Bill C-71 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2024)

This enactment amends the Citizenship Act to, among other things,
(a) ensure that citizenship by descent is conferred on all persons who were born outside Canada before the coming into force of this enactment to a parent who was a citizen;
(b) confer citizenship by descent on persons born outside Canada after the first generation, on or after the coming into force of this enactment, to a parent who is a citizen and who had a substantial connection to Canada before the person’s birth;
(c) allow citizenship to be granted under section 5.1 of that Act to all persons born outside Canada who were adopted before the coming into force of this enactment by a parent who was a citizen;
(d) allow citizenship to be granted under section 5.1 of that Act to persons born outside Canada who are adopted on or after the coming into force of this enactment by a parent who is a citizen and who had a substantial connection to Canada before the person’s adoption;
(e) restore citizenship to persons who lost their citizenship because they did not make an application to retain it under the former section 8 of that Act or because they made an application under that section that was not approved; and
(f) allow certain persons who become citizens as a result of the coming into force of this enactment to access a simplified process to renounce their citizenship.

Citizenship Act

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I understand the need to present a new piece of legislation, but this is not a new piece; it is a cut and paste of the old piece. The member knows very well that this has gone through committee in the past, with both Bill C-71 and the Senate bill, Bill S-245. The member also knows very well that for us to consider legislation to fix what he is saying and address the issue of the court ruling, we need to fix this legislation.

With the way it is written, it is bad legislation. It needs to be fixed because we cannot give citizenship out in perpetuity with the excuse that somehow we have to address a court decision. Yes, there is a court decision, but even more important now is to ensure that we put in place a piece of legislation that would resolve the very issues we are talking about here today.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to this piece of legislation this evening here in the House.

After 10 years of the tired Liberal government, our immigration system is broken. I say that somewhat with a heavy heart because I look across at my colleagues and I know they like to be referred to as a new government. It is anything but new. What the Liberals have done is they have played musical chairs with their front bench. Most of them are the same people, just in different positions. The same goes for the parliamentary secretaries; they are the same people.

The system is broken, obviously for even a better reason than just them playing their musical chairs. Over the past 10 years of the Trudeau Liberals, because that is who they are, they have had seven ministers of citizenship and immigration. I am sure that is a historic first if we look back in the history of Parliament. They have had seven. Basically, they have not been able to find a competent person to handle the file, which has resulted in the dilemma we have today.

They often refer to the previous Conservative government with the great former prime minister Stephen Harper. We had a plan. I am the former parliamentary secretary to the minister of citizenship and immigration in the Harper government. We had a plan.

Our plan was predicated on the following: 65% of newcomers coming to Canada would have to come through our economic streams. This would be someone who had some working knowledge of either of the two official languages of the country and had a skill or a profession, something they could do where they could contribute to their families and to Canadian society from day one when they arrived in Canada. We had understandably set aside 25% for family reunifications, recognizing the importance of keeping families together, and we had set aside 10% for compassionate streams such as asylum seekers and refugees.

In all of that, we had a reasonable and sustainable number of people we would welcome into Canada on an annual basis. In came the Trudeau Liberals, these Liberals we are now facing across the aisle in their third minority government in a row, and out goes this plan and in comes helter-skelter, as far as managing the entire immigration file is concerned.

Today's asylum backlog, for example, stands at over 280,000 people as of March 31 of just this year, which translates to a four-year wait for asylum backlog. These are people who are waiting to get a response. Almost 29,000 people have failed to appear for their removal proceedings, and they cannot be located in the country, because there is no system in place for that to happen.

This is what happens when we have no plan, no control and no semblance of organization on how we should manage a ministry of the Crown. The government planned to cap study permits in 2024, and then blew right past their cap by over 30,000 people. In fact, in 2024, if we add all the streams together, over a million people came to Canada at a time when we have a housing crisis, we have a job crisis, our young people cannot find work and there are 1,500 encampments just in the province of Ontario alone. People cannot find a place to live.

I would argue that when we welcome people to our country, we should provide them with opportunities, opportunities like my parents had when they came here from Greece. When they came here, they worked hard. They got a good paycheque, which afforded them the opportunity to buy a home and grow their family.

Those opportunities and that Canadian dream, under these Liberals, have gone completely out the window. These Liberals have eroded the trust in our immigration system, and under their watch, wait times for application processing is completely out of control. Now, they want to add to the chaos.

I believe being a Canadian citizen is one of the greatest privileges one can have. Canadians died for the rights and privileges afforded to our citizens. Some of us may take that for granted on a daily basis, but 66,000 brave men lost their lives in the First World War, 44,000 brave soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War, 516 people lost their lives in the Korean effort, another 159 people lost their lives in Afghanistan and 29 in Cyprus and other efforts around the world. They lost their lives for those rights and privileges that we have today, and we need to take that seriously.

We have a responsibility, when we bestow that Canadian citizenship, that huge privilege, on somebody. It means something. We do not water that down.

Canadians have the right to vote. I would argue that people who have a right to vote should have contributed or contribute to this country, as many of our families do and as Canadians do from coast to coast to coast on a daily basis.

Now, Bill C-3, the bill we are discussing, weakens Canadian citizenship by eliminating that first-generation limit, allowing parents born abroad to pass citizenship to their children born abroad, generation after generation, as long as one parent has spent 1,095 non-consecutive days in Canada prior to the birth of the child. That does not mean 1,095 days in the last five years, which is the standard today for a permanent resident to become a Canadian citizen. It is just 1,095 days in their life.

A student who came to Canada, studied, spent three years here, obtained a Canadian citizenship, left the country and grew a family somewhere else can bestow that citizenship to their child born in that country, in perpetuity, to grandchildren and so forth, without ever having lived another day in our country. That does not make sense to Canadians who worked hard to earn that right of citizenship.

Like many colleagues in the House, I have attended citizenship ceremonies. What a huge privilege it was and what an emotional experience it was for me to be there because it brought me back to thoughts of my parents when they came to this country. It is always meaningful for the people who are being bestowed with citizenship on that day. There is nothing more emotional for me in speeches that I have given on the subject, than that day when a citizenship judge affords me the opportunity to say a few words. My closing comment, when I look at the crowd of 30, 40 or sometimes 50 people obtaining Canadian citizenship that day, are, “Welcome to the Canadian family”, knowing very well that those folks had come here, worked hard, done all of the right things, waited their time and earned the right and privilege of Canadian citizenship.

We should not look at this legislation without considering the importance and the value of Canadian citizenship. The government has not completed a cost analysis, nor has it told Canadians the number of new citizens that Bill C-3 would create or the cost to taxpayers, especially in health care, pensions and so forth. When we ask Liberals the questions, they say that they do not know, that they are not certain and that they cannot put a number on it.

Any other time, the Liberals would look at the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report and recite those numbers with glee. This time, the Liberals have conveniently decided they are not going to refer, at all, to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who has said that this is going to affect some 115,000 people, at the very least, and initially cost Canadians $21 million. Why the Liberals are choosing to ignore the Parliamentary Budget Officer's analysis is perplexing, to say the least. I am sure the Speaker is having difficulty understanding the reasons why as well, because no reasonable person could come up with a logical answer to that question.

Worse, there would be no criminal check required for new citizens. The government requires criminal background checks for other immigration processes, so why would it not want to do that for this stream of people who they are suggesting come in through Bill C-3. It makes no sense. I would argue that a primary responsibility of a responsible government of any country is the safety and the security of its citizens.

Canadian families need to know that when they take their children to school, to a shopping mall, to a community centre or to a park, the people walking beside them have been properly vetted and are law-abiding residents and citizens of this country. However, the bill does not provide for that background check.

Not vetting individuals coming into the country raises a lot of questions, but it is in line with the Liberals' soft-on-crime policies that we have seen over the years. The Liberals appear really comfortable with potentially allowing people convicted of serious crimes such as rape, murder and terrorism to gain citizenship and have the opportunity to be in our communities. As bizarre as that sounds, if I were a Liberal member of Parliament, God forbid, I would ask, “Why would I not want to do a background check on people coming into the country?”

A 30-year-old who has never lived here before but is the son of somebody who has been out of the country would find out that the Liberals have passed a bill, and they could automatically become a Canadian citizen. They could come to Canada as a Canadian citizen with no background check. That is amazing. That does not make sense to me, and I can assure members that it does not make sense to my constituents of Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill. I represent one of the more diverse communities in the country, and I am positive it does not make sense to Canadians anywhere in this beautiful country of ours.

