Bill C-31 represents an important piece of policy in the history of Canadian citizenship. It takes its place in a dialog of policy and resistance about who ‘gets in’ and who is excluded from Canadian citizenship. By critically reading the text of Bill C-31 through other policy texts, academic arguments and research, and activist texts, this analysis elucidates historical connections between relations of capital, immigration, labour, and the criminal justice system. It works from a materialist feminist framework, critical of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation as systems that work through one another in dialectical and historically specific ways. The analysis argues that Bill C-31 is a continuation of relations of capital and that a dialectical conceptualization can yield strategies for a revolutionary praxis that offers hope for the transformation of existing social relations towards new and more humane ways of relating to one another.

Bill C-31 represents an important piece of policy in the history of Canadian citizenship. It takes its place in a dialog of policy and resistance about who ‘gets in’ and who is excluded from Canadian citizenship. By critically reading the text of Bill C-31 through other policy texts, academic arguments and research, and activist texts, this analysis elucidates historical connections between relations of capital, immigration, labour, and the criminal justice system. It works from a materialist feminist framework, critical of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation as systems that work through one another in dialectical and historically specific ways. The analysis argues that Bill C-31 is a continuation of relations of capital and that a dialectical conceptualization can yield strategies for a revolutionary praxis that offers hope for the transformation of existing social relations towards new and more humane ways of relating to one another.