The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter examines how the history and laws of settler colonial states such as Canada inform their citizenship, connecting the colonisers and the colonized over time. It posits that settler colonialism destabilises the political core of citizenship from both ends: the coloniser and the colonized. Part I establishes the relevant dimensions of citizenship from the multiple taxonomies in the citizenship studies literature. It contends that political subjectivity is the most productive lens on citizenship in settler colonial states. Part II follows Canada along the historical path from subject to citizen, establishing some of the enduring sources of subjecthood. This part focuses on the legal construction of Indigenous identities and British subject hood as mutually exclusive, and on Britain’s conquest and rule of New France, which would become the Province of Quebec. Part III examines the creation of independent Canadian citizenship in 1947, exploring its prior existence in the immigration realm. This part also examines the state of contemporary citizenship law in Canada, including its relationship to the Constitution. Part IV complicates the progression described in Part II, suggesting that what endures for Indigenous peoples as well as for the Province of Quebec conceptually exceeds the frame of state citizenship. It queries whether and how citizenship is a productive category under conditions of inequality inside the settler colonial state. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about how the various dimensions of citizenship map onto settler colonial states and their limits.