The people I feel most for are the immigrants who went through the traditional immigration processes. These immigrants went through vetting, proved they had a connection to Canada and did the hard work to acquire the privileges and rights bestowed upon them as Canadian citizens. Under the bill before us, their citizenship would become weaker.

To summarize some of these points, the government cannot tell us how many new citizens the bill would create. It cannot tell us the cost. Of course, the Liberals do not want to talk about cost. They recently put through a throne speech and have decided to spend half a trillion dollars without presenting a budget in Parliament so we can debate and discuss it.

Speaking of debating and discussing, I have heard Liberal members come up to the microphone, stand up in their spot and tell us that if we have amendments to Bill C-3, we should bring them to committee. They appear to be saying that they are amenable to looking at some reasonable amendments to the bill. Well, we can be forgiven for questioning the veracity and, really, the honesty of those comments because of a previous rendition of the bill. This is not a new bill. The Liberals purport to be a new government, but this is a cut-and-paste bill. This is Bill C-71 cut and pasted into Bill C-3.

To new members of Parliament elected on all sides of the House, the Liberals are saying, “Never mind, just take our word for it. It's good because we discussed it in the previous Parliament.” That makes no sense because that legislation died when Parliament was stopped and then reached its end of life to go into an election. Members of Parliament should have a right to review it.

When one of those previous renditions, Bill S-245, came up for debate, there were no fewer than 40 amendments moved by Conservative members, all of which the Liberal-NDP coalition of the day voted against. They did not want to consider any one of the 40, and now they want us to look at this bill and say, “We'll take it to committee and consider it, and thank you for allowing us to present some amendments.” Well, we know the record of my dear friends across the aisle on amendments, and we know how much consideration they will give them.

Current citizens who were born in Canada or immigrants who went through other processes to become citizens would definitely have their citizenships weakened with this proposed legislation. There is no plan to process the new applications in an already backlogged, broken system, and the government does not know the scale of the impact or, if they do know, are not willing to share it with Parliament. The question is simply this: Why are the Liberals doing this? Quite frankly, I am not surprised.

Over the last 10 years, the Liberals have continuously weakened Canada's immigration system and how we are perceived on the world stage. It is completely irresponsible to allow hundreds of thousands of immigrants into Canada, given the current challenges in the housing market. In fact, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, in its May 2025 report, linked record immigration to worsening housing affordability. We know what that means in all of our communities across the country, irrespective of whether people want to stand up in this place and try to defend that somehow.

Taxpayers have spent billions of dollars housing asylum seekers in hotels. The CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, acknowledges that we need some 3.5 million more homes by 2030 to provide shelter for people who are already here. Here we are wanting to add to that, with a number we do not know. The government is not telling us. It is adding hundreds of thousands of new people into a housing market that is already undersupplied, overpriced and unfair to all who are trying to afford housing, especially our young people who have done everything right and cannot afford to buy a home in the community they grew up and would love to grow a family in.

The job picture also looks a lot less rosy. Our youth cannot land entry-level jobs. Youth unemployment is at 20% in some parts of the country. Unemployment rose to 7% overall in May, the highest rate since the pandemic. Forecasts show that Canada may shed another 100,000 jobs by the fall. The government is adding hundreds of thousands of new people into a job market that is already at its weakest point in years. It is simply reckless.

The Liberal government must create an environment in which new immigrants and Canadians can succeed. That is not happening currently. I have heard stories from my riding in which immigrants who came here 10 years ago are now considering leaving Canada, because the promise they were made has been broken by the Liberal government.

The bill also touches upon children who are adopted internationally. That is something very close to me and very dear to my heart. Back in 1993, my wife and I flew to Guatemala City, where we had the honour and the privilege of meeting our children for the first time. My family came together by something called the miracle of adoption. Therefore, I applaud that the bill recognizes that those children who come into the country will become Canadian citizens. Nothing felt more unwieldy to my wife and me when we arrived in Canada and had to wait a period of time before our infant children, a biological brother and sister, could become Canadian citizens. This bill will correct that, which I applaud.

As my colleagues on this side of the House have said previously, I am glad it is resolving the issue of lost Canadians as well.

It has been 10 years, and our immigration system is in shambles. The Liberals are welcoming hundreds of thousands of new immigrants in a housing crisis, a health care crisis and a deteriorating job market. What is worse, the basics, such as processing applications, are taking much longer, and backlogs continue to persist. The government promises to fix issues that continue to be broken. It is just not fulfilling its promises.

In the last minute I have, I want to say that it is just more of the same. The Liberals want to pass a bill that would add to that chaos, of course, cost taxpayers more and weaken everyone's citizenship.

Only common-sense Conservatives will restore order and integrity to our immigration and citizenship system by tightening requirements, clearing backlogs, streamlining processing, respecting the will of the folks who want to come to Canada through normal immigration channels, welcoming them and giving them every opportunity to succeed in our great country.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague who just gave a barnburner of a speech and a clinic to everybody in this House about what is wrong with this legislation. I will try to follow that.

Before I do that, I want to thank everybody who is participating in this Parliament today, but I also want to thank everybody who got us here, specifically the volunteers in Calgary Centre who did a really good job in making sure we have good representation continuing in Calgary Centre. I will do my utmost for my constituents, to make sure their opinions and input are represented well in this House of Commons. I thank the volunteers, of course, and my family and my wife. I thank them all for everything they did to make sure we brought good government back to this side of the House to make sure we hold the government to account, because frankly, I think it is the same old government even though its members protest that it is new. It does not seem like any of its actions are new.

That leads us to today's legislation. Bill C-3 is a carbon copy of Bill C-71 from the last Parliament, and it got stuck every step of the way because of exactly what we are talking about today. There are big holes in this legislation, and the government knows that. The government has put another bill on the table that we get to spend time talking about in this House of Commons when we really should be dealing with things that are much further up the rank in importance. Frankly, we should be talking about the economy, the nation's debt or what we have to do to get projects built in this country again. However, the government is obsessed with repeating the same mistakes it made before.

I am a little surprised that this topic comes up so high on the Liberals' agenda. I was on the immigration committee last session, and this one is back here again. We always thought the Liberals were just trying to co-opt the party that used to be known as the New Democratic Party by making sure they were spinning their wheels and continuing to gain their support. Evidently not, though, because I am not sure the Liberals need the seven votes that are independent over here now because the NDP failed to maintain party status as a result of being the Liberal Party's lapdog for the last three and a half years. It is embarrassing, quite frankly, but this is a game, and this game cannot continue.

If we want good legislation, we have to put good legislation forward. It is our job, as His Majesty's loyal opposition, to make sure we bring forth the problems we see in this bill, and there are numerous problems. We have pointed them out for the last couple of years and said what the Liberals have to change.

I have listened to speeches here from the members across the way today, and it is almost like they are living in an illusion. There are talking points. They are making things up. They are given Liberal talking points and told to just go out there and say them. It does not have to be the truth. It does not have to be based on reality. It just has to be the Liberal talking points. It is all presentation and absolutely zero substance about how this is going to affect the country. I will go through this in a number of ways.

We have the government and the deputy government House leader on the other side. He may be the chief government whip or deputy government whip. I am not sure what position he has been shuffled to at this point; I apologize. Effectively, what we are talking about here is a new government that is just a change of socks from the old government at this point. This is disastrous, but it goes back a long way.

One thing we have always been clear about on this side of the House is that there was a gap in the actual admissibility of Canadians that the previous law had. That was being dealt with. I will get to that later in my speech, about how we were dealing with that, and how the government and the department of immigration were dealing with that without this broad legislation coming in to suddenly change and upend the world.

Conservatives support fixing the issue of lost Canadians. I cannot say how many times I have heard over on the other side that Conservatives are opposed to this. That is a talking point. Conservatives absolutely support the issue of lost Canadians and making sure they become Canadian citizens. We think there are around 20,000 eligible Canadians who are not eligible right now because they have fallen through the cracks of what the previous legislation said were Canadians.

Senator Yonah Martin put forward a bill to address exactly that. It was Bill S-245; that is the numbering they have over in the Senate. It took a targeted approach to make sure those wrongs were righted and that these people did have a pathway to Canadian citizenship, and it was very clear.

