As I was listening to the news about the war in Lebanon, I was stunned by the amount of the Canadian casualties which was somewhere between ten to twenty percent of the whole figure. For seconds, I was wondering why there are so many Canadians in Lebanon, but as they announced the names, everything became clear.
Apparently, during the Lebanon’s long and bloody civil war, a good percentage of rather rich, educated and dominantly French speaking population of Beirut had been immigrated to Canada and mostly to Quebec. During the period of peace and prosperity in Beirut, most of those immigrants, now with Canadian passports, had returned to Beirut and have been working and living there ever since.
Now, the problem is, the awfully large amount of people with dual nationality who haven’t been integrated properly into the Canadian society for whatever reasons, those who’ve come back to their original countries long ago, working and living there and they’re just carrying the Canadian passport as a backup, puts the government of Canada in a very awkward and uneasy situation.
From one side, the government should react in a proper way to the fact that a lot of Canadians have been killed by Israel’s attacks, but from the other side, it’s improper by nature to react to the death of those who apart from their Canadian Passports, are internationally regarded as Lebanese and not Canadian!
The mild and somehow neutral reaction of Canada shows that regardless of what they say, they seem to believe in the existence of a so-called Second class semi-Canadians! The subject that if not addressed and debated properly, can cause considerable problems in the future for the credibility of the Canadian citizenship!
