Suzanne Tremblay

[Employment Insurance, November 8th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, more and more complaints are being received from people who cannot draw employment insurance when they have left a job in order to care for a family member who is ill. In the last throne speech, the government made a commitment to remedying this problem by allowing people to look after family members who are gravely or terminally ill “without fear of sudden income or job loss”.

When does the Minister of Human Resources Development intend to follow up on this commitment made in the Speech from the Throne?

[Citizenship of Canada Act, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I was about to explain a situation for which I would like to find a solution. I spoke with my colleague about this case, but I am going to come back to it.

Here is the situation: several years ago, when he was very young, a constituent of mine set out to see the world. He ended up in Australia and, one fine day, he applied for Australian citizenship. An exceptional series of circumstances rekindled his desire to return to Canada.

On September 11, 2001, I was in Australia with a group of parliamentarians for the Commonwealth conference. As we were delayed for a couple of days, we asked someone at the hotel what was the best restaurant in town. When he heard people speaking French with a Quebec accent, a young waiter stopped near us and asked if we were from Quebec. He introduced himself and said he used to live in Rimouski.

He wanted to come back to Quebec and apply for a Canadian passport, but he learned that he was no longer a Canadian citizen. When he had applied for Australian citizenship several years ago, Canada did not allow its citizens to have dual nationality. Therefore, unbeknownst to him, he had been stripped of his nationality. He is no longer a Canadian citizen. If he wants to come back to Canada as a Canadian citizen and again have a Canadian passport, he must apply to immigrate to his own country.

Frankly, in my opinion, this legislation makes no sense. His father lives in Rimouski, his brothers and sisters live in Rimouski. He was born in the hospital in Rimouski. He is Canadian in origin and he is now being denied the right to have restored to him, through some sort of accommodation, the nationality of which he was stripped without his knowledge. How can an 18 year old roaming the world in 1975 be expected to have the required means of communication? We did not have the means of communication then that we have today. The fact that this happened without his knowledge seems quite normal to me; we cannot blame him for being ignorant of the law.

When a civil servant tells me: “Ms. Tremblay, ignorance of the law is no excuse”, that makes me think of the great sociologist, Jon E. Kolberg, who said there were eight levels of social development. When someone gives me this sort of answer, it corresponds perfectly to stage two, which is just a step above stage one. It is law and order. It is like those people who have been waiting for ten minutes for the red light to change, but who have not realized that the lights are not working and will not cross on the red light because that is against the law.

When I find myself up against someone who interprets the law so narrowly, I tell myself that it is really sad to think that in this country, there is someone who was born in Canada, who lived in Canada for the first 18 years of his life, but who, 30 years later, as he is approaching the age of 50, cannot come back to his own country. He must immigrate to his own country and go through the whole process.

He was in Canada and he was told “No, if you want to become a Canadian citizen, you have to leave Canada and go to another country. You must go to an embassy and meet someone to become a citizen, to regain your Canadian citizenship”. I think this is wrong. I hope the minister will listen to the arguments made by my colleague, and I intend to ask him to do something about this case.

I am quite sure that several young people, between 1947 and 1977, since that dates back to the time when the act was amended in 1977, were not informed individually of what would happen if they applied for another citizenship. Moreover, today it is possible to be a Canadian citizen and have dual citizenship. I really hope we will be able to do something to improve the situation.

Let us look at clauses 16 and 17 of Bill C-18. My colleague for Rosemont—Petite-Patrie already mentioned that even if we, in the Bloc Quebecois, agree with the underlying principle of Bill C-18, we are quite concerned about the controversy that might arise if the bill is passed with clauses 16 and 17 unchanged. Clause 17 deals with definitions. Clause 16 lists the various ways one may lose one's citizenship. In my view it is open to abuse on the part of a government or a minister.

Again, when we recall what was said about Osvaldo Nunez, we think “Let us not be paranoid”. However, we believe there might be a risk and a danger that a government might put its words into action and deprive of his new citizenship a citizen who, after swearing allegiance to Canada, might decide to openly work, as Mr. Nunez did with us, to build a country he would find more interesting for himself and for his children than the one he immigrated to in the first place.

This is a problem for us. Some very clear explanations will have to be given to us for our concerns to be alleviated. We feel that this could cause real problems for citizens who might live in constant fear or decide to go underground in order not to be labelled as a member of a given party. It would not necessarily have to be a sovereignist party, simply a party that the government of the time would not like.

