Bill S-230 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (granting citizenship to certain Canadians)

This enactment amends the Citizenship Act to permit certain persons who lost their Canadian citizenship to regain it.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

There were just a couple of points made by Ms. Kwan. There was a short point about the intentions or the views of Senator Yonah Martin. It's commendable that the member reached out to our colleague from the Senate when the bill was tabled and that she met with Senator Yonah Martin and that she said her views had changed between then and now, at some point.

That's not comparable to us. We sit with our Senate colleagues in all of our meetings. I know that's different from the case for most caucuses, but our senators are involved in everything we do, with regular reports in caucus. They listen to the whole debate and they get to participate in it. They are equal members in our national caucus.

I should know. I chaired the national caucuses of the Conservative Party during the pandemic as well as a little before that and a little after that. Her views did not change. I thought she was very clear, when she came before the committee on Bill S-245, which was taken through the Senate so quickly, that there was a common understanding among senators that the substance of the bill was the same as that of Bill S-230.

That's why Senator Martin was able to convince her Senate colleagues to expedite the bill and to convince our caucus that the substance had not changed and that, therefore, this bill should be pushed through because it was essentially the same as before.

You can't interpret every conversation you have as a permission slip for any action to be taken. I did follow up and I have followed up repeatedly with the senator in question and also with the House of Commons sponsor of the bill, who was my predecessor on this committee, about their intentions concerning the contents of the bill.

At this final stage of the bill, I just want to ensure that we have a common understanding of how we got to this point with some of the work we have done and where we agreed on certain amendments to be passed. Again, having one-off discussions doesn't compare to being in the same caucus room. I know it's different for certain caucuses that don't have senators who sit with them regularly, but in this case we do, and I believe we've reflected what was Senator Martin's understanding when she testified at this committee as a witness. Also, we have been able to speak to her continually about stakeholder relations, the contents of the bill and certain amendments to be considered.

As my colleague Mr. Perkins said, when all of us are drafting bills, the tighter a bill and the simpler it is, the more likely you are to get consensus from more people. When bills are changed at committee stage—and it happens, and I agree. I'm sure if there is another IRPA bill or maybe the government will have a bill to amend the Citizenship Act at some point or a modernization bill, as they like to call it, there will be amendments made by the committee that may result in our having to return to our caucuses to get a review or to get agreement on them. That is how my caucus works. When a bill is substantively modified, seriously amended as this Bill S-245 will be, it should be reported back to the House and it will require us to go back to caucus.

We have a caucus meeting tomorrow. I think all of us have caucus meetings tomorrow, so I was wondering, Madam Chair, whether you would be willing to perhaps suspend the meeting, and I could take it back to my caucus, and we would meet tomorrow at 3:30. I could therefore get direction tomorrow morning from my caucus team and the Senate caucus members on the Conservative side as well, and I could come back to the committee. We could either expedite it or we could maybe reconsider it, but I would hope we could expedite it. I hope my caucus would give me very clear direction.

That is how we work. We have a consent system. We have caucus advisory committees, and I don't think that's a big revelation to anybody out there, but there is a substantial amount of consultation that every shadow minister has to do on their file and every sponsor of a private member's bill or a Senate bill has to do.

The substance has changed. The scope is much beyond that of the original version that came to this committee. On at least one of those matters—the adoption clauses—we did agree with them, and I'll stand by those votes. I thought we voted wisely to expand it there.

I think that would perhaps be better for us, because it is late and I know this committee met extensively on Monday. I was not here on Monday. Forgive me for that. It was my oldest son's junior high graduation, and that's one of those things you can't miss, especially when it's your first one who is graduating. I could not miss that, so I was present for that.

That would be my suggestion and perhaps you could take it under advisement.

I'll stop there.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

No, and I want to speak to that.

The reason it's still a no—despite the fact that we've had I don't know how many hours of debate to get to this point—is that I want to make very clear that both my position and the position of my caucus is that this was a bill where the sponsor came here and distinctly said where the tracks were to go, in her view. I reiterated and spoke to her again during the clause-by-clause consideration.... I just want to make sure it is understood that we were opposed to the expansion of the scope of the bill and the votes that were held then. We did not want to go beyond the original scope. It was a very narrow support and help for a certain group of lost Canadians that we were trying to address.

Expanding the scope then led to our side thinking of things we have heard from constituents and stakeholder groups and from witnesses before the committee on important amendments that could be made.

I then said in the House during the debate on the tabled reports from this committee, when concurrence was moved, that we would consider this a statutory review. We tried to demonstrate that this would be what we consider a statutory review of the Citizenship Act. Therefore, we would make amendments that we thought were necessary or important or that addressed concerns we heard in different communities.

Again, we showed some goodwill. We voted for some of the amendments, such as the improvements in language that the department brought forward and said needed to be done—the difference between Bill S-230 and Bill S-245 and the difference in language that needed to be brought forward. We decided that, yes, we would vote in favour of that.

There were measures in there to make sure that adopted children would be treated equally to children born in Canada and children naturalized in Canada. We supported those as well.

We did not support the substantial connection test being only 1,095 days, and we suggested it should be successive or continuous days. We thought that it could have been toughened up with some prohibitions on persons who have been convicted for crimes with two years plus a day. It would have strengthened the bill. We could then have voted for a substantial connection clause, especially if it had added more days.

I have to say, there was much unpleasantness in May, unfortunately, during those breach of privilege debates that we had to have at this committee. I will also remind you, Chair, and others at the committee, that I proposed a motion that would have seen us deal with amendments at the table by May 15—for other parties to submit them—now that the scope had been expanded.

I know that this was a long and arduous process. However, I think we've learned more about the Citizenship Act than any of us on this side and on that side probably knew. I have copious notes now, and I probably understand the Citizenship Act better than I ever wanted to. Now when somebody from my caucus comes has a question or a bright idea, I will use the content from this meeting to dissuade them from touching this act and making further amendments, because I realize how simple it is to lose entire groups of Canadians and make more lost Canadians in so doing.

I hope we also demonstrated the fact that we can be reasonable and can proceed to quick votes when necessary, when time is of the essence. We were making a point that the way May went down was, in my view, still not acceptable and that we all take this back to other committees that we may serve on so that this doesn't happen again.

When the sponsor of a bill asks that we not affect the contents of the bill, the substance, the scope and the principle, and that we leave it intact and have a simple up or down vote on whether we support the bill as is, it is a courtesy to our colleagues not to—what I will again call—vandalize their bill. I have used that language, and I will continue to use that language, I'm sure, at report stage, at third reading of the bill and then as it goes to the Senate.

The witness testimony that was heard at the Senate committee was that, if amendments were to be made, that would delay the passage of this bill and it should just be passed as the original. There was a certain gentleman who said that repeatedly. I have the witness testimony from that committee on Bill S-230 when it was being debated originally.

Now that there are amendments that are very likely to pass, this bill will likely go back to the Senate. That could be as late as perhaps the fall—late fall—or into the spring session, and who knows whether there will be an election then.

I am just laying out the concerns I have with the way this was done. This bill could have been passed way back in May. I am convinced of it. It could have been royally assented to and then we could have worked on a different piece of legislation, or a member could have tabled a different bill that could have been considered. That's not me, because I drew third from last in the private members' bill draw.

I will note, for the benefit of all of us, that senators seem to be able to legislate faster than members of Parliament. We get only one chance from one draw in each Parliament, while senators can keep drafting new bills and expediting them through the Senate, if they can convince their colleagues....

