Bill C-24 (Historical)

Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act

An Act to amend the Citizenship Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Citizenship Act to, among other things, update eligibility requirements for Canadian citizenship, strengthen security and fraud provisions and amend provisions governing the processing of applications and the review of decisions.
Amendments to the eligibility requirements include
(a) clarifying the meaning of being resident in Canada;
(b) modifying the period during which a permanent resident must reside in Canada before they may apply for citizenship;
(c) expediting access to citizenship for persons who are serving in, or have served in, the Canadian Armed Forces;
(d) requiring that an applicant for citizenship demonstrate, in one of Canada’s official languages, knowledge of Canada and of the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship;
(e) specifying the age as of which an applicant for citizenship must demonstrate the knowledge referred to in paragraph (d) and must demonstrate an adequate knowledge of one of Canada’s official languages;
(f) requiring that an applicant meet any applicable requirement under the Income Tax Act to file a return of income;
(g) conferring citizenship on certain individuals and their descendants who may not have acquired citizenship under prior legislation;
(h) extending an exception to the first-generation limit to citizenship by descent to children born to or adopted abroad by parents who were themselves born to or adopted abroad by Crown servants; and
(i) requiring, for a grant of citizenship for an adopted person, that the adoption not have circumvented international adoption law.
Amendments to the security and fraud provisions include
(a) expanding the prohibition against granting citizenship to include persons who are charged outside Canada for an offence that, if committed in Canada, would constitute an indictable offence under an Act of Parliament or who are serving a sentence outside Canada for such an offence;
(b) expanding the prohibition against granting citizenship to include persons who, while they were permanent residents, engaged in certain actions contrary to the national interest of Canada, and permanently barring those persons from acquiring citizenship;
(c) aligning the grounds related to security and organized criminality on which a person may be denied citizenship with those grounds in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and extending the period during which a person is barred from acquiring citizenship on that basis;
(d) expanding the prohibition against granting citizenship to include persons who, in the course of their application, misrepresent material facts and prohibiting new applications by those persons for a specified period;
(e) increasing the period during which a person is barred from applying for citizenship after having been convicted of certain offences;
(f) increasing the maximum penalties for offences related to citizenship, including fraud and trafficking in documents of citizenship;
(g) providing for the regulation of citizenship consultants;
(h) establishing a hybrid model for revoking a person’s citizenship in which the Minister will decide the majority of cases and the Federal Court will decide the cases related to inadmissibility based on security grounds, on grounds of violating human or international rights or on grounds of organized criminality;
(i) increasing the period during which a person is barred from applying for citizenship after their citizenship has been revoked;
(j) providing for the revocation of citizenship of dual citizens who, while they were Canadian citizens, engaged in certain actions contrary to the national interest of Canada, and permanently barring these individuals from reacquiring citizenship; and
(k) authorizing regulations to be made respecting the disclosure of information.
Amendments to the provisions governing the processing of applications and the review of decisions include
(a) requiring that an application must be complete to be accepted for processing;
(b) expanding the grounds and period for the suspension of applications and providing for the circumstances in which applications may be treated as abandoned;
(c) limiting the role of citizenship judges in the decision-making process, subject to the Minister periodically exercising his or her power to continue the period of application of that limitation;
(d) giving the Minister the power to make regulations concerning the making and processing of applications;
(e) providing for the judicial review of any matter under the Act and permitting, in certain circumstances, further appeals to the Federal Court of Appeal; and
(f) transferring to the Minister the discretionary power to grant citizenship in special cases.
Finally, the enactment makes consequential amendments to the Federal Courts Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Joe Comartin]

Order, please. On a point of order, the member for Scarborough—Rouge River.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was waiting for a natural pause in the minister's speech. The minister was a little confused, it seemed, with the actual number of hours in here. I just want to say that it was on February 27—

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Joe Comartin]

Order, please. I have already ruled that is not a point of order.

The hon. minister has the floor.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are determined to make that processing happen, but we are also determined to continue to reinforce the value of Canadian citizenship to show that it is not just by being interested in Canada, by being domiciled in Canada, or by having visited Canada that one becomes a Canadian citizen.

There has always been a principle of residency in this country behind Canadian citizenship, since 1914 when the length of time in that bill was actually raised to five years. It stayed there for a good long time. It was reduced to three years under the Trudeau government of the 1970s. That was too little. It was not only a much shorter time than Australia, the U.K., the U.S., all of our peers, France, and other European countries have. Many of them have much longer periods, seven or ten years.

