Canada’s beauty is that it gives you the choice to state your birthplace or not on your passport.
Bambi proudly has Beirut, Lebanon. She could have also left it blank.
This being said, today she read about an Israeli-born young woman from Montreal who was told that she cannot have Israel written on her passport due to the political conflict.
Clearly and obviously, there seems to be incompetence in this statement.
Was it malicious? Was it someone not clever in geography? Was it overzealous?
It was surely un-Canadian, especially for a country claiming to be obsessed with “equity” among its citizens.
Of note, this young woman was born in Kfar Saba, which is in the central part of Israel (not in Palestine) (https://tinyurl.com/yw8h23m9; https://tinyurl.com/mrd5s8p4).
At the end, she pushed back, good for her, and the story ended with her birthplace on her passport (as it should be). Bambi’s burning questions are as follows: is this the only story or were other citizens told the same? And do government bureaucrats receive the same training?
