The country offers a cautionary tale about democracy and voting rights.

By David Frum @ TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 23

By getting into Canada's travails on this issue, Frum brings up the conundrum of How is democracy supposed to work in a world of dissolving national boundaries and proliferating dual, triple, and quadruple citizenships?

One of several interesting factoids therein:

Perhaps you think of Canada as an immigration magnet, but Canada also exports people in large numbers: perhaps 2.8 million people, or about 9 percent of the country’s population. (In contrast, only about 9 million nonmilitary Americans live abroad, or less than 3 percent of the U.S. population.)

Naturalized Canadians are three times as likely to live outside Canada as native-born Canadians, according to the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. About 24 percent of immigrants from Hong Kong return to the territory after acquiring Canadian citizenship, as do 30 percent of immigrants from Taiwan.

You can see the appeal. Hong Kong’s economy is growing much faster than Canada’s. Its income-tax rates top out at 17 percent. Canada does not tax the foreign-source income of nonresident citizens, in effect creating a geopolitical arbitrage opportunity too attractive to miss: the protections of Canadian nationality at low Hong Kong prices.