Almost completely obscured by the Sturm und Drang south of the border, Canada is having a national election this month. And things just got a bit more interesting, due to the difficulty that it seems all right-wing candidates have of telling inconvenient truths.
You see, the leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Andrew Scheer, has turned out to have a secret second life as a tax-paying (though apparently never voting) American. He holds dual citizenship and has been concealing it, while he and other Conservatives have a history of attacking others for doing the same thing and not concealing it.
Mr. Scheer was going to tell the electorate, he says, and renounce his American citizenship before trying to snag the job of Prime Minister of Canada, but the whole thing somehow slipped his mind. He only began the process of discarding his suddenly inconvenient Americanness this August, he claims, just as the election was about to be called. And gee shucks, he completely forgot to tell anyone anything about it, until the newspapers caught him.
Amazing what people can forget, isn’t it?
The whole thing is made a good deal more fragrant by attacks Scheer made on the former Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, for holding dual French and Canadian citizenship. According to the Toronto Star, Scheer, who was himself an American citizen at the time (though he was concealing it), said “Does it bother you that she is a dual citizen (France and Canada)? Would it bother you if instead of French citizenship, she held U.S. citizenship?” Commenting now, he claims it was just an innocent question put to his constituents.
When the Toronto Star newspaper asked Scheer if he was concealing his U.S. citizenship by omission, Scheer simply said he “would disagree” with that.
I bet he would. But with what success, only time will tell.