I just think there's a certain measure of unfairness that now has been built up in our system, whereby members of Parliament get to legislate less quickly and less easily than senators can, and senators don't have an elected mandate from the public to push the bill, so they push.... Nevertheless, they are nominated and they are appointed by the Governor General upon the advice of the Prime Minister, so they can do work like this, like Bill S‑245.

I just want to lay that out, because I've seen a few articles using the F-word and people know how much I love that word, because I've used it at other committees. It's not the one you think. It's the “filibuster” word. We have not done that. We have asked questions to wonder about the contents of the Citizenship Act and the impact on different groups of lost Canadians. We also had structural amendments that we wanted to do on the Citizenship Act, which we have proposed and laid before the committee. Unfortunately, none of our amendments passed even though I heard that some of them were.... The content was quite good and could form part of future private members' bills that any member can pick up and reuse. I just want to make sure that members remember that and also that the vice-chair of this committee and I can be merciful when we want to be merciful and allow things to continue and proceed to business.

Madam Chair, there is a group of hopeful Canadians out there—international students who really need our time and our efforts—and I really hope that this committee is going to do that, but with the state of this bill right now, I know that I'm going to have a very tough time presenting this to my caucus to convince them that we got something in it. There's nothing in here that I can really point to, nothing to convince them that this bill is the same substance as it was before it came to this committee intact. That is a concern to me. This might happen to any one of us with our bills in the future—where the content might be deleted and replaced with things that we don't agree with—but it looks silly when you're the sponsor of a bill and you're whining to have to either vote against it or against your colleague's bill just because the content has been drastically changed from the original.

I want to put that on the record, because I'm sure there will be journalists who will want to refer to this, and I would want to refer to it, too, and send them the clip. That way, it can answer all of their questions on our feelings and thoughts on the process up until this point.

Thank you, Chair.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Did something change? Did the department discover that there would be unintended consequences if the wording of Bill S‑245, which was Bill S‑230, was kept as is?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'm just going to go back to territory we've gone over before, because there was a previous version of this bill, Bill S‑230.

You talked about doing a legislative review the last time Bill S‑245 was coming through, and that's when the department identified that the original wording of Bill S‑230.... This is what we have gotten rid of, and now are amending in order to avoid unforeseen consequences, as you just described.

When did the department discover those?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Just to return to the grant versus right of citizenship, because again, officials have said they've gone through the testimony on Bill S-230. I'm just wondering why it has taken two years to get to the point where a problem was identified with the drafting.

Mr. Attfield, who was the director general, was asked questions by Senator Ataullahjan on the grant of citizenship, and Mr. Attfield responded:

It’s worth noting that the discretionary grant of citizenship also then allows that individual’s child to also pass on citizenship. The grant of citizenship allows that person to extend their citizenship so that basically the first generation limit will not apply to their child as a result. It resets the person’s generational clock for passing on citizenship if that person has a child born abroad.

That was Mr. Attfield's understanding of Bill S-230, and now there's a problem with Bill S-230's drafting. Is this your understanding? This is the crux of the problem, that some people will be treated differently because of the way they have obtained citizenship. He talks here about resetting a “person's generational clock”—I'm not sure if this is the right terminology, but that's what's here—“for passing on citizenship if that person has a child born abroad.”

We've talked about the difference between “right” and “grant”, and that's the crux of the problem with this section. I seem to remember understanding Mr. Attfield's saying that's the way they want it to work here.

If I'm misunderstanding it, then please correct me.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Were you involved in the Bill S-230 drafting or the internal debate within IRCC when you learned that the bill was provided to the Senate? Because the two bills are identical, at that point did you raise concerns with Bill S-230, or did you raise them and they never got to the level where they were considered by more senior officials? Was that work caught only later?

I don't have the exact people who were there at the time. Are you all new in these roles? It was a few years ago, and people do move around.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'm just concerned here because Bill S-230 was considered by committee, and Bill S-245 was redrafted, I assume, by the Senate clerks and the legislative clerks that they have there. They were drafted in the same manner, and then it sailed through the Senate at all stages with the understanding that the work had been done on Bill S-230 on the previous committee, on June 16, 2021, and that the bill had no errors at the time.

I have two officials who spoke. One was Catherine Scott, associate assistant deputy minister, strategic and program policy at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. That testimony—and I've gone through it—didn't identify an issue here. The other official was Alec Attfield, director general, citizenship branch, strategic and program policy, IRCC. He did not identify there being any known issue with the wording of the bill. You said that there were citizenship experts since then.

Are these internal to the department, or are they external to the department?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

It's been mentioned now that this was a drafting error, but this bill is exactly the same bill as Bill S-230, which was considered by the Senate one Parliament ago. I've gone back through that committee testimony from officials, and nobody identified this as a drafting error at the time. I'm just wondering. When did the department discover that this would be a drafting error, and how did you discover it?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'm going to back to the Senate testimony on Bill S-230, which is the original version of this bill. During that testimony, there were numbers. Alec Attfield, director general, citizenship branch, strategic and program policy, IRCC—your predecessor, if I am correct—said that as a result of the 2009 changes and the subsequent 2015 changes, “As a result of the communications there, in the range of 17,500 people became Canadian citizens or regained their citizenship.... There was extensive and sustained communication at that time. With the 2015 amendments, another 600 cases were identified and became Canadians as a result of the changes in the law and the communication that resulted from that.”

The 40,000 to 60,000 annually now who request proof of citizenship—so the certificate or the number or the microfiches that we talked about last time—to get their number.... Those 17,500 at some point were requested from the department. Are they included in that, or is that separate? If the department, after the fact, was able to estimate for the 2009 changes and the 2015 changes, why can't the department provide a stronger estimate now?

Committees of the House

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Madam Speaker, I want to start by letting you know that I am going to be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Nose Hill.

I am here to talk about Bill S-245. It is not something I planned to do today, and I am sure most members in the House had not planned on doing this, but here we are, and I want to make sure that people are clear on what it is we are talking about.

This is a private member's bill that has come from the other place, the Senate. Senators, just like members of Parliament, are able to produce legislation called private members' bills, so this is the legislation that has come from Senator Yonah Martin from the other place. It is her intention and her idea. It is something that she wants to see done. That is what we are talking about here. It is now in the House and we are working with it.

The subject of this is the “lost Canadians”. We have heard many different explanations of this, but many people may not quite understand what that is. Essentially, our Citizenship Act has some flaws in it that cause certain people to either lose their citizenship or to not get it in the first place. They create these little categories of people who, through no fault of their own, do not have access to Canadian citizenship.

There have been attempts over the years to fix some of these problems. Many of them have been fixed over the years, but there are still some groups of people who are still considered lost Canadians and are not being treated the way they should be, as they are unable to receive Canadian citizenship status. Over the years, there have been bills brought attempting to plug those holes and fix those gaps to ensure that those people who deserve to be Canadian citizens are, and this bill is one of them. There is a particular group of people, a fairly clearly defined group of people, that it seeks to remedy. It is not trying to fix everybody, and that was part of the point initially.

I also want to mention that often times when we think about people who are not citizens of Canada, we immediately think of immigrants. This does not necessarily mean immigrants. There are in fact many people who would not consider themselves immigrants who fit into these categories of lost Canadians. They are just Canadians who do not have their citizenship. There are different categories of these. Part of the point here is that trying to catch them all, and fix all of the holes in the legislation in one shot, is very difficult. It has been attempted over the years and, so far, it has been unsuccessful. We believe that a better approach is to target a very specific area, a specific group of people who are lost, and at least fix those, and then if there are more holes, we would fix those holes, rather than trying to do everything at once. This is a simple bill to fix one of those groups.