It was also a short period of time during which a select few of those who paid the right lawyers or paid the right crooked consultants were able to leave requirements unfulfilled. They pretended they were here for three years when, in fact, they were not. That cheapened Canadian citizenship. That undermined the value of Canadian citizenship. That made us, in some parts of the world, in terms of citizenship, a laughingstock.

It is this government that has done more than any in our history to clean up that abuse, abuse that began in 1977 under a flawed model of citizenship, and we are absolutely convinced that it is the right thing to do to require four out of six years of physical residency in this country, and to be able to check that people are actually here, to be able to avoid all of that paperwork, those banker's boxes of receipts and plane tickets that people used to have to bring with their citizenship applications. We would be able to do it electronically starting next year, and there would not be fraud associated with our residency requirement.

We would also clarify that residence means physical presence. We would ask prospective citizens not just to be physically present but to say up front that they intend to reside in Canada. It sounds reasonable that someone who is physically present in Canada for three, now four, years would actually have the intention of being here.

The opposition seems to think that people end up here by accident, that they do not intend to be here and that we should not ask them what they intend because they are here anyway. They kind of sleepwalk into Canada. That is the perspective of the Canadian Bar Association. That is the perspective of a few on the other side.

Would it curb their mobility rights? Absolutely not. For people who say they intend to reside in Canada and then decide to go somewhere else or marry someone else or accept a job offer somewhere else, their intent to reside in Canada ends. Their physical presence in Canada is curtailed. They would not qualify for Canadian citizenship at that point in their lives. So be it.

Their human rights, their rights under the Canadian charter, their rights as permanent residents would not be affected. They have just changed their plans. Anyone who pretends that this is interference, that this is an unfair burden on new Canadians, has not talked to any new immigrants lately. New immigrants are proud to say that they intend to reside here. They want to become citizens as quickly as possible.

Right now, already, it is not three years on average that people spend here; it is actually four years, on average, that the majority of new Canadians have spent here before they apply to be Canadian citizens. We are actually catching up with reality. It is actually something that Canadians want us to do to ensure that the connection, the integration, and the sense of belonging are strong, the way they should be among citizens who share political institutions, who share the burden of participating in this democracy together.

The third set of measures we have in this bill relates to citizenship fraud, combatting abuse of the citizenship process, among other reforms. I am glad to hear some on the opposition side say they are happy to see a regulatory body set to be designated for citizenship consultants.

There is a much larger of immigration consultants. We made a very successful effort to regulate them, to make sure that they are self-regulating and that the ones who were counselling people and guiding them down the wrong path toward residency fraud and all kinds of abuses would be left out of the game from now on. We made sure that people would get good, honest advice.

We have all heard cases in our constituency offices of people who spent large amounts of money in different parts of the world to supposedly come to Canada, but then the person disappeared or the advice was wrong or the application was only half filled in. We do not want our citizenship to be associated with that kind of advice. Under this measure, we would take another important step toward making sure that we are not.

We would also increase the penalty for committing citizenship fraud. We would streamline the revocation process and bar people whose citizenship was revoked because they obtained it fraudulently from reapplying for citizenship for 10 years. Did members know that? Did they know that those who obtained citizenship fraudulently and who had it revoked by cabinet could then reapply for citizenship? It was not considered a crime.

Criminals are inadmissible to Canada. They would be inadmissible as citizens under this bill, but we were still letting people who had committed citizenship fraud come back and be citizens. That would no longer happen.

We would also revoke Canadian citizenship from dual citizens who are members of an armed force or an organized armed group engaged in armed conflict against Canada. We would deny citizenship to permanent residents involved in the same actions. Dual citizens and permanent residents convicted of terrorism, high treason, treason, or spying offences would be similarly affected, depending on the sentence received.

Some on the other side, and the bar association again, like a bad Greek chorus, have said this would create two classes of citizenship. I mean no offence to the parliamentary secretary; I am talking about an ancient Greek chorus.

It is actually very simple, and everyone on the opposition benches would do well to understand the difference. People are citizens if they do not commit these crimes; if they commit the crimes, they are no longer citizens. That is the difference. There are not two classes of citizenship. We would not have citizens who have other nationalities in circumstances where these very grave acts of disloyalty to Canada are committed.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

But if they only have citizenship in Canada—

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am being heckled by the Liberal Party again. It has been going on all day.

The Liberals used to stand by these kinds of principles. Their Citizenship Act, in 1947, made it possible to strip citizenship from those who committed treason, even if it made them stateless.

