Colby Cosh has a bit of good-natured fun-poking at the great and the good of the Canadian Establishment as an honorary Canadian turns out to be presiding over something that might be described as genocide:
President Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2014
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Sometimes I am convinced that Canada is a name that will endure through the ages and travel with mankind throughout the galaxy. Sometimes I am convinced that we should be considered exclusively as a subject for absurdist fairy tales, a real-life Ruritania or Grand Fenwick. I guess it goes about 50-50. But I am afraid the emerging controversy over Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary Canadian citizenship puts us firmly in kooky Zembla territory.
The present State Counsellor of Burma was the fourth person ever to receive this distinction. Now we are talking about withdrawing her honorary citizenship because, as first minister of Burma, she has been heavily implicated in massacres and ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people of the country’s Rakhine state.
One in four: not such a great batting average, is it? Our political class devised the highest and most permanent form of honour that could be envisioned for a foreign do-gooder, and literally the fourth person on the entire surface of the planet who was deemed to have met the criteria went and became CEO of a genocide. What does this suggest about the collective judgment of Canada’s elite? You don’t suppose anyone is going to lose a job over this, do you?
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Our prime minister is now spitballing the idea of having Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary citizenship withdrawn, and one supposes that if this might help save innocent lives, it ought to be considered, even at the price of turning this concocted showpiece institution of “honorary citizenship” into garbage. One of the essential meanings of citizenship is that it cannot be withdrawn, even with due process, even when a citizen has perpetrated unspeakable crimes. “Honorary citizenship” does not confer the legal rights of the real thing, but surely it is at least supposed to resemble the real thing — to represent a commitment of analogous significance and irreversibility as that which we enter into with immigrants taking the oath and joining the club over at the courthouse.
Since honorary citizenship is not conferred by Parliament, it is not clear that it could be revoked by Parliament. Probably an Order-in-Council would do (because, again, no enforceable rights are at stake). If this is done in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, it seems obvious that we should just put the institution in abeyance for a century or so. Let later generations see if they can manage not to screw up this honorary citizenship thing so thoroughly.
It’s worth a Significant note that Burma has endured decades of these ‘poor refugees’ slaughtering border villages of Burmese people. I’m on her side with this one, You plan to kill my people, I will kill you.
But I’m one of those 5% of Canadians that have seen the world outside the facade of holiday hot spots and stepped into the morass of tribal genocide, sex slavery and endless border conflicts. Your opinion pc. here shows you have lived a safe life thanks to people like me. It might be wise to step outside your cloistered hallways and jump into a place like Zimbabwe or Yemen, see what the real world is like.. then come back attempt to chastise her for doing nothing more then protecting her people. This is normally a good site to read real world editorials. But this is just too much of a liberal snowflake pantywaist article.
Comment by Ian — September 27, 2018 @ 14:36
Burma has been a very violent place for decades, and the border areas in particular. The military junta of “Myanmar” were terrible, brutal rulers, and the opposition — personified in Aung San Suu Kyi during her extended house arrest — was widely expected to reverse the former military government’s policies and (to some degree) help heal the wounds.
I don’t think Colby Cosh fits your characterization of someone living a “safe, cloistered” life, and you’re perhaps putting too much emphasis on his description of those frustrated expectations (of the grandstanding humanitarians who awarded her honorary citizenship in the first place). I thought the main thrust of the article was to point-and-laugh at the “great and the good” of Canada’s Laurentian Elite for having one of their more obvious bits of virtue signalling come back to bite them in the collective ass.
Comment by Nicholas — September 27, 2018 @ 16:33