This is the same as Bill S-230. In a previous Parliament, the bill was studied in the Senate. It went to committee, was looked at carefully, and was sent here to the House to be worked on. Then an election happened, so that legislation never saw the light of day. Therefore, the attempt to rectify the citizenship situation of those lost Canadians failed. It failed because it did not get through the process in time before an election was called. That is very significant because right now we are in another minority Parliament, which means an election can happen at any time, so we do not have a lot of time. Time is not our friend in this case; we need to move to pass these bills quickly.

The same senator, Yonah Martin, has now put forward the same bill, Bill S-245, which has also gone through the Senate. This time in the other place it was not reviewed or studied because it was exactly the same as the previous legislation. Therefore, the Senate decided to fast-track it, move it through the other place and then to the House here so that we could deal with it. That is where it is now. It is here in the House and we are dealing with it now.

I just want to mention this with respect to the sponsor of the bill, Senator Yonah Martin. She was able to get it through the last Parliament. It took a lot of work and effort to bring everybody together to agree on things, but she was able to get it as far as it got. Unfortunately, it was not far enough. However, she was able to get it here quicker, which is a testament to her ability to work across party lines and with other people in the Senate, because she knew that time was the enemy and the biggest problem that the bill faced. The assumption that went along with that, as she got it to this House, was that it was the same bill as last time. From the Senate's perspective, this bill is the same one that it studied before and therefore it did not need to study it again. That is important and we should remember that.

Why are we here today? We are studying this bill at committee. We are getting very close to the end. There has been a lot of debate and talk about it. We have heard many witnesses speak to this bill. Indeed, there are many groups of people who represent these groups of lost Canadians, because there are numerous groups of lost Canadians. Everybody wants to solve this problem. The Conservatives want to fix this problem, as do the Liberals and all of the other parties. However, we want to fix it; we do not just want to talk about it. We do not want to study it to death, but fix it. We were able to get a lot of testimony and hear a lot of things to understand what the scope is and how it is going to work.

So people understand, what happened toward the end of this process is this. With respect to private members' bills, we have to stay within the scope of the bill. We cannot add things that go beyond the original intent of what, in this case, Yonah Martin had. There must be some ideas out there to do that, to go beyond the scope of this bill, because the government and the NDP teamed up together to bring this to the House now so that it can authorize the committee to go beyond the scope of the bill. That is what we are here talking about today.

This is really significant, because the originator of the bill, in this case Yonah Martin, had an intent for this bill. She came to committee and spoke about the bill and what her intent was. She was specifically asked if she would allow for amendments to the bill that would expand its scope. She was very clear on that. She said that she was willing to accept amendments that would clarify the bill, but she was not willing to accept amendments that would expand it. The reason she said that was very simple and makes a lot of sense.

Why would she accept amendments to clarify the bill? She wants the bill to be successful. She wants to plug that hole for this group of lost Canadians once and for all, so in her mind, if her words were not quite correct and somebody had a better idea to make those words a bit better, she was all ears and willing to do that. It only makes sense, because we want to get the wording correct. We have an army of lawyers in this place who are able to interpret our laws and statutes who I am sure had ideas and suggestions to clarify those things.

Why did she not want to expand its scope? It is very clear. She knows that if the scope gets expanded it creates a whole new pathway for this bill. First, it goes beyond what she had intended, which makes it more complicated, which means more work and more understanding is required. It goes from a simple one-page bill to a multi-page bill that has implications on all kinds of things. Most significantly, should it come through the House and be amended and expanded in scope, then it ends up back in the other place. Why did it pass through the other place very quickly? Because it was the same bill that had been studied in the previous Parliament. It had been looked at and studied in the Senate. The senators had their chance to talk about it and tweak it. That had all been done. The only reason they expedited it through this time was because it was exactly the same as the last time.

If we put two and two together, if it goes back to the other place having been changed, what is going to happen? The senators would say that it is not the same bill and would want to know what happened. Senator Martin would have to explain that it has changed and grown in scope and they would say that they need to study the bill and that it is going to committee to be studied.

With the way timelines work around here, we would be adding months to the process. The enemy of this bill is time, so we would clearly be doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing, which is adding time to this bill. We would be adding complexity to it, which means it would have to be studied at committee and looked at again. At the end of the day, there could be an election. We all know that an election could happen at any time. It could happen over this issue today. I heard members saying that might happen, so we never know what could happen. We never know what the day is going to bring. Time is the enemy of this bill, and this process would be adding a lot of time to it. That is the whole point of why Senator Martin wanted this to be done.

As I close, I want to highlight two things. First, we are all in support of fixing these problems for lost Canadians. There are no members on either side of the House who do not want to fix this law and correct the problem there. That is a given.

Second, we oppose the idea of the government taking a private member's bill, expanding it and putting things in there that were never intended to be there by the member who raised the bill. That is something we are very concerned about. We do not want to set a precedent. We do not want to allow the government to come in and pull up someone's bill and do that.

It was great to speak in the House today.

Citizenship and Immigration

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to be joining the debate on this bill. I want to begin by thanking my constituents again for returning me to Parliament to serve them, to speak on their behalf and to bring the voice of Calgarians here to Ottawa, to our national Parliament. Every day, I think about how lucky each and every one of us is, all 338 of us, to be able to represent constituents in the House of Commons and work on their behalf.

I also want to start by saying that I am a Canadian who was born overseas; I happen to be one of those who were naturalized back in 1989. I was able to share that story when I was doing outreach activities on the Island of Montreal. I also talked to many new Canadians about their experiences of coming to Canada. I reminded them all the time that anyone could become a member of Parliament if they make the effort, tell the truth and have the work ethic and dedication. Representing people in this country in a legislative body is a great privilege, and we should never forget that.

I want to go over a few points very quickly, just to give an outline of the trouble I have with what is happening today with this concurrence of a report coming out of the immigration committee. There is the issue of timing and how we have come to this point, where the vote would now be necessary. I want to talk about the mover of this Senate bill, Senator Yonah Martin of British Columbia. I want to talk about Senate Bill S-230, the original piece of legislation, and how Bill S-245 is basically the exact same bill.

I also want to speak briefly to process. This is not an issue related to the substance. I think many people agree on the substance; of course, Conservatives agree because this is a Conservative legislative initiative. It is very simple to understand why Conservatives, for example, would not do something like move amendments to a bill being proposed by a Conservative. It is because we all agree with it. We went before our caucus. We had a presentation. Of course we agree with it; it is a Conservative senator proposing a Conservative idea. That idea is the rightful restoration of Canadian citizenship to a particular group of Canadians, and we are talking about a small group that is affected.

The bill is very simple. It is all on one page. It is a simple idea that would address a specific group. This does not mean that others do not have a case for it to be restored. There is a legislative case for it to be done. However, this particular bill has been in the works in two minority Parliaments now to try to fix it. As we know, minority Parliaments are unpredictable, despite there being an NDP-Liberal coalition. Here, we have a government and an opposition party, and we do not know where one begins and the other one ends. We do not know when there could be an election; that would wipe out all the legislative initiatives being considered by the House and by the Senate.

