve foreseen that at the same hour the West turned its back on its humanistic traditions, it would be called to police the global order, shore up markets, and shoot down terrorists?

If we consider this official or elite multiculturalism as an ideological state apparatus we can see it as a device for constructing and ascribing political subjectivities and agencies for those who are seen as legitimate and full citizens and others who are peripheral to this in many senses. There is in this process an element of racialized ethnicization, which whitens North Americans of European origins and blackens or darkens their 'others' by the same stroke. This is integral to Canadian class and cultural formation and distribution of political entitlement. The old and established colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery, are the conceptual devices of the construction and ascription of these racialized ethnicities. It is through these 'conceptual practices of power' (Smith, 1990) that South Asians living in Canada, for example, can be reified as hindu or muslim, in short as religious identities.....We need to repeat that there is nothing natural or primordial about cultural identities - religious or otherwise - and their projection as political agencies. In this multiculturalism serves as a collection of cultural categories for ruling or administering, claiming their representational status as direct emanations of social ontologies. This allows multiculturalism to serve as an ideology, both in the sense of a body of content, claiming that 'we' or 'they' are this or that kind of cultural identities, as well as an epistemological device for occluding the organization of the social....an interpellating device which segments the nation's cultural and political space as well as its labour market into ethnic communities....Defined thus, third world or non-white peoples living in Canada become organized into competitive entities with respect to each other. They are perceived to have no commonality, except that they are seen as, or self-appellate as, being essentially religious, traditional or pre-modern, and thus civilizationally backward. This type of conceptualization of political and social subjectivity or agency allows for no cross-border affiliation or formation, as for example does the concept of class.

Until this past month, one could essentially purchase Canadian citizenship for about C$100,000 – the interest on a five-year loan of 800K to the government – a price tag that was kept under the radar of the populace, who grew furious on learning it was actually true. It was also collectively humiliated to learn how relatively cheap the price tag was. Also in Canadian citizenship news, Texas senator and Tea party enthusiast Ted Cruz – a man with presidential aspirations – has formally renounced his Canadian citizenship. Born in Canada in 1970 to an American mother, Cruz has always been an American citizen and is technically eligible to run for president, but his opponents ran a vicious smear campaign cruelly branding him as “Canadian Ted”.

Citizens who do not cover their faces have the right to know who they are interacting with. What about their rights? The face veil is an insult to those who do not conceal their identity in public. In effect it says: “I have the right to know who you are but you don’t have the right to know who I am.

Medicine is becoming a business, and if people choose medicine as a way to make money, they should go to the States because there, health care is a commodity for sale and you can shop around for the best product. Patients are the customers and if you're rich you get better health care than if you're poor. In Canada, health care is a basic human right, a service that every human being deserves. Tell me, have any of you ever seen someone get preferential treatment? A Canadian over a non-resident? A white person over one of color? A VIP over an ordinary citizen?

Out of the meeting came Jimmy Gardner of the Wanderers swearing like a trooper… Gardner came out and he sat down in a chair near me. He was so mad he could hardly do anything but swear — and then he turned to me and said, ‘Say, you O’Briens have other hockey teams up North haven’t you? In Haileybury and Cobalt?’ I said we had; at least we helped support the teams up there. And he said, ‘Ambrose, why don’t you and I form our own league? You’ve got Haileybury, Cobalt and Renfrew. We have the Wanderers.…’” O’Brien also remembered it as Gardner who suggested that he bankroll another French-Canadian team for their new league, which they started up a week later on December 2, 1909, and called the National Hockey Association (NHA). Two days after that, the NHA unveiled its French team, which the Montreal Gazette said would be called Le Canadien, although the Ottawa Citizen correctly labeled Les Canadiens.

But like the U.S. Government, the Canadian powers-that-be never seemed to realize that criminals don’t pay any attention to rules and regulations and laws. The only group of people who are punished by restrictive gun laws are the law-abiding citizens.

Citizens expect quick responses to their questions or perspectives, putting enormous pressure on the machinery of government to react quickly and to get it right, which it was hardly designed to do, given its reliance on hierarchy.

