“They’re denying her identity and Erin Brooks will pay a price for this”
An interesting email and subsequent phone call this morning from the author of The Lost Canadians: A struggle for citizenship rights, equality and identity re: the “cruel and sadistic” rejection of Erin Brooks’ Canadian citizenship.
Vancouver-born Chapman, a pilot for United Airlines, was six when he was stripped of his Canadian citizenship due to a weird quirk in the Canadian Citizenship Act and has spent his life advocating for “Hundreds of thousands of others like himself, now collectively known as the Lost Canadians, whose ranks have included such Canadian icons as Roméo Dallaire, Guy Lombardo, Leslie Nielsen, Ricky Gervais, and Nobel Prize winners Willard Boyle and Saul Bellow.”
Sixteen-year-old Erin Brooks was born in Texas and raised in Hawaii to Canada-born daddy, Jeff, a second-generation Canadian. She wants to compete for Canada at the 2024 Paris Games, has lineage, speaks reasonable French (grandaddy is Québécoise from Montreal) and, likely, will medal at Teahupoo given her formidable skills at a wave that terrifies even the reigning men’s world champ.
Chapman came across Erin Brook’s story a few month ago, contacted the family and told ‘em,
“I’m not a lawyer but I know the laws better than most anybody.”
He says he went to the seat of power in Ottawa and was peppered with questions about Erin. They wanted to know her full story, her culture and identity.
“They’re denying her identity. Erin Brooks could go compete for a lot of other countries but in her heart and her identity she’s Canadian. But they don’t want to give the appearance of her jumping the queue.”
Chapman says the citizenship queue has eleven people in it; the immigration queue, 50,000.
To point out the absurdity of Canada’s citizenship laws, he gets me to read about a recent decision by PM Justin Trudeau to gift a new life to a girl who ran away from her parents in Saudi Arabia.
“She had no connection to Canada, nothing, never stopped foot in Canada and Trudeau reaches out and says we want you, we’ll protect you.”
Trudeau, a progressive who advocates for allowing the entry of half-a-million refugees, has been described as “a Pied Piper eagerly leading his once-rugged nation down a slippery slope where one will soon face the gas chamber merely for accidentally misgendering someone.”
Chapman tells another story of the freestyle skier Dale Begg-Smith, born and raised in Canada, and who wanted to compete at the Olympics under the Maple Leaf, was rejected, and then he won gold for Australia. At which point, Begg-Smith was branded a traitor by his countrymen.
“Are they going to paint Erin Brooks with the same brush?” says Chapman. “Way to go Erin, everyone loves you except for Canada. Awful girl. What has she done to deserve this? That’s what they’ll do to Erin. She’ll pay a price for this.”
Chapman cites examples where Olympic athletes have slid straight into Canadian citizenship and says with a stroke of pen Erin Brooks could be riding for Canada within twenty four hours.
As one reviewer wrote of Chatman’s book,
“It’s a tale of appalling treatment by what is allegedly one of the greatest countries in the world against its own citizens and all of the cloak and dagger, smoke filled room type of machinations which go on behind the scenes in an effort to save a loonie or two. Very sad, and yet, the kind of whistle blowing which is needed if anything at all is to change with re. to how big, impersonal governments treat their citizens, all the while heralding their inclusiveness and welcoming spirit.”