That is exactly what happened to Bill S-230. When the election was called on August 15, 2021, it wiped out all the legislative initiatives that were under way back then. Bill S-230, dealing with these lost Canadians, had already gone through the Senate. It had one meeting of consideration, with expert testimony being provided by government officials; this was useful in understanding that the contents of the legislation were correct and would in fact fix the situation that we are facing. We heard new testimony and new consideration on Bill S-245.

The timing is the issue that I am hung up on. I do not know when an election could come. I want to expedite a bill like this, with no changes, in order to consider new legislation. The House is always free to do that. Any member of the House or any senator could table a private member's bill. In fact, senators can now legislate faster than we can, which I think is wrong. I hope some government members would agree with me on that. It is a separate legislative idea. Maybe there could be changes to the Standing Orders someday.

I know there is at least one member from Winnipeg who would agree with me that members of the House of Commons should be the ones legislating the most often, and senators should not do so as often or as quickly. Now we have a lottery system, and the Speaker drew the numbers. I am going to remind the Deputy Speaker of this, because I think I drew third from last when he was doing the draw. I really think there should have been a recount. I see another member from Montreal, from one of my alma maters, Concordia, saying that she drew a much better number than I did.

Timing is an issue in this matter. This is a group of lost Canadians who could have their citizenship restored. They would be made whole. If we made no amendments to the bill, once passed through the House of Commons, it would receive royal assent from the Governor General and be made law.

Any amendments we make at committee would then return to the House, and any report stage amendments would delay the passage of the bill. The bill could then go again for another set of reviews. I am sure that senators, when they agreed to pass this bill on an expeditious basis, were passing the original bill, Bill S-230. They were passing a bill they had already considered and debated.

They are going to consider the debate that took place in the House. They are going to review why, for example, government officials before the committee in the House of Commons provided different information than some other government officials, though some of them were the same, at the Senate committee two years ago. They will wonder why the advice was slightly different and why they now have a problem with some of the wording in Bill S-245. They say it does not address the issue as well.

When I looked at the titles of these government officials, they are the exact same positions. Some people have been promoted and some have moved to different positions.

I am sure senators will review the bill. That would be months of extra waiting. As the Senate considers the bill, it will have more witnesses come before the Senate committee, and then with whatever potential amendments the Senate might have, it will send the bill back to the House of Commons. I know I am supposed to call it “the other place”, but I feel Canadians at home should know that this might delay and potentially kill the bill. The bill may not become law if this does not get done.

How did we get to this particular situation? We have a terrific vice-chair on the immigration committee, the member for Saskatoon West, who has been negotiating with the other parties in good faith. It is what I hope the government is doing during the public service strike by PSAC and at their negotiations at the table. The member has been negotiating in good faith and providing information to other parties, such as what our voting position is, what our concerns are and what type of subamendments we would consider.

We were considering some amendments that would strengthen some of the ideas we had heard and had talked about before the committee. The motion that was passed at committee, over our objections, broadens the scope beyond section 8 amendments to Bill S-245. The way I interpreted the motion was that it would mean anything in Bill S-245, the Citizenship Act, and that would be concurred in on a vote in the House of Commons. This sounds to me like a statutory review of Bill S-245, so anything in the Citizenship Act could be done.

There are many things I have heard in my travels across Canada in meeting with both new Canadians and people from families that have lived in Canada for generations. They have issues with the Citizenship Act, such as how citizenship ceremonies are organized, and whether they are done in person or virtually, at a click. Some of those are also around the rules of specific lost Canadians. Is it right to put citizenship ceremonies on certain holidays, which were maybe not as major 40 years ago? Those are all issues that members should be mindful of.

When reading this motion, and I am not burdened by a legal education so I read it like a layman would read it, with the words as they are, and it says that it would go beyond section 8, which means that anything else in the Citizenship Act should be eligible for an amendment. We have an opportunity to help lost Canadians. We also have an opportunity to ensure there are no future lost Canadians, who might have missed a citizenship ceremony because of a holiday, travel or any number of other reasons.

We have come here because other parties have not been forthcoming in explaining their position. At committee, I moved a very reasonable amendment that would have provided more time for to consider new out-of-scope amendments. We have no in-scope amendments because we agreed with the contents of the bill.

It would have been good to have more time on out-of-scope amendments, and then we could have provided the amendments. We could have all had time to consider them within our caucuses. That is what our side does. We have a fulsome debate in our caucus where our members of Parliament and senators come to an agreement on different amendments that we might consider, especially if they are major amendments, such as this seems to be, a statutory review of the Citizenship Act.

We can now take a moment to talk about the mover of this bill, Senator Yonah Martin. I think many members of the House of Commons, and I hope of the other place, the Senate, would say that she is a very non-partisan member, a member who is able to work with all members, regardless of political affiliations, on any number of issues.

She has a big heart for the Korean-Canadian community and for the battle of Kapyong. She is mindful to remind us of the battle of Kapyong and how important it is to Canadians of Korean heritage every single year. She has been of huge assistance not only to Conservatives, but also to Canadians of Korean heritage all over Canada, by connecting them with their civic officials, with Canadian political and civic life, and with community organizations.

She has a bill, which she successfully negotiated through the Senate with no amendments. That is unusual. For many of us, when we put together private members' bills or motions, there is always that potential for amendments to come forward that we were not aware of, or were not considering.

This is a member who, at committee, specifically asked that we not make amendments because of the timing issue I mentioned right at the beginning. This is why I want to bring it up. She specifically said, when asked, that she did not want an expansion of the scope of the bill if it would delay the bill. That is what would happen here. There would be a delay of the bill.

She offered a solution, which was new pieces of legislation. The government can always table government legislation to help these Canadians, which they have identified through our witness process, through the submissions the committee received. That would be entirely okay. We could consider the merits.

The House of Commons has expedited bills in the past. We just did it last week. Portions of the budget were expedited through the House of Commons. It is possible to do these things, especially when there is consensus and we work collaboratively, which I heard a parliamentary secretary talk about.

Many members on that committee will agree that our vice-chair and the Conservatives work collaboratively. We were doing that when this was moved. We were working on a draft report in a committee, and at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration no less. We are more than happy to do that. The immigration committee has done a lot of work exactly in that manner, collaboratively, by everybody being upfront about the positions they will be taking and the concerns we have with amendments and different policy issues, as well as where we are coming from. That is another one.

I wanted to make sure I brought up Bill S-230, which was the original version of the bill, in the previous Parliament, because I want to highlight the fact that, the committee on Bill S-230 in the Senate had one meeting to consider the details of the bill. We are going to be adding on basically new sections on lost Canadians. What I have found about the Citizenship Act, and I know many members will agree, especially those on the immigration committee, is how complicated it is. It is easy to make a mistake on dates, years, months, days and specific words, where we could have individuals lose their ability to pass on their citizenship to their children or grandchildren or not be able to retain it in cases of marriage.

I was born in Communist Poland, a country I always say does not exist anymore. It is a footnote in history. As a Canadian who was not born here, I know that the Citizenship Act is something to be mindful of. All my kids were born in Calgary, so they are not affected directly for things like the first generation rule, but others are. I absolutely recognize that, but there is an opportunity to legislate.

Another senator could put forward another Senate bill to address individuals, and we could again have an expedited debate to push it through the House if we could get to the terms and the words we all agree on. Like I said, in Bill S-245, there were government officials who came before the committee in a previous Parliament to say that this wording is the exact wording to address the issue the senator is concerned about. The same government officials, at least with the same titles from the same department, said it actually needs to be changed because it might not do what one says it would do.