Bill C-3 goes way beyond fixing the holes. It goes way beyond any sanity as far as how a developed nation's immigration system is supposed to go through a process when we are bringing people into this country. It is a sweeping overhaul. It opens the door to abuse and weakens the very meaning of what it means to be a new Canadian.

First, this bill would eliminate the first-generation limit on citizenship for children born abroad. Under this bill, anyone born outside Canada to a Canadian parent, regardless of how many generations removed they are, could claim citizenship if that parent spent 1,095 non-consecutive days in Canada. What does that mean? If we count the years, that is three years of, effectively, maybe visiting family three months at a time or whatever the case may be, and suddenly they are Canadian. That is less than three years, with no requirement for consecutive presence and no criminal background check. Effectively, people would be getting around what is a very important and very highly considered international requirement for becoming a citizen in almost any country. Can we get an international background check on this? Can we have some police check? No, this person would automatically be a Canadian citizen.

I do not know why that is a point of contention. Perhaps it is because breaking the system and then bringing it back in front of this House in two years' time, if the Liberals manage to push this bill through with some support, would be something that occupies the House's time. There would be some more and some more, as opposed to dealing with the issues one time, fixing everything right and getting it done.

This bill does not provide a substantial connection to being Canadian. It is a loophole. It would allow for multi-generational flow-through citizenship to people who may never have lived in Canada, paid taxes here or contributed to our society in any meaningful way. It is an open door, telling people they get to come to Canada because they have a long-term, long-ago connection, that they have, effectively, been able to passport shop and come here.

I am going to go into the last prime minister's statement about how we got here and what we are doing here. This is what people call the postnational state. I say the previous prime minister, but as I say, the new government seems no different from the old government. “Postnational state” refers to a perspective that acknowledges the diminishing importance of the nation-state, Canada, and national identity in favour of global, regional and local entities. It does not mean the end of nationalism, but rather a shift in focus and power dynamics where supranational organizations, multinational corporations and globalized culture play increasingly significant roles.

What does “supranational organizations” mean? A supranational organization is like the United Nations, many nations. We talk about multinational corporations. What is a multinational corporation? Well, Brookfield would be a multinational corporation because it has holdings in many companies. There can be a government that, maybe, has some considerable expertise in these areas and a shiny new face that was both head of a United Nations body and also head of Brookfield. This is part of what we are drifting down.

The whole thing about looking at a postnational state suggests that national identity and loyalty are becoming less central as other forms of belonging and identity gain prominence. If we are going to have an open door to coming into Canada, effectively Canadian citizenship will mean less, and I do not think Canadian citizenship means less at all. We also have postnational citizenship, the idea that citizenship is no longer solely defined by national borders and that new forms of participation and belonging are emerging.

Now, I am the great-grandchild of Canadian immigrants on one side and the great-great-great-great-grandchild of Canadian immigrants on the other side. That makes me a Canadian. I can tell everyone here that my family has contributed to building this country, as every Canadian immigrant family has all the way along. We build and grow this country, and we are proud of this country and the contributions made by everybody who comes here and makes sure they build lives here, build families here, seek opportunities here and develop this great country into what it could be. To change that, where somebody can get Canadian citizenship very easily, cheapens the work we have done, everything we have accomplished in this country and what we build here for all generations.

It would be a loophole, as we have said, and it needs to be fixed. It needs to be addressed, because if it is not addressed this time, it will have to come back to the House and get addressed another time.

What do I mean by that? This is my third term as a parliamentarian. I have seen a number of ministers of immigration, and it has been an absolute disaster. Canada went from being a country where about 350,000 people, maximum, were new immigrants per year, to 1.2 million per year, for two years. I can tell members pretty clearly that it had no connection with the reduced health care that occurred across Canada and with the reduced housing that occurred, the housing crisis and the health care crisis. Those have no connection, because we can increase demand without necessarily increasing supply, if we do not believe in actual economic rules.

However, all Canadians face this because of a more or less disastrous policy. As a result, one minister got shuffled out, and then the next minister came in and reversed many of those policies. There was an impact from that reversal. That reversal caused this: A whole bunch of people had been given expectations about what the path to becoming a Canadian would be, and all of a sudden that changed. That changed whether someone was in a post-secondary institution or just on their pathway to becoming a Canadian citizen. All of a sudden, new roadblocks were put in their way. Delays were incurred. Effectively, people were pushed out of the queue, and that is not meeting expectations.

People build their lives, and it is an onerous process to become a Canadian citizen. Sometimes it takes five to seven years. It is a long process. People have to be committed to it and want to become Canadians. It is a prize to actually get in here and contribute to this society. We are honoured to have such great people come into our country and contribute here, but an open door does not make that worth its while. We have to close that broadly opened door so we can actually have a managed system like the one we used to have.

When I was on the immigration committee, I guarantee we received anonymous phone calls from bureaucrats talking about how badly the system was being run by the party on the other side and how there was no managerial control being used. The Liberals effectively opened the doors, shortcutting a whole bunch of security processes in order to just push the number of people coming into Canada.

This is speculation, but one of the reasons is that the Liberals did not want to actually see the GDP of Canada go down, because their policies across the way were punitive to the economy. If we are just increasing the number of people, of course there is a GDP associated with new people, but if we look at the actual math, we can see the math actually shows that our GDP per capita was not increasing. There was a problem with that, because we were no longer meeting our growth as a country. Inflation was more than our GDP. That is a problem. It is a problem in any country, and we cannot just paper over it by throwing a whole bunch more people into Canada. That would be increasing one number without a quality increase.

I have always speculated, and I do not mind saying it in this House of Commons, that the reason the Liberals intentionally make a mess of this file is that they have a large constituency that profits from the middle of the immigration mess. They have all kinds of consultants, and I think that one of their previous ministers of immigration was actually from that very constituency, the ones who actually make money from legal representation, consulting and everything else. Of course, billions of dollars of taxpayer money goes off the table for what is often a very long process of getting Canadian citizenship. It is a very big constituency, and I know my colleagues on the other side of the House profit from that, because they collect money from it. It is a bit of an aberration.

Let us not forget something here. The first-generation limit was introduced in 2009. It was a response to the 2006 Lebanon crisis, where Canada spent $94 million evacuating 15,000 “Canadians of convenience”, as they were called at the time: people who held citizenship but had little or no connection to Canada. I see that, on the other side of the House, they have no hesitancy to run up the numbers in Canada; $94 million is $94 million, and we cannot repeat that again. We have to make sure that the people we are actually helping across the world when there are actual conflagrations, as there are all the time and we are expecting more and more, are actually Canadians and actually will continue to contribute to our society going forward.

As Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill, puts it, “Canadians living abroad sometimes can be a burden for the government in the sense that if we need to evacuate them, during an armed conflict, or if they come back to the country, to seek health care and so forth.” That is part and parcel of being Canadian. It is just not open to everybody all around the world. We have to make sure that we understand what it means to be Canadian, the value of Canadian citizenship.

Let me be fair. We support, again, the concept of restoring the citizenship of lost Canadians. We support, clearly, treating adopted children the same as biological children when it comes to citizenship, but these provisions were largely addressed in Senator Martin's bill, Bill S-245. They do not justify the massive overreach in Bill C-3, nor in Bill C-71.

I have a quote here, on the commitment we talked about: “Introducing tens of thousands of new [Canadians] without a robust integration plan is reckless. Our social infrastructure is buckling, and health care is under severe pressure. The lack of a clear strategy for accommodating this potential population surge only heightens concerns.” What is the surge we are talking about here? We think there are about 115,000 people who would immediately qualify over the first five years of this program, and then continuing all the way through, because once they have a connection to Canada, their children do, etc., from children to children. This is something that is going to continue to escalate until it is addressed, until it is actually amended. In doing our job here, we look at making sure that this is the case.

There are also logistical factors. This is going to cost over $20 million just for administration, per year, as these come through our IRCC department. Again, government members do not understand the numbers, even though the Parliamentary Budget Officer has clearly put the numbers on a plate for them. They will not even quote the number of how many people this is going to affect. This is just ignoring what is actually happening out there. They do have some modelling. They do have some clarity that they have been provided on this, but they do not want to see that.

I am suggesting that maybe they are doing that for a reason. They are putting some canards out here to make sure there is some debate that continues to spend time in the House of Commons, as opposed to coming up with a real bill that actually gets things done.

