That's true, Mr. Speaker. The government House leader just responded to me and said, “Nobody heckles louder than you”, and he is right. I give him that. It is the first time I have agreed with the government House leader in I cannot remember how many months. However, that is not the point.
The point is that the government sends these things to the Supreme Court. In this case, it is also hoping that it will take longer than the next election cycle so that it does not become a nuisance during any kind of election campaign. What is really interesting and is the great big question here is how the government believes that it can be consistent when it recognizes that the Supreme Court has the right to pass judgment on these laws and yet when it does, oftentimes what we hear from the government and other right wingers is, “We have an activist court again. There are the courts going beyond their mandate, there they are making laws rather than interpreting them.”
We mostly hear that in the U.S., but we hear an echo of it here in the chamber when it suits the government's purposes. It needs to be said that this is another case. There are serious issues, politics aside. I am not a lawyer, but those who are and who have a reputation that they care about when they speak publicly are saying that this has some real constitutional questions. I am underscoring from the get-go that is not unusual with the current government. It really does not care about that part of the process at all. In fact, we know how it feels about any entity that presumes to have more power than it does, or more authority. Look at what happened to the chief justice of the Supreme Court recently because the Prime Minister got into a bit of a snit over a recent decision by the Supreme Court.
For the rest of us in Canada, all we can say is thank God the court is there and thank God that so far it still is the body that Canadians have come to rely on to be their absolute final line of defence in terms of defending their rights in this country. However, make no mistake, if it had the opportunity in any way to change that and bring the Supreme Court under its thumb, where it wants everybody and everything else in Canada to be, it would do it in a blink.
I do not know how much it has been talked about, but the fact that this is retroactive is always worrisome. Also, that is a rarity. It is certainly not the regular course of events where legislation is made retroactive, and yet this one is.
The question mark at least has to be raised, what cases have the Conservatives got in mind that are not currently out there, where individuals may not even know they have a problem, but there is trouble coming. We do not know, and what is more worrisome is that some of the new powers the minister has, he or she does not have to divulge to the public. It is not necessary put in as secrets with CSIS, but the Conservatives certainly are not going out of their way in any way, shape, or form to publicize, be transparent about, and account for the power they are giving themselves.
This is all so very troublesome. Having been around here enough, when we start seeing retroactive, people who thought their legal matters were over and done with should be paying a little extra attention. The feds could be coming when individuals thought they were already through whatever system they were involved in.
I have to say that I am rather shocked, and we say this about every wrong thing the government does, but I really am shocked that there is not a greater outrage. I have heard colleagues talk about how much they enjoy speaking at the citizenship ceremonies, and I do too. They are one of the best events that we could attend, because at that very moment, happening right in front of us, ordinary people of the planet suddenly, in a blink, become Canadian citizens. Anybody who has ever attended knows the magical moment when these individuals go from being non-Canadian to Canadian.
I am sure I am not the only one who says, during all those speeches when we are given a chance to say how proud we are of our new citizens, “welcome to the family of Canadians”. They are in, they have made it, they are Canadians, and unless they have fraudulently made their way there, and there are processes and procedures as there should be to go after people who fraudulently make themselves Canadian citizens, it is fair game.
When we start going beyond that, we say to people, “You are a Canadian, mostly. You have this big bag of rights over here and the charter, but one minor little technicality, a little catch in terms of your citizenship versus my citizenship, and that is, yours can be taken away.”
This is Canada. The rest of that story does not matter. If they have done something absolutely horrible to humanity, we have laws to deal with that just the same as if it were one of us who were born here. That is the whole idea of citizenship: we are equal. We do not stand before a judge and say, “Madam Justice, I have to admit to being a dual citizen, so you have to bring out the other book of rules for Canadians, because I am not in that first tier of Canadians. I am in the second tier, the one where you can take away my citizenship”.
This is so wrong. It is so un-Canadian, and I have not even gotten to all the stuff about what the minister can and cannot do without having to be transparent. I have touched on it, but it is, I cannot think of a better word, ugly. It is ugly in terms of what it does.
I agree with my colleague, there is so much to be said about this, but of course, we will respect the rules. However, I have to say this is wrong. In my opinion it is un-Canadian. That is not what it means to be a Canadian citizen with a string attached, where we can pull the string back whenever we want if we do not like an individual's actions.
No, that is not right. We stand before the court and before our justice system as equals where nothing is supposed to taint the decision, nothing.
Yet in this case, we would have a law where people can be punished by having their citizenship taken away, but it could not be done to someone who was born here. It is wrong, it is un-Canadian, and we can only hope that, since the government will pass this, our precious Supreme Court of Canada does step in and deem that this is outside the Constitution and that this would not become the law, but if it does we will get a new government—