We look at what is going on today throughout the world. People thought that the war of 1914-18 had taught the world a lesson. The war of 1939-45 showed there was still cause for concern. Now, when we thought the lesson had finally got through, we see that the 21st century is not very reassuring, with the continuing conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Israel. It is all very well for the United Nations to pass resolution after resolution to try to calm down the situation and get people to live in more peace and harmony, but we can see that this does not actually change much. People are still ready, for one reason or another, to fire on each other. To have a clause as permissive as this one in a bill can be a source of concern.

Citizenship is the most important thing to an individual living in a given country. Political citizenship and public citizenship are very important. When we think that citizenship can be revoked, however, that is problematic.

There are reasons for revoking citizenship, but when we read between the lines, some of these reasons may be extremely dangerous and make us think that it does not bode well.

Personally, I think that the government also made a cosmetic amendment in deciding that immigration judges would no longer be referred to as judges but as commissioners. I tried to look up definitions in dictionaries and would personally have preferred to continue talking about citizenship judges.

Changing citizenship judge for citizenship commissioner appeared to me as a cosmetic change at first, but on closer reflection, a commissioner is much less important than a judge; commissioners cannot think as freely and are less independent, and I would fear greatly that they would have to play some kind of propaganda role to keep their jobs.

We can ask the question because it is written somewhere at the beginning if this is a bill to promote citizenship. The commissioner would then have to promote citizenship. Frankly, I am afraid the commissioner would be in a perilous situation.

In closing, this is a very important bill, and I hope the government will show flexibility in listening to the wish list of opposition parties and making the necessary changes.

[Committees of the House, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I just need some clarification here. It seems to me that the government House leader has said that the members of the committee would be appointed within five days. But since the House does not sit next week, what about these five days?

[Citizenship of Canada Act, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-18 amending the Citizenship Act. I think that my colleague has raised a lot of questions and one of the issues that we are particularly concerned with is the adoption of children abroad.

According to the present rules, measures will have to be taken so that we have guarantees to that effect in the act and it will not be very expensive for the government to do so. We insist on it and anyway, I do not see how the government could bypass the Quebec civil code. However, our colleague from Laval West will certainly want to propose an amendment to remove any doubt.

At the present time, a child adopted abroad has to go through the whole process required of any immigrant, the medical examination and all the steps that follow. But it is also true that the process is quicker for a child and can take less time than for a regular resident. Except that in Quebec, a young child cannot be declared a Canadian citizen until the Quebec court of adoption has given its ruling under the Quebec Civil Code. We therefore find it extremely important that this element be taken into account in the act.

As far as the adoption of children abroad is concerned, many countries authorize the adoption of their children. In those countries, it works for a while and then it stops working. But each one of these countries has a specific process for the adoption of children. It might be a good idea for the government to study the issue in view of making things a little more uniform, of making things less complicated for parents and helping them understand what to expect when they deal with county x or country y , so that the process is clear for everybody.

It is important to mention that Canadian parents--and I myself am godmother to a young Canadian adopted in Russia--live under a cloud of uncertainty as long as they do not have the guarantee that their child will be granted Canadian citizenship.

So, it is important that, when that day comes, everything is settled and done as it is nowadays. It is probably better to grant Canadian citizenship to the child right away, but it is obvious that citizenship will not be immediately granted if it is not done under the Quebec Civil Code which is, as we all know, the most important element to establish that the child can really reside in Quebec and in Canada.

Let us now turn to the citizenship oath that can be found in an appendix to the 75 clause bill. It says, and I quote:

From this day forward, I pledge my loyalty and allegiance to Canada and Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada.

What I find amazing is that the summary, where the most important elements of the bill are listed, says that the Citizenship Act will amend some things and provide for a modern citizenship oath. I do not see what is modern about pledging allegiance to Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen ofCanada, who is celebrating this year her 50th anniversary as Her Majesty the Queen of Canada. I do not think that when one pledges allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen, one is keeping up with the times.

We should perhaps use another term or make sure Canadian citizens no longer have to take an oath of allegiance to something the Deputy Prime Minister considers archaic. This is either archaic or modern. You cannot have it both ways.

For once, I would support a motion by the Deputy Prime Minister, and I would do so with great pleasure. Should the Prime Minister decide to introduce a motion to the effect that, when the queen is replaced, Canada will no longer have a queen or a king, then we would be truly a sovereign country, something Pierre Elliott Trudeau wanted when he unilaterally patriated the constitution. He used to tell us it was high time Canada became independent and sovereign. If we want to be independent and sovereign, we should really do away with an archaic institution.

