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.”
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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.
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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.
“They would have been fired had they not resigned”
At the same time, roughly a third of staffers at DOGE have resigned in protest, saying that they will not push through demanded changes that put the country at risk.
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” 21 staffers of DOGE wrote in a letter, seen by AFP on Tuesday, to White House chief of staff Susan Wiles.
“However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments,” they added.
Musk downplayed the departures, saying that the workers were “political holdovers” who worked remotely and refused to return to the office as ordered by Trump.
“They would have been fired had they not resigned,” he added on X.
The dismissed employees had been working on modernizing critical government systems including Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, healthcare, and disaster relief platforms, the letter said.
“Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans’ data less safe,” the letter stated.
The employees explicitly refused to participate in what they described as efforts to “compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.”
According to Wired magazine, engineers at DOGE are working on new software that could assist mass firings of federal workers across the government.
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