All citizens are equal - but some citizens are more equal than others

One of the more disappointing days of my 20s was the day I became a Canadian citizen. At that point I had been living in Canada for 18 out of my 22 years and I was really happy to be making a commitment to becoming a signed-up full-on citizen of the Great White North. Woo! My English father and I both passed the citizenship test and went off to the citizenship ceremony together.

I was excited. This was going to be good. I was going to feel really happily Canadian. I knew I'd still be part British and part American too of course, but I was finally *choosing* to become part of the country which had dictated most of my life up until then.

So what was disappointing? Unsurprisingly dad and I were part of a large group of people from all over the world. Good-oh. Unfortunately, this global diversity wasn't fully appreciated by the citizenship judge, who gave us a massive lecture on how much *better* Canada was than our native countries, and how lucky we'd be to suddenly have human rights. I'm sure this generalisation applied to some of our group - but not all. It left a really bad taste in my mouth - was there no way we could appreciate our home countries and Canada *too*? Did we have to make a value judgement that Canada was automatically better?

As part of the Citizenship ceremony, you are asked to swear on a Bible or affirm your oath to Canada. Dad and I were fine with affirming, but as both of us are pretty much atheists, we didn't want to use the Bible. Fine, right? You would expect that the rest of our multi-faith group would be doing the same. Surprisingly, all of them wound up swearing on the Bible. Why is this? Because the citizenship judge had brought one of his friends, a fundamentalist Christian evangelist, to the ceremony so he could hand out Bibles... and start converting heathen souls. To be sworn into a secular nation, which recognises the separation between church and state, with some hard-core bible thumping really struck the wrong note. Not only was Canada a better country than yours - it would be good if you signed up for the standard religion too.

We left the ceremony as Canadians, but neither of us felt particularly proud at that particular moment, though obviously we were overall happy to be citizens at last, after so many years of hard work and education in the country.

Anyway, I've been reminded of how that citizenship ceremony made me feel over the past few weeks, because of some new amends to Canadian citizenship laws. As you know, I now live here in the UK where I am happily married to a lovely English fellow. Though I'm a British citizen (thanks again, Dad!), I identify mainly as a Canadian expat, as Canada is still where I've spent most of my life. But it turns out that my Canadian citizenship is second-class. Because I was born in the USA, if I have a child here in the UK, they won't be eligible for Canadian citizenship. I'd need to fly all the way back to Canada if I wanted to bring a dual citizen child into the world. This seems even more ridiculous for my sister, who was less than 1 year old when we left the USA - but if she has a child while she's on a contract in Alaska (as she is right now - can you believe I'm related to an archaeologist?), no Canadian citizenship.

Funny - I thought that that day in Citizenship court I became a full Canadian citizen, with all the rights of the native-born. Turns out I was wrong. Canada - you are better than this.

P.S. useful debate about all of this here