Now we are left with not knowing what types of amendments are going to be brought forward at the committee if this concurrence of the report passes of the motion that came out of the immigration committee. We just do not know. Nobody knows now what amendments will be brought forward, except for the mover of the amendment, who will be at the table behind closed doors, potentially in camera, considering these amendments. It will hopefully all be done in public.

It is important to remember none of the parties will be obliged to provide any new amendments out of scope to be considered. Like I said, there are lots of different situations we could look at.

I always have a Yiddish proverb to share. I was in Montreal at a synagogue on Saturday, a very observant one, and there is a great Yiddish proverb: Hope for miracles, but do not rely on one. It is unpronounceable for me in Yiddish, but it is indeed a good one. I always hope for miracles. I hope we can come to some type of consensus that this bill should be expedited in its current form.

I want to vote for it the way it is right now, and I think those on my benches want to do the same thing. We want to help these lost Canadians and restore, rightfully, their citizenship. There is an opportunity to help others, and that is what I hope this place would be good at. I hope it would be able to come to a consensus on new pieces of legislation that address certain things.

I am serving in my third Parliament, and I think this would set a bad precedent. To go into another member's bill, and over their objections, say that we are going to change their private member's bill or their Senate Bill, the idea they put forward, is a bad precedent.

I know it has happened off and on in the past 10 to 20 years. In those particular cases, the individual members have brought it up to me that it should not have happened that way. I really believe that for members who have an idea that they are bringing forward, we should honour their requests and have a simple up or down vote.

Even Senator Yonah Martin said that, if there are particular technical amendments to the way this legislation is worded that keep the intent and the principle she is trying to address, which is helping this particular group of lost Canadians have their citizenship regained, which is in the summary that is provided for the bill, and it uses the term “regain”, then she was okay with that. However, what we have talked about so far, and what I have heard from the parliamentary secretary and the member of the New Democrats, are things that are potentially far out of the scope of the original intent and principle of the bill. Here I have concerns.

I have expressed those concerns. I have made forceful promises. I intend to keep my forceful promises. I have done so at other committees, which I have been on, whether it be at the PROC committee, where I remember serving with other members to ensure that the intent of motions and bills was retained. Members would have a straight up or down vote on particular subjects, and that made it very clear what we were voting for and against.

Again, I see this as an opportunity. We do not know when the election could come. I do not want to send this back to the Senate. The Senate already has had its say on the matter. It has reviewed this piece of legislation. What I want to do is expedite this bill. I was ready to do that at the first meeting on Bill S-245.

We could have maybe considered some particular amendments that were perhaps on the edge of what would be permissible. Looking to my vice-chair, I think it is fair to say that we were willing to consider them.

We had that conversation with the Liberal benches, and we were forthcoming with what our ideas were, what our concerns were and where we wanted to go. My expectation was that we gave it due consideration. We had received valuable insight, information and ideas from Canadians, both overseas and here, who had expressed concerns with different groups of lost Canadians.

We could have addressed those in other pieces of legislation, and then a senator could take up the case, or a member of any party could take up the case in a private member's bill, although probably not me, because, like I said, the Speaker drew me third from last, I believe. I still remember that, so I will probably not be one of those members.

The House can work collaboratively. I will give another example. On bereavement leave, the Minister of Labour was kind enough to work with me before Christmas, and this was 2021, to insert part of my private members' bill on bereavement leave straight into Bill C-3 and then expedite it through the House.

To the parliamentary secretary's saying that they were hoping we could work collaboratively, well, of course we can. There is even an example where we have done that. It was our shadow minister for labour at the time, the member for Parry Sound—Muskoka, who did it. It can be done, when people come in good faith at the negotiating table and we hammer out a deal. That deal was done before Christmas and Canadians in federal jurisdiction had bereavement leave provisions provided to them.

Those types of situations can happen. I call them legislative miracles, getting back to my Yiddish proverb. Legislative miracles can happen when people want to make change. That was a private member's bill that likely would have never passed. It had drawn such a high number that it would not have been able to pass. I would not have been able to have the opportunity to have it debated.

With that said, I have laid out my case of why we should vote down this report, and I move:

That the House proceed to Presenting Petitions.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I do not have a specific question for the member. It is more of a commentary on what I heard her read to the House to provide the perspective of her party.

I will mention to those listening at home that the member is a parliamentary secretary. The government has known for almost eight years that there were these different groups of lost Canadians. There is always the ability to table government legislation, and I think we will find that a lot of members of this House are willing to consider plugging holes in legislation.

That is exactly what Senator Yonah Martin has been doing in two Parliaments. She was able to convince the Senate to move Bill S-230 through the Senate with one committee hearing to consider the exact same bill we have today, Bill S-245. She was able to do so because she is widely considered to be a non-partisan member and widely considered to be well informed on the subject of the Citizenship Act. Members at that committee voted against my amendment to suggest, if we are going to go beyond the scope, that we give ourselves more time to consider what groups of lost Canadians we could consider and what different situations lost Canadians might find themselves in. I will tell the parliamentary secretary that the Liberal benches voted against my amendment to the motion that brings us here today to debate this concurrence report.

This is about process. We do not know when the next election will come in a minority Parliament, and it very well could be that lost Canadians will have to wait again for another Parliament before this particular group of lost Canadians will have their citizenship restored to them, as it should be.

This is not a question about whether it is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. It is about process. We have a bill and an opportunity to fix something for a particular group of Canadians. We all agree on that, and by doing this, the bill will be sent back to the Senate, and the Senate will thereafter make further considerations and call more witnesses to the committee. That is simply the legislative process.

I know that is difficult for the government to understand. I know it is difficult to have such a thin legislative agenda. However, this situation could have been avoided.

[Don Chapman]

Can I just mention, when Bill S-230 died, it was brought back in the Senate and passed third reading in five days. It was sent to the House and in the first month it was passed. Really, I don't see, if there's an election, that it's going to be any different.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you for that.

Senator Martin, I was going to ask you, if there are amendments made to this bill, and some of them I believe would be perhaps out of scope to the original intent when it was brought here.... Because the Senate didn't consider them—Bill S-230 at the time was considered and was studied at committee, and Bill S-245 was expedited through the Senate because it was the same bill—do you believe senators, your colleagues, will want to do a full review at a Senate committee before passing the bill?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

There were no issues then, but now people of a lower grade.... There was no assistant deputy minister here last week. They said at the Senate two years ago that there was no problem. Now they've raised that there are problems.

Mr. Hallan, since you sit on the finance committee, and you've sat on this committee as well, have you ever heard of a situation where over the years officials have contradictory opinions on the same bill? This is the identical bill. From Bill S-230 to Bill S-245 nothing has changed in the contents, but now there are two opinions on the bill's content.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

You're open to it.

When Bill S-230 was being debated back on June 16, 2021, the most senior officials there were Catherine Scott, assistant deputy minister, settlement and integration, and Alec Attfield, director general, citizenship branch, strategic and program policy. We heard something different from officials here at committee last week. Some of them said that there were equity issues involved.

Did you hear something like that, that there were any problems? Just a quick yes or no would suffice, because I have a question for Mr. Hallan specifically on this.

[Yonah Martin]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, this is the second iteration of the bill. The first one, Bill S-230, died on the Order Paper. I don't even remember the year, but it was a few years ago. This is the second attempt, and it has reached this committee. I'm very pleased we are here, at this stage, and I thank all members for their attention to this bill.