That was the Liberal Party when it stood up for Canadian citizenship, when it had been hardened by war, when it had solid people in its front bench, and when it was fiscally responsible. Today the Liberals joke about it, but let us be honest: Louis St. Laurent was quite fiscally responsible. It was a long time ago, before any of them were born.

The fact of the matter is that all of this went by the boards in 1977 when the Trudeau model came forward. Dual citizenship was allowed in Canada, and rightly so. We respect that. However, there was next to no penalty and next to no interest in whether people were loyal in these deep ways to Canada, to her institutions, and to her laws, and there were almost no consequences.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was a time when the Liberal Party was somewhere between the superpowers in the Cold War, playing footsie with Moscow and not standing on the kinds of principles that Canadians like to stand on and have stood on for centuries.

This measure is reasonable. We would not create stateless people with this measure. It would not apply to those who have only Canadian citizenship, and anyone who wants it to not apply them can renounce their other citizenship.

If a dual national commits these crimes, they would be far fewer in number than the number of citizenships revoked for fraudulent intention.

This would be the right thing to do. It would send a powerful message. It would be a powerful deterrent telling those inside the country and outside that we are serious not only about the privileges and benefits of citizenship but also about the responsibilities, the accountability, and the example that we expect to be set by those who carry the passport, by those who vote in this country, and by those who are proud to call themselves Canadian citizens, as we have done for 100 years.

[Jinny Sims, NDP, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it has been very difficult to sit through that diatribe and to stop myself from heckling because I do not like to do anything like that. I want to be able to hear the points that are made.

However, one thing that absolutely fascinated me today was the minister's assertion that we have had days and nights of debate on this bill.

I want to put on record that the bill was last debated on February 27, for all of two hours. That is 120 minutes. Today we started debating at around 6:44 p.m. I do not see how that can be portrayed as days and nights of debate.

We have a bill that is fundamentally flawed because, despite the protestations otherwise, it would create two levels of Canadian citizenship. Those born in Canada could be treated totally differently from other people born in Canada who just happen to have dual citizenship through their parents or grandparents, and this from a country that actually accepts dual citizenship.

Who has the minister been debating the bill with? It certainly has not been in this Parliament.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it has been two days of debate at second reading in this place, so we could well say 48 hours, and I understand there have been 12 hours of debate in committee. We have been seized with the bill for a good long time. Many of its provisions have come before this House in other forms as private members' bills or as versions of various amendments that were proposed in minority government. The House is familiar with these provisions.

What has not changed is that the other side of the House simply does not care about some of the issues the bill tries to address. Canadians do care about them.

We are not surprised to hear skepticism about treason, joining another armed force, or terrorism. We are used to it from the debates on Afghanistan.

When I was in Kabul somewhere between the Canadian embassy and working for the United Nations, the hon. former leader of the opposition, Jack Layton, was saying that we should sit down with the Taliban, who at that time were killing Canadian soldiers.

That was a disgraceful moment for our politics.

It continues to be unfortunate that the NDP cannot bring itself to admit that terrorism is a real threat, that al Qaeda is still out there, and that Canada has an interest in deterring its youth and others from bringing those fights to our shores.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I will give the government credit in terms of its ability to cast spin. The Conservative government is very good at spin. Even if the facts get in the way, it does not bother the government. It will create or fabricate something to try to make it look good.

Let me give members an example. The government will create a crisis. It will say that there was a citizenship backlog crisis, and that is the reason it had to bring in the legislation.

In reality, before the Conservatives took office, the processing time for someone to get citizenship was less than a year, and that was at a time in which almost an additional $100 million was budgeted to reduce it and bring it down to six months or eight months. It was a significant contribution.

My question for the minister is related to the problem that has been created by the Conservatives. It now takes a minimum of two years to get citizenship. That is a minimum. Often it will go to five or six years.

My question for the minister is this: when does he anticipate that the average time to get citizenship will be no more than a year? That is where it was prior to the Conservatives taking government.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will repeat for the member for Winnipeg North the facts of the matter. The waiting time now for a new application is 28 months. It is more than two years and it is unfortunate, but it is because Canadian citizenship has never been more popular. There have been 333,000 applications.

Why was there no backlog for citizenship under the Liberal government? It was because there were fewer applications. There was a lower naturalization rate. There were lower levels of immigration.

I was talking to a former Liberal minister a couple of days ago, who said the Liberals would set immigration levels that they could not even fill. They could not find enough people who wanted to come to this country, because the economic prospects of Canada relative to the United States and other countries were so much worse then than they are now.

