Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
For 70 years, Andre Hissink has held a grudge against the Dutch government and has never shied from talking about.
Finally, this week, the 102-year-old Second World War veteran’s persistence paid off – the Dutch king granted his wish for dual citizenship.
“I am back a Dutchman, but still a Canadian,” Hissink told CTV National News after a special citizenship ceremony at his retirement residence in Perth, Ont.
The Netherlands aims to limit dual nationality and to this day, the government warns its citizens that their right to a passport could be automatically revoked if they acquire another nationality. And seven decades ago, that’s exactly what happened to Hissink.
“I got really cheesed off about the fact I had stuck my neck out for the liberation of Holland from 1940 to 1945,” Hissink said.
Born in the Dutch Indies in June 1919, Hissink was eight years old when his family moved to the Netherlands. In 1939, while studying law at the University of Utrecht, he joined the Dutch military.
In 1940, after the Germans stormed the Netherlands, he escaped on the HMS Keith and fought for the remainder of the war with the 320 Dutch Squadron in the British military. He survived roughly three and a half years and 69 war flights as a bomb aimer and navigator on a B-25 Mitchell aircraft over occupied Europe.
For 70 years, Andre Hissink has held a grudge against the Dutch government, but this week, the 102-year-old Second World War veteran’s persistence paid off – the Dutch king granted his wish for a rare dual citizenship.
His wish to regain his Dutch citizenship, though, dates back to the 1950s when he emigrated to New Zealand for work. At the time, a shortage of jobs existed in the Netherlands and a position was waiting for him with the Air Department in Wellington. Hissink was told he should become a New Zealander for the position, but that meant giving up his Dutch passport.
“I said this is a good job and I want it. They said then you will lose your citizenship …. and I've been mad with the Netherlands ever since,” he said.
On Thursday, surrounded by friends and family, the Dutch Ambassador to Canada Ines Coppoolse made Hissink a Dutch citizen again. The rare exemption to the government’s dual nationality rules was “tailor-made” for Hissink and personally signed off on by King Willem-Alexander.
“You are Dutch and you will be Dutch again,” the ambassador said as she presided over the special bilingual Dutch-English citizenship ceremony. “You have always been Dutch at heart and so I would be the last person to tell you what it is to be Dutch, because I should probably take lessons from you instead of the other way around.”
“Eighty years it has taken and here you are returning it to me, which I absolutely appreciate. Deeply. Believe me,” Hissink told Coppoolse as she presented him with his citizenship papers. “It was the country I went in the war for and after tried to help build up.”
Now, it's a country he belongs to again, but not at the expense of his beloved Canadian citizenship.
Hissink - who moved to Canada for work decades ago, and remembers fighting alongside brave Canadian soldiers during the second world war – accepted the Dutch citizenship on the condition that he could remain a Canadian.
“Seventy years being Canadian. I will never get that total years as a Dutchman," he said.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.