If Alberta separates, will Albertans get to keep their Canadian passport?
The answer:
Maybe. Maybe not.
Despite what you hear from separatists, keeping a Canadian passport is not guaranteed after separation. Yes, Canadians currently can have dual citizenship and therefore, have more than one passport. But Canada has never faced a situation where a province’s citizens decided to separate from Canada.
“… Albertan residents and citizens in a new theoretical Republic of Alberta would have no entitlement to Canadian citizenship in the absence of Canada’s consent.”
Canada’s Clarity Act 2000 sets out the conditions under which a province could negotiate the terms of separation, including citizenship. While the legislation doesn’t explicitly say whether people could keep or lose their citizenship, the preamble to the legislation states that separation “could consequently entail the termination of citizenship and other rights that Canadian citizens resident in the province enjoy as full participants in Canada.”
The Act leaves the ultimate decision to the federal government and would require the consent of other provinces.
How do you think other Canadians would feel about allowing people who voted to leave Canada to continue to hold Canadian citizenship and keep their passports?
(And why would separatists want a Canadian passport if they dislike the country so much?)
Even if current Alberta citizens were grandfathered and allowed to keep their citizenship and passports, there’s no guarantee their future children and grandchildren would also get citizenship. They would be born in a separate country – the Republic of Alberta – and therefore not eligible for birthright citizenship.
And finally, if Alberta citizens were allowed to keep their Canadian citizenship, they might also be subject to paying taxes in both Alberta and Canada. That’s what happens in the US. So much for being tax-free in Alberta.