‘People Like Elon Musk Are Enemies of Our Country’ – 250K Canadians Sign Petition to Rescind His Citizenship
The number of people who have signed a petition calling for Elon Musk to lose his Canadian citizenship over his alleged efforts to “erase” the nation’s sovereignty hit 250,000 on Tuesday, AFP reported.
At the same time, the French news agency added separately, about a third of his staffers at the semi-official US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have resigned in protest, saying that they would not be part of a politics-driven effort that “put the country at risk.”
Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, to an electromechanical engineer father who had family wealth through an emerald mine, and a dietician mother, Maye Musk, who in turn was born in Saskatchewan, Canada. After his parents divorced in 1980, and in order to avoid compulsory South African military service, Musk applied for Canadian citizenship through his mother’s ancestry. He emigrated to Saskatchewan in 1989.
After two years at a university in Ontario, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, incidentally the same alma mater as US President Donald Trump, who brought him on board as a consultant after Musk contributed some $288 million to his presidential campaign.
Since then, he has spearheaded an effort to fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees through DOGE, ostensibly as a cost-saving measure for US taxpayers. But the purge is also closely tied to Trump’s announced plans to exact revenge on the justice employees whom he blames for the myriad lawsuits against him, including his efforts to strong-arm state employees into overturning the 2020 election results that he lost, and also his dozens of felony convictions related to his bribing a porn star with whom he had sexual relations.
Among the other agencies that Musk’s team has gutted this month includes the US Agency for International Aid, which directed millions of US government dollars in humanitarian assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The petition that opened for signatures on February 20 says Musk “has engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada,” AFP reported.
It states that “a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty.” In a now-deleted post Monday, Musk mocked the petition, claiming “Canada is not a real country,” he wrote on the social media platform X he owns.
He has strongly supported Trump who has repeatedly questioned Canadian sovereignty and argued that Canada should become a US state.
Canadian federal lawmaker Charlie Angus, who sponsored the petition, told the AFP that the effort “gives an opportunity for people to express their justifiable anger at the growing power of oligarchs and extremists.”
“People like Elon Musk are enemies of our country,” said Angus, a member of the leftist New Democratic Party.
Petitions presented to Canada’s parliament cannot mandate action but according to officials in Ottawa, Canadian citizenship may be revoked if a person has committed fraud or lied on an immigration application, or served in a foreign army in an armed conflict against Canada.
Source: Kyiv Post