Raising the Bar for Canadian Citizenship

Jason Kenney shouldn't return the citizenship exam to its original form – he should require civil servants to meet the same high standards as immigration applicants.

The revelation that the failure rate for the Canadian citizenship exam has recently increased from less than 10 per cent to more than 30 per cent has reignited discussions in Canada over whether Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has gone too far.

Have the minister’s efforts to ensure future Canadians’ ability to integrate into society – making the citizenship exam more difficult and increasing the passing standard from 60 per cent to 75 – inadvertently discouraged immigrants from applying for citizenship at all?

Kenney’s critics argue that the heightened expectations have changed the tone of the citizenship process. Previously, they maintain, the message was that potential citizens were welcome. The exam was more a formality than anything else.

The new exam, they claim, discriminates against those whose capacity in English and French is more limited, as well as those who have difficulty memorizing the facts and themes in Discover Canada, the revised 60-page primer on Canadian history and culture that is provided to prospective citizens in advance. Even those who pass the exam will come out of it feeling as if they have been admitted into the country reluctantly.

Kenney’s response, at the most basic level, is convincing: there is nothing wrong with expecting future Canadian citizens to know something about the country’s history. Nor is there anything wrong with requiring them to have at least a rudimentary ability to communicate in one of Canada’s official languages.

Raising the bar on admission to Canada increases the value of citizenship more generally, implies Kenney. And if we expect more of Canadians, they will become better citizens and make a greater contribution to the country.

Kenney is right, which is why the current process is therefore profoundly unfair. Indeed, it is utterly reasonable to expect all Canadian citizens to share a similar basic understanding of national history, no matter their country of origin.

Regrettably, citizens who are born in Canada have no such obligation. Since the provinces are responsible for education, there is no national standard that determines what kind of history, if any, Canadians are taught in primary and secondary school.

As a result, as studies by the Historica-Dominion Institute and others have shown repeatedly, a majority of Canadian-born high-school graduates would fail the citizenship exam if it were required of them. Canadian-born adults would hardly score better.

Minister Kenney therefore has imposed a double standard. The solution, however, is not to make the exam easier; rather, the minister should make everyone take it.

Since the Department of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism has no control over provincial education policy, Kenney cannot implement the simplest solution: deny students who have yet to pass the citizenship exam a high-school diploma. Moreover, convincing all 10 premiers to agree to pursue such a course of action is unlikely.

But there is something that Kenney can, and should, propose to his cabinet colleagues: the Canadian government should obligate every citizen on the federal government’s payroll to pass the citizenship exam.

Forcing parliamentarians and civil servants to experience the same demands faced by potential citizens would lend the exam’s new, higher standards immediate credibility. It would send a message to citizenship applicants that the federal government did not view Canadians differently simply because they became citizens later in life.

Calls for Kenney to return the citizenship exam to its original form are misguided. What the minister should really do is raise the bar for everyone else.

An earlier version of this article was published in the Ottawa Citizen on Dec. 4, 2010.