This arose from a court ruling, a superior court ruling in Ontario. People do not really know this, but a superior court is a lower court. It is not the Supreme Court, as one of my colleagues on the other side said this morning. It was appealable. It was not a great decision, because this is already dealt with. Although it is not a law, there is a process by which the Minister of Immigration, and one of my colleagues on this side said that this is how it is dealt with currently, can actually deal with these lost Canadians very easily with her current power. She knows that. The government knows that, but it will not admit it.

That is the problem here. The government is doing something here, but it already has tools to address it, and it is widening the whole approach to this to make sure we are doing something. Most Canadians would say, “What are you doing, and why are you doing it?” It effectively says that we are opening the door here, for all intents and purposes, for the foreseeable future and confusing everybody, causing some problems that we are going to have to address one way or another.

Canadian citizenship is not just a passport. It is a privilege, a responsibility and a bond to this country. Bill C-3 would weaken that bond. It would allow people with minimal ties to Canada to claim the same rights and benefits as those who have lived, worked and contributed here.

[Eric Duncan, Conservative, Stormont—Dundas—Glengarry, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is trust. This is not the first version of the bill that we have seen. We had Bill C-71 in the last Parliament. We also had Bill S-245, a Conservative Senate private member's bill go through, which was gutted and hijacked by the Liberals and the NDP.

I will use the example of the criminal background check's being a requirement. We have advocated for that multiple times, but we have been told, “Oh, take it to committee, and we'll talk about it.” Well, we are talking about it now, because this is about the third time we have had to raise it, unsuccessfully, to get the Liberals and NDP to agree to do all that. Therefore the issue is trust.

We could move it along to committee, but we want to take the opportunity now to raise awareness for Canadians. If the member surveyed 100 residents in her community, I am sure that a vast, overwhelming majority would say that a criminal background check is a very reasonable, common-sense approach. The government could have put that in there, and it comes down to trust. It did not do that, again, and I am not very confident that if the bill gets to committee, the Liberals are going to finally see the light on that.

[Eric Duncan, Conservative, Stormont—Dundas—Glengarry, ON]

Mr. Speaker, this being my first opportunity to be on my feet for an extended time, I just want to take the opportunity to thank the great people of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry for giving me the honour of coming back to the House of Commons for a third time. I am extremely proud to serve as their federal member of Parliament. I want to welcome the residents of North Glengarry, who are new to the riding. It is going to be a little bit easier for the Speaker now to say Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, without the “south” in there. We have reunited all of S, D and G, the city of Cornwall and Akwesasne.

I want to take the time while I have the floor to thank all of those who helped out in our recent campaign, from our campaign team, volunteers and door knockers to the thousands of people who took signs and, at the end of the day, those who marked and cast their ballot for me. It is something that I never take for granted and I am deeply grateful for.

I am grateful for my family and my close network of friends. I have a great big group of second mothers, as I call it, not only volunteers but family and a wonderful group of friends that support us in this unique work that we do and lifestyle that we have of, as I always say around home, getting our meals and miles in. I want to thank my family: my dad, Ed; my mum, Bea; my sister Jill; and my step-parents and step-siblings. I would be a little while listing the five stepsisters that I have, but I wanted to say how grateful I am for their love, encouragement and support.

I am pleased to rise today to add my contributions to the government's legislation, Bill C-3, an act to amend the Citizenship Act of 2025. This is not the first time we have seen a bill in this form. We have actually seen this as a Senate private member's bill in a much different form, one that I think would be much more beneficial. I will get into that in my comments here over the course of the next several minutes.

I want to start by talking about the value and the importance of citizenship in this country. One of my favourite things is when we get the list, on a monthly basis, from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, of individuals in our ridings who have recently obtained Canadian citizenship. It provides us an opportunity to send them a scroll of congratulations. One of the things my staff and I are proud of is not only signing each scroll and certificate but putting a passport application in there and letting them know that they can come to our office for service, making that connection.

One of the things we want to do is to show how proud we are of the value of Canadian citizenship. It is a privilege and an honour. We have people come back in, people I have met from all over the riding, in the community, both in Cornwall and S, D and G. They will come in and appreciate that scroll and show just how proud they are to be Canadian. It is an immense privilege to have the chance to do that.

Bill C-3 will do that in a few different ways. We agree with some measures and sections. There are others that we have some concerns about, and I will get into that. The bill is a recycled version of Bill C-71 from the last Parliament that was tabled by the Trudeau Liberals. Bill C-71 came out of a Conservative private member's bill from a wonderful senator of ours, Senator Yonah Martin, that was heavily amended, Bill S-245.

I want to say that the reason we are here is that in 2023, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the first-generation limit was unconstitutional. The government chose, in this case, not to appeal it. It had the opportunity to appeal and test that in court, but it chose not to. Instead the government committed to changing the law. The court did say, and it is important in our discussions, and I am going to be talking about this, that the “substantial connection test” would be appropriate to ensure that these new citizens were actually connected to Canada. That is a major concern that we have.

Right now, the plan is a very poor test, frankly. The fact is that there is 1,095 nonconsecutive days, with no way to know how that is all done. Again, we talk about having a connection to Canada, that privilege of citizenship, that connection to Canada for an individual to have. It is certainly strained in the way the government has this written.

I want to start with some of the areas that Conservatives have found agreement on that need to be addressed. First is the provisions for adopted children. For myself, when reading about the legislation and our briefing notes and hearing other colleagues today speak about this from our side of the aisle, when it comes to the adoption of children and making it easier for Canadian parents and facilitating citizenship when they adopt children abroad, this issue is something that is worthy of merit and consideration in this legislation.

We need to make it easier in this country for parents to adopt, whether that is domestically or around the world. In this measure right now, the current process is a PR process, a permanent resident process, that parents have to go through and so forth. The bill would treat adopted children the same as natural born. I think that is a step in the right direction. When we talk about cutting red tape, this is one way we can do that, by making it easier for families to adopt. There are still a lot of processes to go through and a very stringent requirement for parents to do so, but when they adopt a child from another country and that adoption process is final, that is when they are treated the same as natural born and get that. It is an easier process as opposed to going through PR and that process, which can sometimes be complicated and difficult for families to navigate as they have gone through many other forms and processes already to go through the child custody and adoption process.

Conservatives have been on record on this before. My colleague from Saskatoon West has done a great job on this piece of legislation and on many of these topics already.

There are several quotes that came from the immigration committee, where we have been on the record on that. We stated, quote, we want to see adopted children have their citizenship respected in the same way. That means allowing them to pass it on without going through unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles. We have been on the record before in this House and at committee. We will continue to do that here in the House as we go through this part of the bill.

Another part of the bill we can support, for which I am going to give two positives, if I could, is restoring citizenship for lost Canadians. We deem that to be reasonable. I want to give, as I did earlier, kudos to our Conservative senator. There is a smaller number these days, but we have a wonderful Senate caucus over on the Conservative benches there. Senator Yonah Martin's bill, Bill S-245, was designed with a clear and narrow goal: to restore Canadian citizenship to a small cohort of lost Canadians. I would say her effort was non-partisan and targeted to remedy a situation that came up nearly 50 years ago in our country.

Conservatives supported that bill at every stage to ensure the Canadians who were unfairly left out of previous citizenship reforms, including those stripped of their citizenship at age 28 under section 8 of the act, could have justice and a fair process. However, the process went through the Senate, and it was a good part of the way through the House and committee. The NDP and the Liberals then hijacked it and made several significant changes, which is where we are at today, many of which are in the form of Bill C-3.

Conservatives have said that while we support the measures I just spoke about, we cannot support the bill in the current form, because there are several other issues of challenge. It dilutes the integrity of Canadian citizenship by automatically extending it to multiple generations. Several of my colleagues have mentioned this in their comments today and have asked Liberal members to provide a number. We are unable to substantiate the number of applicants and the impact this is going to have on immigration, IRCC and the department in this country. How many more will obtain Canadian citizenship through this? It will be countless as it goes on through generation after generation. There is no number to know that. We do not know the cost on services of obtaining passports. There could be old age security and guaranteed income supplement applications and eligibility that come from it. Some of it could be retro, depending on how all this goes, so it could be very difficult in that way. Therefore, I think that is a major issue we have that we need to discuss and to have further clarification on.

One of the challenges is not only the countless generations but also the minimal substantial connection test. I mentioned the 1,000 days the government has put in the legislation. One of the key challenges is that it is nonconsecutive. It goes back, at the end of the day, to the court ruling the government referenced, which said there is space and an opportunity for the legislation to come forward to have that substantial connection test. The government has chosen for it to be 1,000 nonconsecutive days.