Travel to Cuba Generally Tourist travel to Cuba is prohibited under U.S. law for U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and others subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The hard and fast rules have been relaxed some and exceptions are now made for certain travelers who can show an acceptable reason, to visit the Island Nation in which case a “Tourist Visa" is required and available. US Citizens must have a valid passport with two blank pages available, for entry and exit stamps, at the time of entry into Cuba. United States issued credit and debit cards do not work in Cuba so travelers should plan to bring enough cash with them to cover all the expenses they might incur during their trip. Authorized travelers to Cuba are subject to daily spending limits. See the Office of Foreign Assets Control page of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.The export of Cuban convertible pesos (CUC) is strictly prohibited, regardless of the amount. Travelers may only export the equivalent of $5000 in any currency other than the Cuban convertible peso (CUC). Anyone wishing to export more than this amount must demonstrate evidence that the currency was acquired legitimately from a Cuban bank. Cuba has many Hotels and Resort Areas, most of which are foreign owned; I counted 313 of them. Many are Canadian or European owned with Meliá Hotels International in the lead with twenty-eight hotels in Cuba alone. Being a Spanish hotel chain, it was founded in 1956 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The photo show the internationally known “Nacional Hotel.” Some Cruise Lines including Carnival now offer cruises to Cuba and advise guests as to the entry requirements. Follow Captain Hank Bracker, author of “The Exciting Story of Cuba” on Facebook, Goodreads and his Web Page as well as Twitter. His daily blogs and weekend commentaries are now being read by hundreds and frequrntly thousands of readers. Send suggestions and comments to PO Box 607 Elfers, FL 34680-0607.

The illusion of nationalism consists in realising that an Englishman became American, Australian and Canadian, according to the country or the continent on which he was.

We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” The statement was vague, but Ilya understood. “Yes. If you want to try this, I will do what I need to do.” “I will too. Anything. I want this. I want us.” Ilya brushed Shane’s hair out of his eyes. “Then I am moving to Ottawa, I think.” “And we’re starting a charity.” “And we will become friends.” “And we’ll see each other all the time. As much as possible. And spend the summers together. Here.” “Yes.” They kissed again. Ilya couldn’t believe they had solved this impossible problem. Maybe it wouldn’t go as smoothly as they imagined, but it was a plan. “And when I retire,” Ilya said, “after I have won twelve Stanley Cups and thirteen MVP awards—” “The hell you will.” “And you have been retired for, like, eight years already because you got very bad at hockey...” Shane laughed. “Okay.” “Then I will bring you to that dock out there. I will have hundreds of candles all over it...” “That sounds like a fire hazard.” “Is on the water, Hollander. Fucking relax. Will be beautiful, you will love it. The candles. The lake. The full moon.” “Oh, is it a clear night?” “Yes. Of course. And I will get on one knee—” “Ilya—” “And I will say, ‘Shane Hollander, will you please marry me so I can become Canadian citizen faster?’” Shane burst out laughing, and shoved him. “You’re such an asshole.” “And you will say yes, because you are a nice, helpful guy.” “No,” Shane said, taking his hands. “I will say yes because I will still be madly in love with you. And I’ll want to spend the rest of my life with you.” - Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry

Across the globe I am often referred to as "the Indian neuroscientist" or "the Indian Author", despite the fact that my work is practically nonexistent in India, statistically speaking. Considering that, 90% of my book sales come from US, UK and Canada, the rest 10% from Europe, Mexico, South America and Australia, and zero from India - for transparency and context purposes I'll tell to you one more time - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Scientist - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Poet - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Philosopher. However, it's never about the sales, it's about the love. I only mention the demographics to put things in perspective. For example, there are many countries where people cannot afford to buy my books, since they are expensively exported from US and Europe, and yet, I receive far more love from these countries than the land I was born in. Philippines and Pakistan to name a few. As a matter of fact, hate wise speaking, Philippines is the only country so far, where I have not faced any hate and bigotry - which only goes to prove that, state of a currency does not reflect the broadness of heart. That's why, a substantial portion of my work is available freely on the internet. The point is - I am no more Indian, than I am a Yank or Canadian or Mexican or Turk or Swede or Pinoy or British or Brazilian or Egyptian or Aussie. Passport is just a glorified bus pass - nothing more. So, I repeat - I am an Earth Scientist - remember that. Nationalization of Naskar is desecration of Naskar.

