Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Dec. 8th, 2010

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We'll go to Dr. Wong.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll be following up on what Mr. Young just said.

Given that the two bills contain similar provisions for Canadian soldiers and crown servants, would there be any issue at all if both Bill C-467 and Bill C-37 received royal assent?

[Andrew Griffith]

No, there would not be, and the reason is that the amendments we've been working on in Bill C-467 would essentially make it align with Bill C-37. In addition, within Bill C-37 there's something called a coordinating amendment. Basically, should Bill C-37 come into effect after Bill C-467, it would supplant Bill C-467 to ensure that this complex piece of legislation, the Citizenship Act, actually works seamlessly. We've designed it in such a way that both could receive royal assent, and it would resolve the situation.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond, BC]

In fact, when I visited the consulates overseas, I was able to talk to some of our employees. They did tell me that the new Citizenship Act actually deprived them of their grandchildren's right to inherit citizenship, mainly because of exactly what you said.... They were sent overseas by the government and they were actually doing a government job. I can actually verify that this is exactly what I was told by different colleagues. I call them colleagues, but some of them actually are from CIC, and some of them are from the consulate themselves or the embassies. This is something they did tell us when I visited them.

I don't have any more questions. I'll pass it back to Rick.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We're going to Mr. Trudeau.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

I have a couple of small questions.

First of all, to go back to Mr. Young's question, which was a good one, is it correct, according to my sort of lay assessment of this, that the challenge of Bill C-467 is that it focuses on the children born to crown servants abroad, and the exception that we'll address in Bill C-37 focuses on the status of the parents serving abroad? Is that one of the ways that it catches the full circumstances--because the amendment in Bill C-37 deals with the parents, the actual public servants?

[Nicole Girard]

Maybe Alain wants to jump in. What I would say is that one of the primary issues is that the way this bill is drafted, when you look at it in the context of the sections it has to hook into in the Citizenship Act, you see that the first-generation limit would continue to apply. That's essentially the problem. What we would be looking to suggest to remedy the situation would be to work with the second clause of the bill and broaden the existing exception rather than repeal it.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Thank you.

The other question was drawn from something Ms. Chow was asking about, which was the difference between adopting and naturalizing and adopting and going through the citizenship process. I have a constituent in my riding who's dealing with exactly this difficulty. The wait times for the adoption process have jumped up from six months to something ridiculous like 36 months.

It's a hugely longer process and she's now frustrated that she didn't know that she could simply naturalize, that there are two paths. How is the department doing in sharing and clearing up information around those processes? There are two paths, as Ms. Chow said, that will have different consequences the second generation down. Is the department looking at rectifying that or at evening that out, do you know?

[Andrew Griffith]

I'd answer on two levels.

First of all, we do recognize that we have to do a better job in terms of informing parents or prospective parents to make sure that they understand the implications of both approaches. There are in fact some advantages of the current approach, because if you're Canadians living abroad and you adopt a child born abroad, the child can directly become a Canadian citizen while living abroad.

So you have some advantages in this area as well. It's like everything: there are some advantages and some disadvantages. We have to communicate that so that people can make more informed decisions.

In terms of the processing, I don't have that information on hand. I think we had better go back and talk to our colleagues about that.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

It doesn't really relate to this anyway.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

That appears to be it for the questions from the committee.

I want to thank the three of you for coming. We may ask you to come back. We're actually reviewing Bill C-37 even though it hasn't gone through the House yet, so we'll wait and see.

Thank you very much.

We're going to suspend for a couple of minutes.

[Proceedings continue in camera]