Conservatives are on record as saying that it needs to be consecutive days. There needs to be a substantial test. That would be a fair way to make sure that the value of Canadian citizenship is maintained by a person's having a real, legitimate, tangible, long-term connection, at even 1,000 days, but a substantial connection at that point, to Canada in obtaining their Canadian citizenship.

There is another key aspect that Conservatives have raised about the current form of Bill C-3 and about Bill C-71. We also raised it during debate on Bill S-245, when it was gutted by the NDP and Liberals, and vastly expanded to what we see now. There is no requirement for a criminal record check to take place.

We talk about public safety in our country and the need to make sure we have a stringent immigration process, a fair, secure and safe immigration process. The fact that there would not be an obligation, it would not be mandatory, to have a criminal background check is completely inappropriate. Earlier, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader made his comments and interventions about that. He kept saying that the Liberals are open to suggestions and to amendments. Conservatives have been on the record about some of the things we would do and what we want to do. The government has had multiple opportunities to correct the issue by putting it proactively in the bill and making a background criminal check a requirement.

That was debated in the last Parliament in Bill S-245. Conservatives did raise the issue, and we debated it substantially, while the Liberals veered in and around it. Bill C-71 was introduced under the Trudeau government as a piece of legislation, and now the same Liberal government has come back with Bill C-3, yet it has still not put it in. I can assure the House that my Conservative colleagues at the citizenship and immigration committee, if the bill does proceed to committee, will be advocating it. I am very confident that would be an amendment that would come forward.

My comment on this for Canadians is to make an observation about the lack of seriousness the Liberals have shown when it comes to public safety to ensure that Canadians who would be granted citizenship through this process are able to pass a criminal background check. The Liberals have had the opportunity to put this in. The fact that we have had to fight and fight for this, while the Liberals have continually obstructed it, says a lot about their lack of seriousness about it. We will continue to push the topic and continue to do all of this at committee, in debates here in the House, and so forth.

Another major aspect and concern, as I mentioned, is the cost of the bill, as well as the number of people who would be eligible and the countless generations. There are some unintended consequences that would happen if the flaws and issues that we see in the legislation are not addressed. A key part about this is that the numbers are very important when it comes to immigration. We have seen the Liberal government fail time and time again when it comes to the numbers in our immigration system.

We could survey Canadians, and I am sure they would say a few things. I am sure they would say that they believe that in order to obtain Canadian citizenship through this process, it would not be unreasonable in Bill C-3 to add in a provision that would require a security background check. Most Canadians would say that would be common sense.

Most Canadians would think that if the government is going to introduce legislation that would have a major impact on the number of people eligible for citizenship, passports, services and all of that support, the government would have estimates on how many people would be impacted and what the cost would be to various departments and services. People would think the government would have all of that. It has refused to provide those numbers. Most Canadians would say that they would expect parliamentarians and the government to have that information on hand, available for public knowledge and discussion, when a piece of legislation like this is coming forth.

However, when it comes to numbers, we have seen so many times how the Liberal government has broken our immigration system with reckless numbers. We have seen them, and we know that the Liberals know they have created a failed and broken system after 10 years of being in office, because they are trying to rescind many of the decisions they made. They are now trying to make major changes to the temporary foreign worker program.

They provided over a million international students with permits, with zero plans for them to be housed safely in appropriate circumstances and with affordability. I have spoken to a large number of international students at St. Lawrence College in Cornwall and in my travels in Eastern Ontario and across the country. It has been incredible the number of frustrated international students who heard for years about the opportunity to study in Canada.

Under the Trudeau government and continuing under the current government, the Liberals keep missing their targets. Even after they have realized the issues they have made and tried to cap numbers, they broke the international student system. We heard stories in the GTA of six, eight or nine people staying in a two- or three-bedroom home and sometimes paying $1,000 or more each in rent. These are ridiculous prices. We have heard of international students having to go to food banks.

The reason I raise all of this is that the government and the Liberals, when it comes to our immigration system, in numbers and in a sustainable system, have failed Canadians, new Canadians and those immigrating to Canada, very, very deeply.

We have seen it with respect to permanent residency. Members do not have to take my word for it; the government has admitted it broke the immigration system when it comes to permanent residency, because now it has rescinded and it is attempting to cap the number of permanent residents admitted into Canada and approved every year.

The Liberals have made many changes. They have actually closed the group sponsorship for refugees, which I have been personally supportive of. They have shut that program down. I have done that as a Group of Five; we sponsored a Syrian refugee family. I gave up my house and went to live in my mom's basement for six months, believe it or not.

I was part of a Groups of Five sponsorship opportunity, where we came together as a community to help a family in need abroad. They are doing very well in Canada these days. Because the government has broken the immigration system, and asylum claimants and the whole refugee system are severely under strain, it had to cancel that program in order to try to get its numbers under control.

Now we find the government proposing legislation in Bill C-3, about which we are asking what the number would be, how many this would impact, and what the impact would be on government departments and the economy in our country. We do not know.

I can just see another issue coming of the government's being woefully unprepared for the very legislation it introduces. It just speaks again of virtue signalling on its part, of breaking our immigration system and not learning from those lessons. We continue to see it time and time again.

I will give the Liberals a little bit of a compliment, but I do not want them to take it the right way. They get an A for an announcement. I have never seen people do photo ops and announcements better than the Liberals. That is their compliment. They can get the banners. They get the best backdrops. They have the podium announcement. They have people cheering. They have the news release out. It looks great, and it sounds great, full of Liberal word salad.

However, what happens is that they get an A for an announcement and an F for follow-through. Look at their tax cut today. They talk about numbers. Their big tax cut never came to fruition. It is drastically, astronomically smaller than what they said it was going to be.

The Liberals are not good with numbers. They are not good with numbers on the budget. They will not table a budget this spring. They will not tell us what the deficit is. They broke our immigration system by having numbers get out of control. We have another piece of legislation dealing with citizenship and immigration, for which they do not know the cost, they do not know their numbers and they are not doing the math. Canadians have seen this after 10 years, on repeat, over and over and time and time again.

Conservatives have said that there are measures of the bill that we will support and that we have been on the record as supporting before. However, we have some serious concerns about several of the provisions that need to be addressed.

We cannot support citizenship by descent for countless generations, we need to change the test for a substantial connections test, and we need to make sure every applicant passes a criminal background check. These are common-sense things my Conservative colleagues and I will continue to advocate for, to make sure, at the end of the day, that anybody who comes to Canada and becomes a citizen has an amazing opportunity to afford a home, to get a good job, to get health care and to enjoy what so many of us have had: a great quality of life in this country.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to rise to speak to this bill for the many reasons I spoke about it in this House in the last Parliament.

I have had the privilege of working with colleagues from all parties on committee specifically on this legislation, which impacts Canadian families. The spirit behind this bill is that Prime Minister Harper, in 2009, basically created a first-generation limit, creating a double system in immigration and causing children born outside of Canada to Canadian citizens to struggle to acquire their right to be Canadians.

First of all, Canada is built on institutions that uphold fairness, strengthen opportunity and provide certainty to its citizens, and today, as we are talking about Bill C-3, we have the opportunity to reinforce one of those foundational institutions, which is citizenship. I want to be clear that this bill addresses a gap between the intent of our laws and the lived reality of Canadian families. Specifically, it intends to restore the ability of Canadian citizens born abroad to pass their citizenship to their kids and grandchildren, ending a policy that left many Canadian families in limbo, unsure of whether their children would be recognized by the country they serve or contribute to and call home.

This is not an abstract policy fix. This is about restoring stability for military families that are posted overseas, for diplomatic corps who have represented Canada with dignity and integrity, and for the countless global Canadians who have lived and worked abroad while remaining firmly rooted in the values of our country.

Citizenship is not a transactional benefit. It is a covenant between the individual and the state, between generations, between past sacrifices and future potential. When we deny that link, we undermine the trust in our system and introduce a risk that erodes the social contract that underpins our democracy.

When families return home after years of service or work abroad, they should be able to resume their lives without bureaucracy clouding the future of their children. Bill C-3 would deliver that. It would provide clarity where there was confusion, fairness where there was inconsistency and continuity where there was disruption. It says to families that they are Canadian and their children are as well. That is not only the right decision; it is part of our foundation of rights, our charter rights.