The lost Canadians issue is decades old. As I said, I came across an individual, Don Chapman, with whom, I'm sure, some of you also met. He's quite a champion, because he was a lost Canadian. From that point of view, he has been very tireless. I've been educated through my meetings with him and in looking at some of the details of how we have groups of individuals who became lost and who need to be reinstated.

There are other categories of lost Canadians, for sure. To look at that separately would require government legislation, perhaps—other bills put forward. I know there have been piecemeal attempts in the past as well. For this specific bill, I decided to start with a very small cohort. It made sense, as they had already turned age 28 by the time Bill C-37 came into effect. Therefore, even though it was grandfathered to those who hadn't yet turned 28, those who did were left out.

That seemed like a natural group to address first. I looked at all the other categories, but this one seemed, I'd say, the least contentious or most obvious. That's why, I think, in the Senate, with my Senate colleagues, and before committee, the first time around, we didn't have any officials raising concerns. They just couldn't answer how many people would get captured, should this bill be adopted.

We don't know the exact numbers. The officials before the committee, last week, attempted to answer some of that. That's why it's very focused. I hope this committee and the House can get behind this bill. We are very close.

[Yonah Martin, Senator, British Columbia, C]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good evening, colleagues.

It's a honour for me to speak to you about this Senate public bill. Bill S-245, formerly Bill S-230, is an act to amend the Citizenship Act to permit certain persons who lost their Canadian citizenship to regain citizenship. The bill is about a group of Canadians. I say, “Canadians”, but they are lost Canadians until we are able to reinstate their citizenship rightfully.

I am a proud, naturalized Canadian. I was born in South Korea and first arrived in Vancouver in 1972. I became a citizen five years later. I understand the value, the symbolism and the importance of our citizenship. I come to you today humbly as a naturalized Canadian and someone who came across this important group of lost Canadians and their plight. I know that there are other groups as well, which I have learned, and I've been able to work on them with Don Chapman, who is here as one of the witnesses today. I know that he is a true champion of lost Canadians.

This Senate bill addresses a specific gap in the Citizenship Act to capture a group of Canadians, or lost Canadians, who lost their status or became stateless because of changes to policy.

In 1977, the Citizenship Act added a new provision that applied only to second-generation Canadians born abroad on or after February 15, 1977. In order to keep their citizenship, these individuals had to reaffirm their status before their 28th birthday. This law was passed and then forgotten. The government never published a retention form. There were no instructions on how an individual would reaffirm their Canadian citizenship, and those affected were never told a retention requirement even existed.

In 2009, the Citizenship Act was amended by Bill C-37. It was one of the first government bills that I had a chance to study as a member of the committee that studied Bill C-37. This change saw the age 28 rule repealed entirely. Canadians caught up in the age 28 rule but who had not yet reached the age of 28 were grandfathered in. However, what I didn't fully realize at that time was that Bill C-37 did not include Canadians who were born abroad between 1977 and 1981, essentially those who had already turned 28 before the passage of Bill C-37 in 2009. Today the age 28 retention rule still remains in effect only for those second-generation Canadians born inside a 50-month window from February 15, 1977, to April 16, 1981, those who had already turned 28 when that age 28 rule was repealed through Bill C-37.

Many of these individuals were raised in Canada from a young age. They were born abroad. Some, like me, came to Canada much younger, such as at two months of age. They went to school in Canada, they raised their families in Canada, and they worked and paid taxes in Canada, yet they turned 28 without knowing that their citizenship would be stripped from them because of the change in policy from that previous bill I spoke about. Bill S-245 will allow these Canadians to continue their lives without fear, knowing that they are valued and supported by reinstating them as Canadians.

Again I would like to acknowledge the work of Don Chapman, a tireless advocate and champion for lost Canadians who will appear before you later today.

Colleagues, Bill S-245 received unanimous support in the Senate, and today I invite your support of this bill here in the House of Commons committee.

I would also like to acknowledge MP Jasraj Hallan, the sponsor of the bill in the House of Commons, and thank him for his work and dedication to helping lost Canadians and to this bill, which will reinstate citizenship to a group of lost Canadians who have always been Canadians and rightfully deserve to be given back their citizenship.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention MP Jenny Kwan, who has also been a tireless champion on this particular issue.

Thank you, colleagues.

Citizenship Act

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Madam Speaker, since these are the last speeches before we go spend a week in our ridings and many members have already left the House to go be with their families and constituents, I would like to commend all those stalwart members who are sticking it out to the end. There are not very many of us, judging by the number of empty spaces there were in the parking lot this morning and by how easily I was able to find an EV charging station. There are very few of us here this Friday, but I would say that what we are lacking in numbers, we are making up for in quality.

The last thing we are talking about today before leaving for our last week in our ridings before Christmas is Bill S‑245. I do not really have any kind of an inside scoop to share since my colleague from Lac‑Saint‑Jean already announced just two weeks ago that the Bloc Québécois would be supporting this bill. I like to contradict my colleague from Lac‑Saint‑Jean from time to time just to tease him, but I will limit my teasing to his clothing choices rather than a bill that has such a significant impact on some people's lives. In short, I will also be supporting Bill S‑245.

I think my colleagues have already realized that the Bloc Québécois does not tend to be overly partisan. If a bill is good for Quebec, we vote for it, no matter who introduced it. If it is not good for Quebec, we vote against it. We always explain the reasons for our decision.

Bill S-245 does not really fit in that framework. It is about Canadian citizenship. It affects people who may live in Quebec, our constituents, but it also affects people who may live elsewhere in Canada or even elsewhere in the world. This bill is fundamentally connected to a person's right to Canadian citizenship. While it may seem a little counterintuitive for a Bloc member to defend Canadian citizenship, the principle I am defending today in supporting Bill S‑245 is that no one should have their citizenship arbitrarily taken away just because they have reached the not particularly venerable age of 28.

I would like to start by outlining the contents of this bill and its purpose, but I also want to offer two brief editorial comments about this bill's predecessor, Bill S‑230, and the immigration file in general because no bill should ever be analyzed in a vacuum without context and broader considerations. If we take too narrow a view of this bill in debate, we are likely to miss opportunities to improve not only this bill but also future bills.

Now back to Bill S‑245. What is this bill all about? Bill S‑245 seeks to close a gap, a loophole in the Citizenship Act. The bill concerns a small group of Canadians who lost their Canadian citizenship or have actually become stateless due to government policy changes over time. This small group of Canadians is called “lost Canadians”, and there are about 100 to 200 of them.

Here is a little background information. The federal Parliament passed its first citizenship legislation in 1947, but it was flawed from the beginning. Citizenship was not considered a guaranteed right at the time, but rather a discretionary power of Parliament. For instance, although it was set out that the children of a Canadian parent would also be Canadian, under this system, when the responsible parent took the citizenship of another country, his or her children lost their Canadian citizenship.

Furthermore, the legislation provided that children born abroad would receive citizenship only if their parents registered them within two years of their birth. It also included an obligation for these children to be domiciled in Canada on their 24th birthday if they were born to a Canadian parent who was born outside Canada. This meant that many individuals, even if they lived in Canada for part of their lives, may have unknowingly lost their citizenship status.

Finally, the legislation discriminated against certain children based on the circumstances of their birth. In order to have Canadian citizenship under the law, a child had to be born to married parents. The main purpose of the 1977 amendment was to simplify the citizenship regime. Once again, however, the amendments were far from perfect.

