Lois Harder

Claims of belonging: Recent tales of trouble in Canadian citizenship:

Canada’s Conservative government faced its first substantive controversy in its handling of the evacuation of Canadians from Lebanon during the July 2006 conflict in that country. Within a year, another controversy was spurred by the passport requirements of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (in force since 2007). Upon applying for their passports, some people discovered that their Canadian citizenship was in doubt. Both cases raised similar questions in public debate and policy: what constitutes a Canadian citizen, what role do factors surrounding one’s birth and kinship ties have on one’s claim to citizenship and what obligations or attachments does a person have to undertake in order to be a citizen? But the cases also exposed differing responses towards the Canadians evacuated from Lebanon and the ‘Lost Canadians’ that reflect a racialized and ethnicized hierarchy of Canadian citizenship.

‘In Canada of all places’: national belonging and the lost Canadians

This paper explores the role of kinship and ethnicity in the designation of Canadian citizenship. Using the phenomenon of Lost Canadians – people whose citizenship status is ambiguous due to conflicting laws, unfamiliarity with requirements to maintain citizenship and quixotic enforcement of these requirements – the paper offers evidence for the kinship basis of a contemporary liberal democracy and reveals the degree to which a Canadian ethnic identity is operative in this settler society. But the objective of the analytical exercise is not to rest at the observation that Canadian nationalism is ethnic. Rather, by examining the ways in which the complex rules of Canadian citizenship define or exclude people from citizenship, we see how thoroughly rule-bound the status of national belonging really is. It thus might be observed that Canadian nationalism, indeed, all nationalisms, are civic since they rest on rules for belonging. Once we notice the rule-boundedness of belonging it becomes possible to disentangle these rules – kinship rules – from their connections to nature and biology and thus to appreciate their social character. From this vantage we might begin to think about alternative, and potentially more democratic, forms of belonging.

Child Care, Taxation and Normative Commitments: Excavating the Child Care Expense Deduction Debate

Lois Harder also raises the themes of marginalization and gendered assumptions underlying policy responses. Examining the Child Care Expense Deduction (CCED), Harder argues that seemingly gender-neutral, tax-delivered social programs actually reinforce gender inequalities, and that what families and women need are better public resources and accessible quality child care.

Citizenship Without Magic

I share Costica Dumbrava’s critique of ius sanguinis citizenship, and ultimately what is, I think, his rejection of birth as the basis for political membership generally. Of course, there are issues of practicality – of the world as we find it – that might limit whether and how one would advance the abolishment of birthright citizenship in light of specific political dynamics. But it is precisely those practicalities, and the near unthinkability of alternatives to birth-based citizenship that demand our interrogation of birthright in the first instance. As Joseph Carens has argued with respect to his advocacy of open borders, ‘even if we must take deeply rooted social arrangements as givens for purposes of immediate action in a particular context, we should never forget about our assessment of their fundamental character. Otherwise we wind up legitimating what should only be endured’.

State Feminism and Political Representation

State Feminism and Political Representation , Joni Lovenduski, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. xix, 315. Lovenduskis edited volume is an 11-country (10 western European countries and the US), analysis of the effects of womens policy agencies on efforts to increase the representation of women in the political process—in legislatures, on party lists and in public administration. The book is the product of a 10-year collaboration among scholars involved in the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State and it exhibits the rich rewards that such a lengthy and involved affiliation among like-minded scholars can produce.

Future Prospects for Women, Globalization, and Democratization in North America

Proponents of globalization assert that market liberalization will lead to increased democratization. According to this view, the economic forces fueling globalization will not only produce economic integration on the continent of North America, as trade, finance, and labor move freely across national borders, but will also contribute to increased personal autonomy and well-being. The individualism that informs capital market relations will spread with marketization, gradually eliminating ascription standards, which fix a person’s place in the social order from birth on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste. Industrial production will provide increasing numbers of people with employment opportunities that enable them to break away from traditional modes of living and embrace notions of individual rights and self-reliance. Economic growth will lead to prosperity for all. The spread of the “achievement” standard will heighten individual aspirations and contribute to greater worker mobility as individuals move to seek better job prospects that will reward their hard work and talent. Moreover, growing notions of individual interest will foster the development of “civil society,” that is, the growth of voluntary organizations, which seek to promote the interests of their members. As these interest groups and nongovernmental organizations proliferate, they will make increasing demands on political parties and the government for programs that will benefit their members. Representative government, competitive elections, norms of transparency and accountability, and voter mobilization—elements central to “democratization”—thus emerge as a result of forces put into play by globalization and marketization.

Women and Politics in Canada

A distinctive feature of women’s political power is its ghost-like quality. Often unacknowledged, but also strongly resisted, its existence, effects, and potential are evident in the vast array of structures and practices that have been devised to reinforce its obscurity. The phrase “women and politics” thus has a peculiar ring. It asserts that women have a role in the shaping of our collective well-being, thereby not only acknowledging the realm of domesticity and reproductive labor as sites of politics, but also claiming that women have a role in public power. Further, the relationship between women and power is not simply one of subjection. In fact, different groups of women at various times have reinforced, resisted, and reshaped the forces that work to structure the gender order (understood as the structures and norms that give meaning to masculinity and femininity (Orloff 1996) as well as the broader conditions of social life).