Canadians work to pay taxes, contribute to our communities and are civically engaged. They raise their children to be Canadian. In the House earlier, I heard a number of members ask what really constitutes a deep connection to being Canadian. When a Canadian citizen has children, I am more than sure they pass Canadian values to their children regardless of where they find themselves in the world.

Having this conversation when a parent has a child and wants to return home means talking about bureaucracy, reaching out to IRCC and trying to figure out whom they can call, whether it is their member of Parliament or member of provincial Parliament. With that tier of bureaucracy, it is a very confusing system for Canadians who have served us and who, for different reasons, do not have Canadian citizenship.

This bill, in spirit, works to restore stability to help Canadians understand that it is their institutional right to be Canadians and not have the lawmakers of the country having that discussion. If Harper had not created this system, I do not think we would be having this conversation.

I will remind the many colleagues who have asked questions as if we are having this conversation for the first time that this is not the first time we have had this discussion. We have brought Canadian families who belong in the lost Canadian group to Parliament and told them we think it is important that we restore their citizenship. Here we are again having the discussion as if for the first time, questioning the many families that have struggled through this system wondering whether they belong as Canadians or not. We are having this debate today as if the work that has been done for the last number of years is not important, and that is not fair.

We need to protect Canadians, and we cannot afford to put them on pause due to legal technicalities that do not reflect modern mobility or the realities of a globalized world. As we build what we believe to be a fair Canada, we have to be fair to the men and women who have served our country and their children.

We have to be fair as well when we reach out to people to come here to talk to lawmakers and to engage in committees for a number of hours. My colleague from the Bloc Québécois mentioned earlier how many hours he spent listening to filibustering that happened on Bill C-71 when it was introduced in the House in the last Parliament. I can speak only to the last Parliament, because I was here. I was not here when the bill was first introduced, but in the last Parliament, I was here, and I saw the countless hours we spent filibustering, blocking conversations around whether or not Canadian families deserve to be Canadians.

They went through that. They withstood the long conversations. They listened to the banter. They listened to disagreements. They listened to people talk about them as if they were not humans and as if they were not in the room, to get to the end.

We got to the end. We brought the bill into the House. We passed it. It went to the Senate, and for parliamentary reasons, we are back at the bill again, and we are here to discuss it to make sure we can take it to committee, agree on amendments that make sense, and pass it quickly. The last thing we want to do is start conversations on whether or not people deserve to have Canadian citizenship restored.

Unfortunately, I have been here this morning and have listened to colleagues re-question. I have listened to colleagues who sat with me on committee and promised to those families that we would not do this again. They re-question instead of proposing amendments, instead of agreeing that we can send the bill to committee and work together on amending it in an appropriate way and in a fast manner that would actually stop the long delay of Canadian families going through limbo, where they do not know and are re-asking themselves whether they are valued Canadians.

I thought that we had settled that problem. I know that today's Chair was also on the committee. We settled the problem. We settled the issue of making Canadians question whether they belong. We settled the issue of having the banter and the debate that is politicized for Canadians, but here we are again.

I have listened to countless speeches in which people are putting those Canadians back into the debate of “Am I a valued Canadian?” I want to tell them that yes, they are a valued Canadian. I want to tell people like Don Chapman, who spent countless hours working with parliamentarians, working with committees and working with different members of our public service to make sure that we get to a place where lost Canadians are no longer considered lost and to where they are Canadians, as we all in the House believe that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.

I am very happy to rise and to reassure the lost Canadian families, the many people who came to Parliament to speak to us and to ask us to make sure we pass the bill, that we are going to do that. We are not only going to make sure that we pass the bill; we will also work with all parties across the House to make sure that amendments make sense and that we do not have to put people through the limbo of questioning their value, of questioning whether they can even serve as Canadians and of questioning whether they are Canadian.

[Anju Dhillon, Liberal, Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in this 45th Parliament to speak about Bill C-3 and the transformative power of Canadian citizenship. At its heart, this bill is about people, real families, their histories, their sacrifices and their deep and abiding connection to Canada, no matter where their careers or lives may take them.

Many Canadians live and work abroad, in international development, arts and sciences, education, the humanitarian sector or global business, just to name a few. These citizens maintain deep links to Canada, often returning to raise their children, care for loved ones and build new communities. Ensuring that their children, whether born or adopted abroad, can share in that identity is not just about fairness; it strengthens our country's cohesion and global outreach.

I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-3. I would also like to sincerely thank all those who spoke before me to defend the rights of Canadians affected by the previous amendments to the Citizenship Act.

This bill represents a new and important step toward more inclusive citizenship. All members of the House recognize what a privilege it is to have Canadian citizenship and how proud we can be of that. From our majestic landscapes and the richness of our diversity to the shared values that bring us together, being Canadian means being part of something profoundly meaningful. Values such as inclusion, respect for human rights, environmental stewardship and peacekeeping are an integral part of our society and influence our policies, our culture, and the daily lives of every Canadian.

Canada is recognized around the world for its open-mindedness and its commitment to multiculturalism. Since the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was passed in 1988, we have strengthened those principles at the core of our institutions. Canada's approach to multiculturalism emphasizes the active integration and celebration of Canadians' diverse cultural identities. This approach has created a society in which people of different ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds can maintain their identity, be proud of their roots and feel at home. It can be seen across the country; communities from coast to coast to coast reflect this diversity and are proud of it.

Our commitment to human rights is at the heart of who we are as Canadians. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the fundamental rights we share as a society: freedom of expression, association and religion; equality before the law; protection against discrimination, and the list goes on.

This commitment is also evident in international efforts. Whether standing up for the rights of women, LGBTQ people or people in a vulnerable situation, Canada plays an active role.

Our immigration policies and measures to protect refugees also reflect these values. Canadians also care deeply about protecting our environment. Our natural landscapes remind us of this responsibility, from the Atlantic coast in the east to the mountains in the west to the Arctic in the north. We know that this desire to preserve nature is essential for future generations. These values are reflected in our environmental policies and initiatives aimed at fighting climate change, preserving biodiversity and promoting sustainable development. Our country has made significant progress in promoting renewable energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and supporting conservation efforts.

Canada is also known as a peaceful country thanks to its history of peacekeeping and international co-operation. Since the Second World War, Canada has played an active role in peacekeeping missions. Our forces have participated in a number of UN-led international missions, thereby strengthening our reputation as a committed and trustworthy country. Our commitment to peacekeeping reflects our core values of diplomacy, conflict resolution and humanism. Canadian soldiers have served and continue to serve in peacekeeping missions around the world to help protect conflict-affected populations.

Canada's foreign policy also emphasizes international co-operation, development assistance and support for institutions such as the United Nations and NATO.

Social justice and equity also define Canadian society. Our commitment is clear. We are working to narrow social gaps and ensure that everyone has access to essential services such as health care, education and a reliable social safety net. Canada's universal health care system, public education system and social assistance programs are designed to promote the well-being of Canadians and give everyone a fair chance.

Building stronger relationships also means recognizing our shared history, including its most painful chapters. The government is continuing to work on reconciliation by responding to the calls to action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's final report. In partnership with indigenous communities, we are building an inclusive country founded on dignity, truth and shared pride. These are the principles that define who we are as Canadians today. By guiding our policies and influencing the way we live together, these values allow us to build an inclusive and equitable society committed to both its citizens and the world around us.

Citizenship provides access to security, rights and obligations, and opportunities. It helps people feel fully included in Canadian society and actively participate in it. It has many benefits that make life better for individuals and for communities.

One of those advantages is the fundamental right to actively participate in the country's democratic process. This includes the right to vote in federal, provincial, territorial and municipal elections, which empowers citizens to have a direct impact on government policy. It is also important to note that only citizens can run for office, giving them the opportunity to represent their communities and contribute to the governance of Canada. All Canadian citizens also enjoy all the legal protections and rights set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This ensures that their civil liberties and rights as individuals are protected at the highest level, in addition to providing a solid framework for justice and equality.

Another important advantage of Canadian citizenship is access to the Canadian passport. This passport is recognized worldwide as one of the most valuable and offers visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to many countries. Canadian citizens also benefit from consular assistance abroad, particularly in emergencies or situations of political unrest, ensuring they are supported wherever they travel since the Canadian passport is respected worldwide.

Canadian citizenship also offers security and peace of mind. Unlike permanent residency, which can be lost if residency requirements are not met, citizenship cannot be revoked unless it was obtained fraudulently.