Although the new legislation did away with the requirement to file an application for a child within two years of their birth and stopped discriminating between children born to a married couple and those born to a common-law couple, it continued to differentiate between children born to a Canadian parent who was born in Canada and those born to a Canadian parent who was born abroad.

Under the 1977 legislation, Canadians who were second-generation or more and were born to parents who were born abroad were required to submit an application in order to keep and confirm their Canadian citizenship.

The legislation required these Canadians to apply by their 28th birthday or they would automatically lose their Canadian citizenship. One of the problems was that, having repealed the requirement for parents to register their children before they turned two, the government no longer had a list it could use to inform the citizens in question that they needed to confirm their citizenship before their 28th birthday. Some of these people who were born abroad returned to Canada, grew up here, worked here, raised a family here, and paid taxes here, all while oblivious to what they needed to do before their 28th birthday in order to avoid losing their citizenship.

Some criticized the government for not doing enough to publicize this requirement both here and abroad, so that citizens would be aware that their citizenship could be taken away. It is said that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that does not mean that a citizen must be familiar with all existing laws. Immigration laws are particularly impenetrable.

In short, many people born while the 1947 law or the 1977 law was in force were at risk of losing their citizenship at some point in their lives without even being notified. They might only find out when they applied for a passport. They are the ones who came to be called the lost Canadians.

This situation came to light largely through the efforts of Don Chapman, a former United Airlines pilot who brought their plight to the attention of the public. Don Chapman discovered that he had lost his citizenship when his father had emigrated to the United States. He demonstrated that this problem affected many Canadians, even some as well known as Roméo Dallaire, and forced the government's hand.

If we think about it, these people suffered the same fate as those whose citizenship is revoked, which happens only if someone committed fraud, made a false representation or knowingly concealed information material to an immigration or citizenship application. This same extreme punishment was being meted out to people who had committed no offence whatsoever.

To remedy the situation, Canada adopted a series of legislative reforms in 2005, 2009 and 2015. Those three attempts notwithstanding, some people still slipped through the cracks. Despite being reformed three times, the act still requires people born between February 15, 1977, and April 16, 1981, to reapply for citizenship before they turn 28.

I am confident that this bill will pass unanimously, and at this point I would like to offer my first editorial comment on the bill's background. In the last Parliament, an identical bill, Bill S‑230, was passed unanimously in the Senate, but it did not have time to get to the House because the government called an election in the summer.

When the election was called, what I told my constituents who complained about the cost of the election, which members will recall was estimated at over $600 million, is that there were even more serious but lesser-known costs associated with the election and that was the cost of all the work that was done on a whole pile of bills in the House and committee that ended up being for nothing. Unfortunately, Bill S‑245 is another glaring example of that.

My second editorial comment is about the government's management of immigration in general. As we see here, many reforms were necessary to solve the problem and many citizens have been left in the dark for years. Nothing has changed, and the machine is still broken.

Despite all that, the government is announcing that, because of the labour shortage, it wants to increase the number of newcomers to 500,000 a year, when it is already incapable of managing passports, when applications for permanent residency are piling up and taking forever to be processed, and when it is almost impossible to get a work permit in 12 to 13 months.

When I ask businesses in my riding what would really help them with their workforce issues, the answer is not for the government to add 500,000 people to the waiting list. The answer is for the government to start managing the applications that are already in the pile more effectively.

Simply put, there is no shortage of problems for the immigration department to fix, and Bill S‑245 addresses one of them.

I would like to conclude by humbly inviting the government to finish the work of fixing and improving the immigration department before even considering getting involved in any new project.

[Ya'ara Saks, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Families]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to Bill S-245, seeking to make amendments to the Citizenship Act and address concerns raised on past citizenship.

I would first like to extend my thanks to Senator Yonah Martin for her advocacy and for bringing forward this bill, as well as its predecessor, Bill S-230. I would also like to thank the member for Calgary Forest Lawn for sponsoring this bill and giving us a chance to speak about it in the chamber.

In 1977, Canada introduced a new Citizenship Act to replace the one from 1947 and amend our citizenship rules. It maintained that individuals born outside of Canada to a Canadian parent or grandparents were citizens as well. However, as was the case since 1947, there were conditions.

Canadians born abroad in the second generation or beyond had to file an application to retain their citizenship. The 1977 act required these Canadians to do so before they turned 28 years old. Failure to do so meant they would lose their Canadian citizenship automatically on their 28th birthday.

The legislation also made another critical administrative change. Canadians who had children abroad no longer had to register their children born outside of Canada for their children to qualify as citizens. This change, removing the requirement for registration of births abroad, meant the government did not collect the names of children born overseas to Canadian citizens. It also meant there was no list of Canadians born abroad in the second generation or beyond who needed to take steps to retain their citizenship.

Some of these individuals born abroad ultimately moved back and grew up in Canada, totally unaware that they had to take steps to retain their citizenship status before their 28th birthday, and because the government did not have a list of who was affected, there was no way to inform a born-abroad Canadian citizen in advance or prompt them to take the steps they needed to take in order to retain their citizenship before they turned 28 years old.

It has been noted that the government of the day could have made more information available in Canada and abroad so that Canadians with children born abroad were aware and could know they needed to take action. When these children turned 28, if they had not taken the required steps, they automatically lost their citizenship and may not have even known it.

The issue of automatic loss of Canadian citizenship for those born abroad in the second generation or beyond would come up only when something would trigger a review or a confirmation of their citizenship. In certain cases, they found it when they applied to work overseas, sought a military commission or a security clearance, or even just applied for a replacement citizenship certificate.

In 2009, the Citizenship Act was amended to address this issue and simplify the rules around citizenship. The 2009 amendments removed the requirement to apply to retain citizenship by age 28 for those born abroad to a Canadian parent in the second generation or beyond.

At the same time, the Citizenship Act replaced those rules with a first-generation limit, something that is quite personal, as I explained here to the member. It is a citizenship by descent, which meant that automatic Canadian citizenship by descent could be passed down for only one generation by a Canadian parent who was either born in or naturalized in Canada.

This first-generation limit remains in place today. Children born to a Canadian parent outside of Canada in the first generation are automatically Canadian citizens from birth. However, children born abroad to a Canadian parent in the second generation, where the Canadian parent was also born abroad or beyond are no longer automatically Canadian. As I mentioned, in families like mine, suddenly not everyone is equal, and this is why discussion, debate and careful thought are really needed on this bill as we go on through the evening.

Citizens like my daughter can apply to come to Canada and become citizens through our immigration and citizenship programs. The 2009 changes also ensured that anyone who was born after the 1977 legislation but had not yet turned 28 when the changes took place was allowed to maintain their status, was not required to file an application, and remained a Canadian citizen.

In 2009, and then again in 2015, the government introduced a number of amendments to the Citizenship Act to restore citizenship to groups of people who had lost their citizenship or who had never become citizens in the first place because of the rules in the first Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947, which we now recognize was discriminatory.

These people are known as the “lost Canadians”. Between 2009 and 2015 approximately 17,500 individuals came forward and were issued proofs of Canadian citizenship related to the amendments to the act.

From the 2015 amendments, another 600 cases came forward and received proof of their Canadian citizenship as a result. However, there is a remaining group of those who refer to themselves as lost Canadians. Those are persons born outside of Canada in the second or later generations who had already turned 28 before the 2009 changes and had already lost their citizenship due to the old rules that required them to apply to retain their Canadian citizenship before their 28th birthday.