We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” The statement was vague, but Ilya understood. “Yes. If you want to try this, I will do what I need to do.” “I will too. Anything. I want this. I want us.” Ilya brushed Shane’s hair out of his eyes. “Then I am moving to Ottawa, I think.” “And we’re starting a charity.” “And we will become friends.” “And we’ll see each other all the time. As much as possible. And spend the summers together. Here.” “Yes.” They kissed again. Ilya couldn’t believe they had solved this impossible problem. Maybe it wouldn’t go as smoothly as they imagined, but it was a plan. “And when I retire,” Ilya said, “after I have won twelve Stanley Cups and thirteen MVP awards—” “The hell you will.” “And you have been retired for, like, eight years already because you got very bad at hockey...” Shane laughed. “Okay.” “Then I will bring you to that dock out there. I will have hundreds of candles all over it...” “That sounds like a fire hazard.” “Is on the water, Hollander. Fucking relax. Will be beautiful, you will love it. The candles. The lake. The full moon.” “Oh, is it a clear night?” “Yes. Of course. And I will get on one knee—” “Ilya—” “And I will say, ‘Shane Hollander, will you please marry me so I can become Canadian citizen faster?’” Shane burst out laughing, and shoved him. “You’re such an asshole.” “And you will say yes, because you are a nice, helpful guy.” “No,” Shane said, taking his hands. “I will say yes because I will still be madly in love with you. And I’ll want to spend the rest of my life with you.

The world now realizes the true face of India, which I have been saying for years under the victimization of Indo-Pak intelligence agencies. I salute Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the institutions that took fair and proper action against India for minorities. I wish I were a Canadian citizen instead of a Dutch, where I have been facing victimization by Dutch officials since 1980.

Federal law forbids US spy agencies from spying on or surveilling US citizens, but the Western intelligence bureaucracies work in collaboration with one another, and the CIA often deploys European, Israeli, and Canadian agencies as surrogates to skirt US laws.

In the 2016 elections, white fear ruled the day. Trump used fear to prime the pumps of white American racial resentment by fanning the flames of the birther myth against Barack Obama, claiming that Obama was not a native-born American citizen. For years Trump stoked the fires of the birther myth, continuing even after Canadian-born Ted Cruz became his primary opposition in the 2016 Republican primaries. Donald Trump deftly used the narrative of national belonging to make some groups, namely white male voters (across class lines), feel visible, heard, and affirmed. All voters should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there’s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s exclusion. There’s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group’s demands visible make every other group’s political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math.