Canadian citizens can access employment opportunities across the country. They can apply for any job, including those that require a high security clearance or those that are reserved exclusively for citizens, such as in the public service. They are also free to work in any province or territory without restrictions. Citizenship also opens the door to many educational benefits. Citizens can receive certain scholarships, grants or other forms of financial assistance that are not available to permanent residents. Many institutions also charge lower tuition to citizens, which makes post‑secondary education more affordable and more accessible.

Canadian citizenship is recognized worldwide for its many advantages, including the ability to travel, work or live abroad. Canada also allows dual citizenship, meaning that citizens can keep their Canadian citizenship when they are a citizen of another country, which gives them more options abroad. Citizenship helps people continue to support loved ones and bring family members to Canada. For example, people can apply to sponsor their parents and grandparents. Citizenship plays an important role in family reunification and strengthens communities across the country. It fosters a deeper sense of belonging and national identity. Canadian citizens are fully integrated into our society and culture, making it easier for them to get involved in their local community and civic activities, and contribute to societal development. Their sense of belonging strengthens the country's social fabric.

Canadian citizenship is not just a symbol. It has a real impact on a person's life, rights and opportunities. Our goal is to have a fair, transparent and accessible citizenship system for everyone who is entitled to it. That is why we must pass the Citizenship Act and restore citizenship to those who lost it or never obtained it. In 2009, amendments to the Citizenship Act limited citizenship by descent to the first generation, meaning that a parent who is a Canadian citizen can pass citizenship to a child born abroad if the parent was born in Canada or naturalized before the child was born. Because passing on citizenship by descent is limited to the first generation, a Canadian citizen born abroad to a parent who was also born abroad cannot pass citizenship to their child born outside Canada. They also cannot apply for citizenship for a child they adopted abroad beyond the first generation. Bill C-3 will allow access to citizenship by descent beyond the first generation, in a spirit of inclusiveness and respect for citizenship.

Bill C‑3 will restore citizenship to those we call lost Canadians, individuals who either were never able to become citizens or who lost their citizenship due to outdated provisions of former citizenship legislation. Although the government has already implemented measures to remedy the situation for most lost Canadians, some individuals are still affected. These changes seek to resolve the issues of lost Canadians and their descendants. Among other things, the amendments address the situation of Canadian descendants affected by the first-generation limit.

The bill also provides clear guidelines for obtaining Canadian citizenship by descent. Once the bill is passed, Canadian citizens born abroad will be able to pass on their citizenship to their children born abroad beyond the first generation if they can prove that they have a substantial connection to Canada. If a Canadian parent born abroad has spent at least three cumulative years in Canada before the birth of their child, they will be able to pass on their citizenship to that child.

We also want to continue to reduce disparities between children born abroad and adopted by Canadians and children born abroad to Canadian parents. Any child adopted abroad by a Canadian parent before the bill comes into force will be eligible for direct citizenship for adoptees, even if they were previously excluded due to the first-generation limit. For children born abroad and adopted by Canadian citizens, when the bill comes into force, if the adoptive parent, who was born abroad, can prove substantial ties to Canada prior to the adoption, direct citizenship may be requested for the adopted child.

In short, Bill C‑3 will restore citizenship to those who have been denied it and provide a fair and consistent framework for citizenship by descent. Building on the progress made by the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration and the Senate through former Bill S-245, these amendments further refine the proposed changes and comprehensively address the concerns raised by the courts.

Filibustering slowed the progress of Bill S-245 and Bill C-71, making it even more clear that Bill C-3 is essential and must move forward without unnecessary delay. As a pillar of our identity, Canadian citizenship unites us around fundamental values of democracy, inclusion and equality. This bill strengthens our legislation to ensure fair rights and equal opportunities for all.

As a government, we must remain vigilant in ensuring that Canadian citizenship remains a beacon of and a commitment to inclusivity, fairness and security. That is why we have introduced Bill C-3: to ensure that access to citizenship remains fair and transparent.

At a time when misinformation and division can threaten confidence in public institutions, Canada must show that its commitment to fairness extends across borders. Providing thoughtful, inclusive pathways to citizenship beyond the first generation affirms that Canadian identity is shaped not only by place of birth, but also by connection, contribution and values. The government's role is not only to protect the rights of Canadian citizens, but also to provide clarity on the citizenship process and to enact legislation that reflects the values of equality, inclusivity and justice.

I urge all parties in the House to support this very important piece of legislation.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we unfortunately did not have time to hear the entire question.

All we can say is that Bill C‑3 will correct an injustice once and for all. The amendments from Bill C‑71 are already included in Bill C‑3. In fact, it is as though we were passing Bill C‑71 without the parliamentary obstruction that took place at the time.

I think that now is the time to do it.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I too worked well with my hon. colleague on the immigration committee in previous Parliaments.

With this particular bill, Bill C-3, which is substantively the same as Bill C-71, Canada will finally be charter-compliant with the gender discrimination components of the Citizenship Act. Is that not something we should actually act on?

On the question around substantial connections, there are provisions in the bill that speak to substantial connections. To his point that people actually—

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I really enjoyed working with my colleague at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

This is not the first time that this type of bill has been before the House. We were able to work together on the second iteration of Bill C-71. I have really enjoyed working with him.

I would like to give my colleague the opportunity to explain why it is important to keep the promise that we made to the families that we met at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. We had discussions with a number of families, some of whom are from Quebec. They want to see progress. They told us how important it is to avoid introducing amendments that will slow things down and said that it is time to pass this bill.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I sincerely hope that this will be the last time I give a speech on such a bill at second reading. That is a lot, considering Bill S‑245 and Bill C‑71. That brings us to Bill C‑3. I hope this will be resolved once and for all.

A few months ago, I stood in the House to speak to Bill C‑71, which was in fact a reintroduction of Bill S‑245, which sought to correct a historic wrong by granting citizenship to Canadians whose cases had slipped through the cracks. I spoke about children of Canadian parents who had been born abroad and lost their citizenship because of changes in the federal rules or for other reasons that struck me as hard to justify at the time. Bills S‑245 and C‑71 basically sought to restore citizenship to all these people who had lost their status due to the overly complex and often unjust provisions of previous Canadian laws.

This idea is taken up again in Bill C‑3, which was recently introduced by the government. In fact, Bill C‑3 incorporates all of the amendments proposed to Bill C‑71 in the previous Parliament, which sought to correct these injustices and errors in the major legislation that is the Citizenship Act.

The bill responds to an Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling which declared that the first-generation limit on citizenship applicable to the children of Canadians born abroad is unconstitutional. The government then had six months to amend the law. Bill C‑3 was introduced as a fallback, because Bill S‑245 and even Bill C‑71, unfortunately, could not get across the finish line. While unfortunate, it was partly due to some crass partisanship on the part of certain political parties.

In this regard, I must point out the following. In spite of my occasional differences of opinion with my colleagues from the other parties represented in the House, as members know, I try not to get caught up in that. I am not in the habit of obstructing during committee meetings. I would even say that, especially with this kind of issue, working across party lines often helps us get results. Personally, it helps me do my work even better for the people of Lac-Saint-Jean whom I have had the honour of representing in the House since 2019.

Today, I will speak not only for Quebeckers, but also for a good many Canadians whose IRCC files have been stalled for too long. As the Bloc Québécois critic for immigration, refugees and citizenship, I want to talk about Canadian citizenship. That might seem odd coming from someone from my party, but it affects everyone here and a good many Quebeckers. I want to talk today about the people we now refer to as “lost Canadians”, those who lost their citizenship because of an often little-known but truly ridiculous provision.

According to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration's estimates, there are still between 100 and 200 people who have not yet regained their citizenship. They are the last group of “lost Canadians”. Bill C‑3 corrects an oversight in the 2009 amendment to the Citizenship Act, which missed a golden opportunity to do away with the requirement for these people to apply to retain their citizenship when they turned 28. That measure in the 2009 amendment to the act was completely arbitrary and should have been removed.

At the risk of ruining the surprise, and for the sake of consistency, I will say that, since we were in favour of Bill S‑245 and Bill C‑71, we are also in favour of Bill C‑3. We believe it should be passed swiftly, but only after a thorough study. By that, I mean that we need to be efficient, but we absolutely must not pass this bill under closure. I urge all parties not to use what I feel is an undemocratic tool that most parties in the House enjoy using, depending on the Parliament and the whim of the government. I am saying that the bill should be passed swiftly, but following the usual process, meaning we should study it in committee and hear expert testimony. I will listen to amendments by members of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. We will study them and, as I said, rigorously analyze the bill. Afterwards, we will have discussions, but we already know what to expect, given that we have already been having these conversations in committee for many years.