Like my colleague said, when I hear about the oath of allegiance in Canada, it calls up a number of memories. Before the last election, for example, the present Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, who was then the Secretary of State responsible for Amateur Sport, personally presided over a oath taking ceremony in Sherbrooke. We remember his statement well. He did not talk about an oath of allegiance to Canada. He asked these new citizens to remember which country had welcomed them, which country they were becoming a part of, and told them they should remember it on election day. He really went a bit too far.

If we want to talk about allegiance to Canada now, and if this is what the minister has in mind, it could also be a concern to take an oath of allegiance to Canada. However, the Bloc Quebecois is not opposed in theory to the idea of Canadian citizens taking an oath of allegiance to Canada, because some day we will want citizens to take an oath of allegiance to Quebec when have our own country. This is perfectly acceptable to us. Except that we would not want ministers or commissioners swearing in new citizens to wax on about democratic values and faithfully respecting the law and fulfilling the rights and obligations of Canadian citizenship.

I will not rehash what my colleague brought up earlier about what the minister, who was not even a member at the time, said in reference to our colleague, Osvaldo Nunez, an immigrant from Chile, a Canadian citizen at the time of the comments, whose country of origin was Chile. Members of the Bloc Quebecois have never attacked the origins of our colleagues, even though approximately one third of the members of this House were not born in Canada. For us, they are all Canadian citizens, and we have no problem with the fact that they may have been born in another country.

So, we spoke about adoption, and the oath of allegiance. I hope that this time around, there will not be any nasty surprises with this bill, because this is our third try at updating the Citizenship Act.

I have read the bill carefully. However, there is one thing that bothers me, and I will talk with my colleague to see if we might be able to introduce an amendment to the bill, to resolve the following matter.

[Child Poverty, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the latest report from the Canadian Council on Social Development informs us that child poverty has increased. Everyone knows that if children are poor, it is because their parents are poor.

Will the Minister of Human Resources Development finally acknowledge that by tightening the eligibility criteria for employment insurance, she is directly responsible for the rise in child poverty?

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, I would like to tell the minister that, when we went west last year, we visited the Coast Guard and met the person in charge, who told us that “Everything is just fine, folks”. But when we went to talk to the front-line people, they told us of huge problems and how, for instance, Chinese boats had been able to get up to the coast because there was no radar.

I also wonder to what extent the Coast Guard is really capable of doing the job. A ship, the Ocean Venture navigated the St. Lawrence up to the wharf at Rimouski. It was only when it got to Matane that people became aware of its existence and asked where it was headed. So it was in the gulf, and then in the estuary, and as far up as Matane before the authorities were aware of it. It was carrying salt, apparently, and stayed at that mooring for two years. We have just learned that it has been sold.

So how certain can we be that the Coast Guard can really do its job? I myself have serious doubts.

[Dairy Industry, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, Deborah Buszard of McGill University and Bertrand Farmer of Quebec's Dairy Herd Analysis Service, have been awarded the Prix Léo-Derikx. This is an award created to acknowledge innovative models for long term partnerships at the pre-competitive phase of research and development.

This McGill University project, started as a means of helping dairy farmers, has developed into a world-class centre of expertise on which the entire Canadian dairy industry depends when decisions need to be made. At present, it receives and analyzes data on more than 13,000 Canadian dairy herds, comprising some 750,000 cows. This represents some 1.2 million milk production records annually.

Working together, the dairy businesses and the award winning academics have proven that great things can come out of effective partnerships. Their success has enriched university training and research programs in Quebec and in Canada, and given them concrete advantages.

Our sincere congratulations to the award winners.

[Employment Insurance, October 30th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, according to the Auditor General, had the surplus in the fund not been pillaged as it was, the budget surplus for the last fiscal year would have been a mere $4 billion instead of $8.9 billion.

When is the government going to at last have the courage to acknowledge that it has made the shameful choice of paying down its debt at the expense of those contributing to EI and of the unemployed workers of this country?

[Employment Insurance, October 30th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the surplus in the employment insurance fund is an illusion, because the government has used it to pay off its deficit, and as a result the fund is now empty.

Will the government admit, once and for all, that its use of the EI fund to pay down its debt has bled the fund dry?

[Supply, October 29th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister must be very sorry that he has to wait until December 31 to make changes to the parliamentary secretary roster, because it must not be easy to work with someone so out of touch with reality.

The parliamentary secretary does not understand the purpose of our motion. He should know that we are here to learn how to run a country. We are not ashamed of that. We are learning how to run a country because, one day, we will have our own country in Quebec. Being here today, because we have been democratically chosen by the people to represent them here, gives us the opportunity to learn how to run a country and, one day, we will show him that he does not know how it is done.