Bringing Citizen Participation to Life Some years ago John McKnight attended the annual Canadian Conference of Community Development Organizations. Several hundred groups were in attendance. The convener of the conference told him that the best community “developer” in all of Canada was at the conference and pointed toward a middle-aged man named Gaëtan Ruest, the mayor of Amqui, Quebec. John introduced himself to Mayor Ruest and asked about Amqui. The mayor said that it was a town of about six thousand people on the Gaspé Peninsula amid the Chic-Choc Mountains, located at the intersection of the Matapédia and Humqui rivers. These rivers are the richest Atlantic salmon rivers on the North American continent, and Amqui is the regional center for fishing for these salmon. Gaëtan invited John to visit his town, and a year later John was able to take him up on the invitation. He found that all the townspeople were French-speaking, and a great deal of the economic base of the community was from fisherpeople who came to fish for the rare Atlantic salmon. One day, as Gaëtan and John walked together down the street, two men approached the mayor. There was a long conversation in French. After they were finished Gaëtan explained to John what had happened. The mayor said that the town had put nets on salmon streams in order to keep the fish near Amqui and accessible to the fishing guides. The two men reported that somebody was cutting the nets to let the salmon go upstream where they could poach them. “That’s terrible,” Gaëtan replied. “What do you think we can do about that?” The men thought for a while and then suggested three things that could be done. “Is there anybody who could help you do those things?” Gaëtan asked. “Yes,” they responded. “We know a couple of other fisherpeople who could help.” Gaëtan said, “Will you ask them to join you to meet with me at city hall this evening?” They agreed. That evening John joined Gaëtan at the meeting with four concerned people. The mayor had insisted that they meet in the city council’s meeting room and he led a discussion of how the group could deal with the salmon poaching problem. By the time they were done, the group had specific plans and specific people committed to carrying them out. Then Gaëtan asked, “Is there anything the city can do to help you with the job?” The participants came up with two ways the city could be helpful. “I am making you the official Amqui Salmon Preservation Committee,” Gaëtan said. “I want you to hold your meetings in the city council meeting room because you are official. I want you to come to city council meetings and tell the council people how you are coming along.” The convener of the National Association of Community Development Organizations, previously mentioned, told John that the process he had observed in the council meeting room that gave birth to the Amqui Salmon Preservation Committee was repeated over and over during Gaëtan’s long tenure as mayor. As a result, the convener said that in Amqui, hidden away in the Chic-Choc Mountains, almost all the residents had become officials of the local government and the principal problem-solvers for the community. John wholeheartedly believes that every public official can learn a great deal from the mayor of Amqui.

There he became a Canadian citizen, founded a charter boat business (earning him the title of Captain) and became the science director of a uranium mining company. (According to one account, Hubbard had something to do with supplying uranium to the Manhattan Project.) By the age of fifty, the “barefoot boy from Kentucky” had become a millionaire, owner of a fleet of aircraft, a one-hundred-foot yacht, a Rolls-Royce, and a private island off Vancouver. At some point during the war Hubbard apparently returned to the United States, and he joined the OSS shortly before the wartime intelligence agency became the CIA.

a Chinese citizen was fired from a Canadian lab after sending secrets to Wuhan. Here’s how the CBC reported it back then: “A Canadian government scientist at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg made at least five trips to China in 2017-18, including one to train scientists and technicians at China’s newly certified Level 4 lab, which does research with the most deadly pathogens.

Not everybody has to be a striver. Canada does a very good job of trying to raise the standard of living of all its citizens. I think this is admirable and appropriate. However, those poor, tortured Canadian souls who are driven to innovate and make things, don’t just have to endure the typical loneliness of genius, they also must overcome the inertia of a culture that continually asks strivers, ‘Who do you think you are?

Cemeteries are deceptive places. You go there for quiet remembering and find yourself assailed by noisy questions. If Mr. Wong didn't turn his back on his homeland, if he didn't forget it or forsake it, what then did he feel about becoming a Canadian citizen? Was it a statement of belonging?

Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian writer, is a leading proponent of the increasingly popular notion of "civic nationalism." He defines a civic nation as "a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values." … Defenders of this myth often cite 19th-century French historian Ernest Renan's famous description of the nation as "a daily plebiscite," a phrase that suggests that consent is indeed the source of national identity. But they rarely note that this phrase represents only one half of Renan's own definition of the nation. "Two things," Renan insists, constitute the nation: "One lies in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of in common of a rich legacy of memories, the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.

When Globe and Mail reporter Omar El Akkad traveled to Waterloo to visit Lazaridis, he got an unexpected reply after wondering aloud what might happen if PlayBook failed. “Are you Canadian?” Lazaridis asked El Akkad, a Canadian citizen of Egyptian descent. Sweeping his arm toward RIM’s sprawling campus of buildings and nearby research institutes he and Balsillie founded, Lazaridis waved the flag, “Jim and I have invested a whole bunch in this country and community … gosh look at the success.

In 2015, nearly one hundred Canadian, Dutch, Irish, German, and English citizens came to America to adopt black children. Whatever forms of othering may be going on in their countries, they are not infected with American anti-black bias that coursed from Virginia's legal codes in the seventeenth century through the supremacist regimes of later ages to the subconscious of far too many Americans in the twenty-first.