Thank you for reminding me of this!
The CanaDoper Café (2012 edition of The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread.)
I am the very model of a modern Gov’nor General
I’ll praise the B.N.A. Act when it hits its sesquicenteneral.
I look all dignified as hell, despite my countenance youthful;
I speak Francois, Inuit, Cree, and even Kwakiutl.
I take advice from anyone who holds the Commons’ confidence;
In fact in matters of dispute my ass is firmly on the fence.
I present Olympic medals to Calliope Ouzouni
At death I’ll adorn the dollar coin for I already am quite looney.
Now, if you can get Le Ministre to sing that bad boy and post the video on You Tube for the world to enjoy, you’ll really have something. 
Just when you think it can’t get any worse, we’re letting Conrad Black back in to the country.
What, you think he poses some kind of risk to the public or something?
He’s no longer a citizen by his own choice, and he’s a convicted criminal. There are translators who in Afghanistan who are likely to be killed for having helped us out, yet they’ve been denied entry into Canada. As far as I’m concerned, Conrad Black can fuck off and die.
Yeah, I’m not too thrilled about him being here either. At the very least, he should have had to wait in the queue.
Well, I know the history, obviously. He applied for, and was granted, a one-year temporary resident permit of which over 10,000 are granted yearly for foreign nationals.
It’s hardly unprecedented and he’s not going to come and steal your money, probably.
There’s something to be said for people serving their time in jail and being able to get on with their life. I’m not defending Black, per se, but I think the story is being blown out of proportion and wishing death on him isn’t really very nice.
Can I just wish that Macleans stop publishing his wife’s drivel?
(yes, I know that the obvious answer is just to stop reading it)
Well, if they keep publishing it, it keeps encouraging her.
Now I have to go look up who Conrad Black’s wife is. 
ETA: Ah, Barbara Amiel. I went and read a bit of a column of hers; yeah, I can live without that.
It’s hardly surprising that a criminal (first convicted when in university) who threw away his Canadian citizenship out of greed is allowed to return by a government that calls the Official Opposition Hitler sympathizers and anyone who protests against its citizen-spy bill pedophiles.
Apparently it is 45 years today since the Toronto Maple Leafs won a Stanley Cup. Happy Anniversary! 
Just five more years and they can have a major celebration on making it half a century!
I think you meant to post this on the Globe and Mail comments.
As was pointed out by more than a few people, we routinely let convicted criminals into the country if they’re actors or athletes, even ones who aren’t Canadian in any way. I don’t see why anyone else should be treated worse. The fact that morons like the people who write for the Toronto Star are calling this “special treatment” when it’s probably not the 1,000th time it’s happened this year just goes to show you whether they’re speaking from an honest position or a partisan agenda.
As for his alleged citizenship, or lack thereof, that was total bullshit perpetrated by the Prime Minister of the day over a political grudge. Black was born in Canada, he’s Canadian, and that’s that, as far as I’m concerned; I think it’s absolutely horrendous that the law could ever be used or interpreted to deny a person citizenship, even if they say they don’t want it anymore. As far as I’m concerned Black’s “renouncing” of Canadian citizenship is meaningless.
I don’t like Conrad Black but this isn’t a goddamned police state.
The procedure requires more than a simple statement. It takes a lot of work, and Black did it.
No Canadian since since the Nickel Resolution in 1917 has been knighted, and Black knew it.
However, Tony Blair and the queen (for $ome rea$on) **ignored ** and lorded Black against the Canadian PM’s wishes, Canadian history and precedent.
Very tawdry. No surprise with Blair — or Liz, for that matter.
Thank you for quoting a bazillion pages of … I don’t know what.
I need to sleep now, after that.
I don’t see how permitting a citizen to renounce his citizenship means the state is a police state. Prohibiting a person from renouncing his citizenship, or taking a person’s citizenship away from him, yes, but letting the person renounce his own citizenship, no.
That’s not true. From around the 1930s on (the Nickle Resolution was ignored by some later governments), no Canadian living in Canada was knighted (AFAIK), but Canadians living in the UK still can be (and are) knighted or ennobled. The Canadian government’s wishes are irrelevant, because as far as the British government is concerned it is now totally and completely foreign.
Why would the British Prime Minister and the British Queen (the Queen of Canada does not create peerages, so her role in Canada is irrelevant) ask a foreign prime minister about an appointment to the British House of Lords, or respect a foreign government’s precedent? Total independence is a two-way street.
However, that’s why I have no sympathy for Conrad Black. He threw away his citizenship because of a purely diplomatic dispute; there were no legal reasons why his peerage couldn’t have gone through, and Chretien had no leg to stand on when he tried to interfere in the governance of a foreign nation. He probably would have gotten his peerage and kept his citizenship had he not been so impatient.
True enough. See, for example, Sir George Bain:
Emphasis added.