Today we have no problem filling our immigration levels. We have more than enough demand. We have never had a higher naturalization rate. We have a backlog because we have been looking into residency fraud and asking questions of those who are clearly trying to disobey the rules.

We do not apologize for that, and the measures in this bill will bring us back to one-year processing by early 2016.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for International Human Rights]

Mr. Speaker, one of the strongest human rights principles is to create all Canadian citizens equal, no matter what. That is the fundamental human rights situation. That is what I am concerned about in this bill, and I would like clarification on from my friend, the minister of citizenship. I agree very much with all of the other aspects that the minister has mentioned. I strongly support this bill except on this one condition, which is the fundamental right for a Canadian to be treated as a Canadian, no matter what.

When a Canadian citizen's citizenship is revoked, unless that citizenship was obtained fraudulently—and I can agree with revoking it for that reason—we are treating one Canadian differently from another Canadian, and in my opinion that is against a fundamental human rights provision. That is the area of my concern in relation to this bill.

I would like the minister to speak about how he would address this issue of this fundamental human rights principle that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. We do not talk about dual nationality. If a person has obtained a Canadian citizenship, it is then his legitimate right to be treated as a Canadian citizen. That is what I am asking my dear colleague.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have enormous respect for my hon. colleague, but on that logic there would be unequal treatment under the current law, because someone who came to this country and was naturalized as a Canadian citizen but had not in fact resided for three years and then saw his or her citizenship revoked because of residency fraud would be treated unequally, differently from me, since my citizenship cannot be revoked because I am Canadian by descent.

Does the member seriously think that we should stop revoking citizenship in cases where we find it to have been obtained fraudulently just to be able to treat everyone equally?

With all due respect, citizenship is a creation of this place. It was created by a law in this place 100 years ago. It was reinforced in 1947. The rules were changed again in 1977. There have always been rules for obtaining and for losing Canadian citizenship.

Terrorism, espionage, and other grave forms of disloyalty to this country constitute very serious crimes. I think my hon. colleague will agree with me that these are very serious crimes, and our position has not changed. The punishment for committing these acts will be severe, and in cases of dual nationals under this bill, it will be in the same way that all of our NATO allies have such provisions.

It was only Pierre Trudeau who prevented us from having these provisions earlier. I think the only NATO ally that does not have these provisions is Portugal. The NDP may prefer the Portuguese model. António Guterres was a very good former prime minister of Portugal, but he did not change this measure. He did not bring Portugal into the mainstream.

We are going into the mainstream. Citizenship has its obligations, and if a dual national commits these crimes, that person will lose Canadian citizenship. That is fair.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that was a rant from the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. That was not really a speech full of any facts. I wonder whether the minister has borrowed his facts from Kijiji because we have seen that before with the Minister of Employment and Social Development with regard to the temporary foreign worker issue. However, I will leave that for today and speak to the bill.

There are quite a few holes in the bill. One of my constituents said that the holes were big enough to drive a truck through. I will try to lay it out and I would ask members to pay attention, because there may not be that many holes to drive a truck through. Maybe we could make some sensible changes to improve the legislation.

I am pleased to stand in the House today on behalf of my constituents from Surrey North to address Bill C-24, which intends to strengthen the Citizenship Act.

We in the official opposition, along with many experts and Canadians from across the country, are very concerned about a number of aspects in the bill.

We agree that changes to the Citizenship Act are greatly necessary and long overdue. This act has not been revised since 1977 and some elements of Bill C-24 would create clear injustices.

In addition, Canadians continue to face ridiculously wait times for citizenship applications.

Even though some changes are necessary, the bill is another example of the Conservative government's use of power to make secretive, arbitrary decisions by cabinet ministers.

I will first speak to a couple of good things in the bill. There are not a lot, because as I have pointed out, we could drive a big truck through the many holes in the bill.

I will be splitting my time with the member for La Pointe-de-l'Île, Mr. Speaker.

The bill would do a couple of things that I do agree with and they should have been addressed a long time ago. The issue of so-called lost Canadians is addressed in the bill. The NDP has fought hard for many years to get this matter resolved. We are happy the Conservatives are bringing this forward as a result of pressure from the opposition.

The other positive aspect of Bill C-24 is the part dealing with expedited access to citizenship for permanent residents who serve in the armed forces, which the NDP supported in the last session with Bill C-425. However, for a bill that is over 50 pages long, it completely fails to accomplish what it is supposedly intended to do.

Instead of addressing the current problems, Bill C-24 would arbitrarily attribute more unnecessary powers to the minister, prolong naturalization, treat many Canadians like second-class citizens and create more injustices.

