Canada can boast of having one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. In the past five years, the government has introduced a series of amendments to citizenship rules, with the majority having a direct impact on the naturalization process. From a sociological viewpoint, we seek to answer the following question: Is naturalization as “liberal” in Canada in the early twenty-first century as it was in the 1990s, or are we seeing a trend toward re-nationalization, as is currently the case in many European countries? Our findings seem to indicate no substantive change in political regime since the arrival of the Conservative Party in power, given the actual scope of the majority of the amendments. However, a discourse increasingly centered on identity and the protection of a specific way of being Canadian reflects a new rhetoric about Canadian citizenship, one that is very close to the “nationalist” concept of naturalization.
