CBC's latest Alberta separation story asks what would happen to Canadian citizenship if Alberta ever voted to become independent.

The article quotes University of Alberta law professor Gerard Kennedy, who suggested that allowing Albertans to keep Canadian citizenship would ultimately be Canada's choice.

“It would have to be Canada's decision,” Kennedy told CBC. “They don't have to consent.”

Technically, any future citizenship arrangement following a hypothetical separation would be subject to negotiations. But the remarkable thing about this discussion isn't the legal uncertainty.

It's the assumption underlying it: that Ottawa could legitimately punish law-abiding Albertans by stripping them of citizenship for participating in a democratic process.

That would be a radical position for Canada to take. After all, this is the same country that has spent years expanding access to citizenship, not restricting it.

Parliament recently expanded citizenship by descent beyond the first generation born abroad, allowing people born outside Canada with no direct experience living here to claim citizenship through their Canadian parents if certain connection requirements are met.

Canada has also repealed provisions that once allowed the government to strip citizenship from dual citizens convicted of terrorism, treason, or espionage.

Since 2017, even naturalized Canadian citizens convicted of the most serious crimes against the country retain their citizenship. Today, citizenship revocation is generally limited to cases involving fraud or misrepresentation during the immigration process.

Canada can grant citizenship to people born abroad who may never have lived in Canada. Canada can allow naturalized citizens convicted of terrorism to keep their citizenship. Canada can allow convicted terrorists such as Omar Khadr to retain Canadian citizenship.

But Albertans born in Canada, to Canadian parents, who have spent their lives paying taxes, building businesses, and contributing to the country, could potentially be stripped of citizenship because they participated in a democratic referendum?

What's more, the CBC article ignores how citizenship has been handled in other modern independence movements.

During Scotland's push for independence, the Scottish government's position was that people who became Scottish citizens would also retain their British citizenship. The expectation was not that millions of people would suddenly lose their existing citizenship, but that they would become dual citizens through a negotiated arrangement.

The Scottish government's more recent independence papers continue to advocate an inclusive citizenship model that would automatically grant Scottish citizenship to eligible residents while preserving existing rights and mobility arrangements.

The peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia followed a similar pattern. Citizens did not become stateless, nor were they stripped of rights as punishment for constitutional change. Instead, citizenship arrangements were negotiated between the successor states, ensuring continuity and stability.

That has generally been the international norm: negotiation, continuity, and respect for existing citizenship rights.

The CBC article presents the possibility of citizenship loss as though it is an ordinary consequence of independence. In reality, most modern democratic separations have sought to preserve rights, not weaponize them.

The same political and media class that insists citizenship is an almost untouchable right when discussing criminals, terrorists, and foreign-born descendants of Canadians suddenly becomes comfortable discussing its removal when the people involved are Albertans expressing democratic dissent.

No one knows exactly what citizenship arrangements would emerge from a hypothetical Alberta independence negotiation because no such negotiation exists.

But if Canadian citizenship is too important to revoke from convicted terrorists, it should be too important to revoke from law-abiding Albertans.

The fact that some commentators appear willing to contemplate the latter says far more about the state of Canada's political culture than it does about Alberta separation.