Our citizenship and immigration system is flawed. We need a bill that would actually strengthen Canadian citizenship, not one that is not even constitutional. I say that because we have heard from many experts. We have heard from the Canadian Bar Association and from lawyers. They point out the unconstitutionality of many parts of the bill, and yet the Conservatives are not willing to hear all of that.

I pointed to some of the good points of the bill and now I would like to take a look at some of the points that are really worrisome. Let us take a look at the aspect of intent to reside.

Basically, under Bill C-24, if granted citizenship, a person must declare his or her “intent to reside”. The goal of this provision is to ensure Canada's expectation that new citizens live and work in the country after completing naturalization. However, this change would empower officials to speculate on an applicant's future intentions. It portrays the image of immigrants as deserving of suspicion and mistrust, and also treats naturalized immigrants as second-class citizens.

The vagueness in this provision will severely create travel restrictions. International mobility will be imperative. It allows Canadians to study abroad, see their families and become globally aware. If Bill C-24 passes, naturalized citizens will lose this fundamental right.

Citizens who travel abroad for honest reasons may face losing their citizenship because they misrepresented their intention to reside in Canada when they were granted citizenship.

The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration could revoke citizenship under the false pretence of fraud. There would be no appeal, no hearing and no public knowledge of this, which brings me to another concern, and that is the powers of the minister. The bill would grant the minister more powers.

Bill C-24 would place unnecessary powers in the hands of the minister. If the bill is passed, the minister will have the authority to grant or revoke citizenship without public knowledge or any form of judicial process.

I am really worried about this aspect of the bill, because the minister will get to decide whether to revoke somebody's citizenship. There is no process, no hearing and the public will not even know about it. That is really worrisome.

Peter Edelmann, a Vancouver immigration lawyer who sits on the executive of the Canadian Bar Association, said:

What’s happening here is they’re proposing that citizens could lose their citizenship on a paper-based process with no hearing at all and no independent tribunal--forget about going in front of a judge to make the decision; you may not get to speak to or even see the officer...

This is clearly unconstitutional. The Canadian Bar Association is saying this, yet the government is not listening to some of the top lawyers in the country who point to the unconstitutionality of this power grab by the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.

It is not surprising to me, because I have been here a number of years now, that the Conservatives are using bills to grant themselves more discretionary powers. We have seen this in many other bills in the House where they are consolidating the power.

A Conservative member is chirping at me, Mr. Speaker. I ask you to ask those members to pay attention and maybe they will learn one or two things, oppose the bill and actually work for Canadians rather than chirping away when another member is speaking.

The Conservatives love power, even if it is at the cost of Canadian democracy and justice. By giving the minister these new powers, Canada is taking a step backward and opening the doors to decisions that are subjective and politically motivated.

Instead of providing solutions to the issues Canadians face every day, the Conservatives are using the legislative process to give themselves even more power than they already have. Unfortunately, they are not worried about the process because they have a so-called small majority, and they are ramming these changes through.

There are many other issues I could discuss such as the unconstitutionality of a number of things in the bill. There are fees and language testing issues. It seems that the only consultations the Conservatives have done in drafting the bill is among themselves or they have gone to Kijiji, as they have done before. We see time and time again Conservatives are not willing to take any sort of advice from neither the opposition, nor from the experts who testified before committees.

Along with my NDP colleagues, I will continue to fight for a fair, efficient, transparent and accountable immigration system. I urge the Conservatives to stop battering democracy and start listening to Canadians.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on the member's comments in regard to English language testing. This is very new where the government has made a decision on two issues. One is expanding the numbers of individuals who will now have to get English language testing to qualify for citizenship. I am curious to know the motivation for the younger and older age groups.

Also, there is the requirement to have IELTS testing done. It costs a significant amount of money to get the testing done and it will also disqualify a number of people from getting citizenship because of the new requirements.

It does not seem to me that the system was broken in the first place. People were quite able to integrate into Canadian society. Would the member comment on what he believes might have been the motivation for making those changes?

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the only motivation I can see, and the minister could answer this, is ideological.

I want to share a personal story. I came to this country in 1980 and I hardly spoke a word of English, yet I am a very proud Canadian today to be standing in the House. My mother was 50 years old when she came to this country and she hardly spoke any English, yet today she is a proud Canadian and a proud Canadian of a member of Parliament.

I do not see why we need to expand what is already there. I only see ideological reasons, which the Conservatives try to feed to their base.