The Hongcouver | Ex-diplomat has some inconvenient truths for Canadian dual citizens

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David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China, has weighed in on the debate about dual citizens. Photo: Harbin University

Published: 9:35am, 22 Jan 2014Updated: 11:52am, 23 Feb 2016

Does a passport make a Canadian? Or do the privileges of nationality demand a certain level of participation in society?

David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China, thinks it’s time for an honest conversation about the obligations of citizenship.

His views, which might serve as a wake-up call to the estimated 295,000 Canadians in Hong Kong, come in the context of a debate in Ottawa about whether dual citizens holding “passports of convenience” deserve full consular protection. Dual citizens make up 88 per cent of the Canadians living in Hong Kong, according to a 2011 survey commissioned by the Asia Pacific Foundation (the survey remains the most comprehensive analysis of the Canadian presence in the SAR).

As one of Canada’s most eminent diplomats, it’s understandable that Mulroney would approach the issue with caution. “It’s a subject fraught with sensitivities,” he said in an interview.

Mulroney, who served as ambassador to China from 2009 to 2012 at the culmination of a 30-year career of public service, weighed in on the debate over consular services last week when he tweeted that limiting such aid to expats with “tenuous” links to Canada “is fair, smart, inevitable”.

Why smart? Because this would reflect the evolving nature of citizenship and mobility, said Mulroney. Such changes have given rise to the phenomenon of “astronaut parents” who work in greater China while leaving a spouse and children back in Canada.

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