We know this has impacted those who were born abroad in the second generation between 1977 and 1981, but there is no way to tell for certain how many people make up this cohort. We do know it is a limited group. It does not impact anyone born after 1981. Those Canadians could not have yet turned 28 before the 2009 legislation was passed. It does not include anyone born before February 1977, when the changes were made to set the 28-year-old retention requirement. It is only a limited group of people who were born between February 1977 and April 1981 and did not take the steps to retain their citizenship before turning 28 years old and were born abroad to a Canadian parent in the second or subsequent generation.

Bill S-245 represents a remedy for this group of lost Canadians. However, a possible solution already exists for this group. The Citizenship Act provides the minister with the discretionary authority to grant citizenship on a case-by-case basis. It is used to alleviate cases of special and unusual hardship or to reward services of an exceptional nature to Canada. To date, IRCC has granted citizenship to approximately 130 individuals affected by the former age 28 rule through this use of the minister's special discretionary authority. The department receives an average of 35 to 40 requests per year related to the former age 28 rule.

As members of this House review Bill S-245, I believe it is very important that they take the appropriate time, effort and care. Anyone who has spent time in the chamber can likely recall reviewing issues, omissions or oversights that can come from legislation that was drafted with good intentions, but where amendments that were missing a critical detail or consideration led to unintended consequences, such as in my own family.

In particular, on the issue of lost Canadians, history has shown us that making hasty changes can lead to the creation of new cohorts of people who may subsequently consider themselves lost Canadians. As lawmakers, we should ensure that legislation addresses the problem and does not create a bigger issue than the one we are already trying to solve. The legislation seeks to address such an issue. For example, bestowing citizenship on individuals who live in another country descended from a Canadian and who never sought to be a Canadian may create unintended problems for them. I note that the bill includes a simplified renunciation process as a result, which would be a very important element to have in place.

We should put in the required effort to get this right. I encourage the members of this House to be thorough and thoughtful in their work and to speak with legislative experts, department officials and citizenship experts. We should be looking carefully at how the legislation needs to be written and do our homework so that there are no unintended consequences. Rather than compounding one problem with a new one, I hope the House can work together to maintain the integrity of our citizenship system.

Once again, I would like to thank Senator Martin for bringing this bill forward and advocating for lost Canadians, who we all agree should be brought back into the Canadian family. I hope the senator, the member for Calgary Forest Lawn and all members of the House can work together to resolve some of the challenges.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

moved that Bill S-245, An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (granting citizenship to certain Canadians), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill S-245, an act to amend the Citizenship Act (granting citizenship to certain Canadians).

I want to thank the hon. senator from British Columbia, Yonah Martin, who brought forward this important bill. She introduced this originally as Bill S-230 in the last Parliament in the other place to address the lost Canadians whose citizenship was revoked without their knowledge and without warning simply because of the wording in the Citizenship Act.

I am excited to hear from the member for Souris—Moose Mountain, who will be sharing his experience of almost being a lost Canadian. If he chooses to do so, maybe he can share a picture of the card he carries around.

While Bill S-230 passed unanimously through the other place in the 43rd Parliament, the unnecessary and selfish election of 2021 killed the bill before it could get to first reading here. That is why I was happy and hopeful to see it pass unanimously once again in the Senate and reach second reading here in this place.

I want to thank Senator Martin for her continued work on this file, along with former Senate Speaker the hon. Noël Kinsella and former senators David Tkachuk and Art Eggleton, as well as Mr. Don Chapman. He has worked tirelessly with our colleagues in the other place to advocate for lost Canadians and this much-needed change to the Citizenship Act.

Canadians who lost their status or become stateless because of these changes to the act are Canadians in every way except technically under the law. They pay their taxes, contribute to their communities and uphold the values of what it means to live in our beautiful country.

From 1947 to 1977, the law of the land was that children born abroad received citizenship only if their parents registered them within two years of their birth. In addition, their parents must have also given birth to them in wedlock, with at least one of the parents being a Canadian.

In 1977, the then government introduced a new Citizenship Act, changing the law so that children born abroad on or after February 14, 1977, received their Canadian citizenship if one of their parents was a Canadian citizen, regardless of their marital status. However, if the Canadian parent was also born abroad, a child had until turning 28 to apply to keep their citizenship. If they did not, it would be taken away.

When the law passed in 1977, the government made no effort to inform Canadians affected by this change. No form was published, no instructions were given on how someone could reaffirm their citizenship and no one affected was told that this requirement even existed.

Finally, in 2009, Bill C-37 was brought in by the Conservative government to make changes to the Citizenship Act to rectify past mistakes. When it came into effect, the rules for citizenship changed for people born outside Canada to Canadian parents who were not already Canadian citizens. The changes saw the age 28 rule repealed, and Canadians caught up in the rule previously who had not yet reached that age were grandfathered into the amended law. However, the wording of Bill C-37 created an unfortunate gap for a small group of Canadians who were born between 1977 and 1981. Those who turned 28 before Bill C-37 became law in 2009 were also excluded.

In the committee review of this bill at the Senate's social affairs committee, senators asked IRCC officials how this could take place, what was being done to inform those who did not know they were lost and why the government was not being proactive in finding them. The answer from the IRCC officials was, “It’s fair to say that given the small number of applications...we are not out looking for Lost Canadians.” In reality, IRCC relies on lost Canadians to figure out they were stripped of their citizenship due to bureaucracy and paperwork.

Some lost Canadians knew about the change and either applied to keep their Canadian citizenship or let it lapse. These are Canadians who in many cases were raised here, who grew up attending school here and who have worked here their whole adult lives. These are Canadians who started families in this country and paid their taxes on time, but for one small change to the wording of the Citizenship Act, they lost their Canadian citizenship. When they turned 28, there was no letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada and there was no warning. It was just gone.

All of us in this place know that Canadian citizenship is not identified by each person as one tangible idea. On the contrary, it is deeply personal to each of us. It makes up our identity and sense of belonging to a broader idea. For my community and me, Canadian citizenship is a goal. It is a marker for achieving the Canadian dream.

Being an immigrant myself and coming to Canada when I was five, I experienced first-hand the journey to achieving citizenship. My family grew up economically in poverty, lining up in the rain for low-income bus passes and having both parents working jobs just to survive. My family always had that goal to reach for Canadian citizenship. I saw my parents work themselves to the bone for my family. Because of their hard work, my brother, sister and I are where we are today. We achieved our dream of Canadian citizenship after having to work hard day and night, coming from little and knowing that the road is not easy. However, we know that the blood, sweat and tears we experienced on that journey were worth it. We are Canadian citizens.

That is why, standing here as a member of Parliament, I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose one's citizenship arbitrarily, especially for those who worked hard and even served in uniform for this country, to one day lose something they believed so much in. This is not just an issue for the many people this bill would help to reinstate citizenship to; it is an issue for all of us. As Canadians and representatives of Canadians, it is our responsibility to help preserve what it means to be a citizen of this country and fundamentally what it means to be a Canadian.

I ask my fellow colleagues to do the right thing and support this bill to reinstate citizenship for lost Canadians.

Message from the Senate

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I have the honour to inform the House that a message has been received from the Senate informing this House that the Senate has passed Bill S-230, an act to amend the Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to certain Canadians, to which the concurrence of the House is desired.