Madam Speaker, one of the favourite functions that I have as a member of Parliament is to attend citizenship court. Having been born in Canada myself and having come from a long line of Canadians, I never had the privilege of attending it before. It was something that I had never even thought about doing. When I became a member of Parliament and I began to go to citizenship court, I took on a new respect for my country and for the people who make up my country. I especially enjoy the look on the faces of the people who are becoming Canadian citizens for the first time.
I take some exception to some of the things that are in the bill, which I will go into in a moment, but I want to give credit to the minister for putting this forward. It has been fairly well thought out and si an improvement over the previous legislation.
Now we will go to the part that I do not like and I will tell members why. It removes the new oath of affirmation. It removes swearing allegiance to the Queen and her successors. That may seem like a very minor detail but for someone like myself who is a fifth generation Canadian, whose original ancestor came as a soldier from the Scottish regiment to defend the Crown, we are a family that is used to swearing allegiance to the Crown and I take some offence to having that part removed. It is not such a serious thing that I will get really worked up about it, but if someone has been in the country as long as my family has and has had those ties to the crown, it is a difficult thing of which to let go.
We have been in Canada since the early 1800s. When my ancestor came, he came as a soldier to quell an uprising in Canada. The first two generations were in Ontario. Their roots were very deep. I would like to take exception to what my ancestors did. They very foolishly sold the property they had for next to nothing. That right now is about 14 city blocks in the City of Toronto. If I could go back and change anything, I would change that.
Regardless of what happened, we then came to British Columbia. One of my uncles was the first motorcycle policeman for B.C. He is also used to swearing allegiance to the Crown, so it goes a long way. When I was sworn in as a member of Parliament, I too swore allegiance to the Crown, so removal of that does upset me. However I have gone on about that long enough.
Citizenship commissioners is the other thing. I really like the idea that we are now calling the people who swear in the new citizens citizenship commissioners rather than citizenship judges. I often felt at the ceremonies that we were misleading new citizens by calling the people who were swearing them in judges. They are not judges. They are political appointees. To call them judges is a misnomer and somewhat misleading.
However I wonder why we are calling them anything at all. Why do we need to have a specific person for that role? I went to the bother of finding out what we pay citizenship judges and I was shocked. We pay up to $87,100 a year for a full time appointed citizenship judge, who will now be called a citizenship commissioner.
When I was thinking about ways to save Canada money and ways that we could find the funding we were looking for the important issues in Canada such as health care, I thought as a first step we could maybe look at eliminating those kinds of positions and putting that responsibility on to the member of Parliament, for example, with no pay. The member of Parliament is the representative of the federal level of government. We are here anyway, and if we were to ask the general public, they believe we are all overpaid because they do not quite understand what we do in here. Therefore why do we not take on that responsibility and not have a commissioner per se?
We have fabulous ceremonies in the Kamloops area which is the central portion of my riding. They are put together by a lady named Trisha Chmiel out of Kelowna. She works for Citizenship and Immigration. If people have not had the pleasure of meeting this lady, they have missed something. My colleague from Kelowna knows the lady well. She is incredibly efficient and effective. Those ceremonies have meaning.
She already works for the Government of Canada and therefore the people of Canada. Why would we not put her in this position? Why would we put an extra person into this position, especially when it is a political appointment? It makes no sense to me. We could cover all of these little areas without any difficulty at all.
We could also look at the possibility of using someone who is an Order of Canada recipient to administer these functions. That would also make sense and would be much more expedient than having extra people coming in.
The other thing I was concerned about when I read this, and I read it fairly carefully, was that there was some wording I did not like. One of the words I did not like was that we are pledging our loyalty and allegiance. When I hear the word “pledge”, I think “American”. I guess I get very territorial about the difference between Canadian and American when it comes to something like this. It would be better to use a word like “swear”, “affirm” or “give”, rather than the word “pledge”. I know this sounds petty but it is all in the way I hear it. When I hear it, it sounds more American. I would like us to maintain Canada's dignity and our tradition, and so I would like that wording changed.
When we are talking to these new citizens and having them swear an oath, in that oath I would like them to affirm that they understand that when they come to Canada, they certainly have the right to maintain their language, their culture, their religion, their food, their clothing and all of the things that are dear to them, but we also have to emphasize to them that they do not have the right to maintain old hatreds that they may have brought from another country. I would like to see something in the oath that allows people to denounce openly the negative things from their country of origin and affirms how they feel about being part of Canada.
We need to make people who come here feel as though they are part of the fabric and weave of Canada. If we think of Canada as a large piece of cloth, each of us is a thread and all of the threads form one large unit. We need to make people who come here feel a part of that. Having talked to enough immigrants who have told me what they have come from, these new citizens who are looking for a new life here, I think they would welcome the opportunity to denounce some of the negative things of the countries from which they have just come.
Generally speaking, the citizenship ceremonies are wonderful. People beam from ear to ear. Children are part of them. It never ceases to amaze me from how many countries we attract new citizens. It is what makes us so diverse and so unique in the world.
I want to elaborate a little on one of the ceremonies I attended. In the last ceremony for example, Canada received the gift of people from 42 separate countries. Does that not say a lot to the world about what we have to offer? What I am trying to put into this entire discussion is how much we need to protect that. We need to protect what people who choose us as a country value so highly. In order to do that we have to be very careful about the wording.
In closing, I applaud what the minister is trying to do. It definitely is an improvement over what there was before, but I would like him to take into consideration some of the things that I have said. I do not want to lose that connection of swearing to the Queen and her successors. To me it is as meaningful as the ties that the French Canadian people feel to their heritage. There is room to leave it in. It does not hurt anyone and it certainly adds to the tradition of the ceremony.