We want to ensure that the scope of the legislation remains as we intend it to be. I think that, already, we can expect that there will not be many amendments, since Bill C‑3 essentially incorporates the amendments that were already proposed to Bill C‑71. If we think about it, this bill is perfectly in line with what our contemporary vision of citizenship should be. Once citizenship has been duly granted, it should never be taken away from an individual, unless it is for reasons of national security. Only a citizen can freely renounce his or her citizenship, and the government should not strip anyone of their citizenship based on a mere formality, such as the need to file to retain their citizenship by their 28th birthday.

Like all parties in the House, the Bloc Québécois supports and defends the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that all are equal before the law. In fact, citizenship is an egalitarian legal status granted to all members of the same community. It confers privileges as well as duties. In this case, the Canadian government has failed in meeting its obligations to its citizens. This situation cannot be allowed to continue because citizenship must apply equally to all. This is simply a matter of principle that we are debating today. I do not believe I am alone in thinking that it is profoundly unfair that, in 2022, people can lose their citizenship for reasons that they probably do not even know exist. These provisions are from another time when there were questionable ideas about what it meant to be a citizen of Canada. Since time has not remedied the situation and since the reforms of the past have not been prescriptive enough, then politicians must weigh in.

We know the path to reclaiming Canadian citizenship is far too complex. Let us be frank: the federal apparatus is not really the most efficient when it comes to managing Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada files. I think the Department of Citizenship and Immigration is undoubtedly the most dysfunctional department in the entire federal government. We need only look back to find examples of how slow the federal administration is. There was a legislative reform in 2005, another one in 2009 and yet another in 2015. How many reforms will it take before we get rid of such ridiculous rules as losing one's citizenship because of a failure to reapply before the age of 28?

Currently, there are many citizens who were forgotten during those reforms. They are men, women, military spouses, children of soldiers, children born abroad, members of indigenous and Chinese-Canadian communities, people who fell through the cracks because previous reforms did not properly fix the act. Bill C‑3 seeks to ensure that past wrongs will not be repeated. The bill seeks to amend the Citizenship Act to, among other things:

(a) ensure that citizenship by descent is conferred on all persons who were born outside Canada before the coming into force of this enactment to a parent who was a citizen;

(b) confer citizenship by descent on persons born outside Canada after the first generation...

(c) allow citizenship to be granted...to all persons born outside Canada who were adopted before the coming into force of this enactment by a parent who was a citizen...

(e) restore citizenship to persons who lost their citizenship because they did not make an application to retain it under the former section 8 of that Act or because they made an application under that section that was not approved...

This refers to this notorious and completely ridiculous provision that has been on the books since 2009. Normally, former Bill C‑71 should have received royal assent a long time ago, but parliamentary obstruction has gotten us to where we are today. People, women and children have had to wait because of political games and bickering between the federal parties. Crass, petty politics have been on full display in this Parliament over the past year.

The Bloc Québécois is here to work for our people. We are here working for Quebeckers who care about Quebec's future, and not just when it is time to cater to their electoral ambitions. There are specific examples in Quebec. Take Jean-François, a Quebecker born outside Canada when his father was completing his doctorate in the United States. Even though he returned to Quebec when he was three months old and spent his entire life in Quebec, Jean-François's daughter was not automatically eligible for Canadian citizenship. This type of situation causes undue stress for families who should not have had to deal with the federal government's lax approach.

Despite what it says, this government is the same as its predecessor. This is not a new government. This government is piling up delays in processing citizenship and immigration applications for just about every program. That is what we see every time we check. It is not right that in 2022, 17 years after the first reform to fix lost Canadians' status, we are still talking about a bill to fix lost Canadians' status. That is completely mind-boggling. The public must sometimes wonder what we do here. That is not right.

In a situation like this, it is up to the government to come up with a solution that would allow individuals to regularize their status and regain their dignity once and for all, like all other citizens. It is a matter of principle. I said so at the beginning of my speech. As parliamentarians, we have to tackle our constituents' issues with a strong sense of duty, without getting into childish debates for purely dogmatic reasons. The “lost Canadians” problem should never have happened.

I repeat, citizenship must apply equally to all. Let us make one last reform, once and for all. We have to get it right this time, as a matter of equality, justice and principle. These families have been waiting long enough, and they deserve to have us working on their behalf.

That said, I think everyone agrees that we should not pass this bill under time allocation. As I said, we can pass it swiftly and efficiently while being thorough because we know exactly where all the parties that will sit on the committee stand on the issue. We know how all the parties will vote on the third reading of this bill.

I think we should move forward fairly quickly. As I said earlier when I asked my colleague a question, there are some urgent issues. The fundamental structure of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration needs to be changed with respect to several programs. I am thinking about the refugee system in particular. Is it reasonable for someone who has applied for asylum to have to wait four, five or six years? We saw one case where someone waited 12 years before their asylum application was processed. That person waited 12 years in a G7 country.

Wait times for work permit extensions are currently skyrocketing. I think they are now at 256 days. The measures that were rolled out in the fall for temporary foreign workers were a total fiasco for the Quebec regions. The immigration policies put in place by this government are one-size-fits-all, as though Calgary, Moose Jaw, Toronto, Montreal and Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean all had the same realities.

One-size-fits-all immigration measures do not work, especially in Quebec, where French language courses must be offered. This is obviously an additional challenge for integrating newcomers. We want immigration to succeed in Quebec, but right now, the federal government is acting as though Quebec were identical to all other Canadian provinces. Even among the other Canadian provinces, there are differences when it comes to integrating newcomers. The realities are not the same.

The territories that make up the country known as Canada are completely different and have completely different realities. The federal government is taking the same approach to immigration as it is taking with its new “one Canadian economy out of 13” plan. It is doing the same thing. The federal government seems to think that there is only one reality when it comes to immigration. That does not make any sense.

As I was saying, we need to do something about application processing times. We need to do something about the reforms that were put in place for temporary foreign workers, because they are not working. We need to do something about asylum seekers. We need to help them get their claims dealt with a lot more quickly, and most importantly, we need to distribute asylum seekers more evenly across Canada.

Currently, Quebec and Ontario are doing much more than their share and, unfortunately, their intake capacity is overwhelmed. It is not right that asylum seekers arriving in Montreal should end up homeless right away because there is no money to house them properly. In the meantime, there are provinces in the rest of Canada that are doing absolutely nothing. They are not doing their part to take in asylum seekers.

I would remind the House that in 2024, the former immigration minister announced with great fanfare that he was going to form a committee and that arrangements would be made to distribute asylum seekers across Canada. That is what he said at a major press conference. A solution had been found, and the committee was going to be set up. Since then, there has been radio silence. We have heard nothing more about it, and no solutions have ever been proposed.

In the meantime, it is Quebec and Ontario once again that have to take care of welcoming the vast majority of asylum seekers. Again, there are issues that need to be addressed. Bill C-3 will tie up the committee, but it had better not tie it up for months because there are far too many other things that need to be addressed. That is why I am asking my colleagues to be diligent and to take their parliamentary work seriously. We know exactly where each party stands on this bill. We will listen to the amendments, if there are any. I think that we should definitely avoid filibustering this issue at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. I urge my colleagues to do the same. That does not meant we will not propose amendments, of course, but let us be serious and diligent, and let us address problems that are very urgent, not just for newcomers, but also for the communities that welcome them, like the ones in Quebec.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives are concerned about citizenship and want to make sure crazy things are not implemented into our system. That is why we take the time to look at things. We make sure that we give it proper investigation and bring in the proper experts, and that is what happened.

The member mentioned Bill C-71. That was completely under the control of the government. That had nothing to do with us. The government controlled the agenda. It could have brought it forward. It could have made changes. It could have had that implemented if it chose to. It was not able to control the calendar in a way that made any sense, and it was not able to get it done, just like so many things the Liberal government was unable to get done in the last Parliament.

I want to point out that the member, and others from the former party that used to exist in the House, were right beside the Liberals all the way along. They were helping them at every single step. That may be why they are in the position they are in today.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member talked about the private member's bill from Senator Yonah Martin. Of course, that bill was amended, which Conservatives opposed and filibustered at committee.

The government then tabled Bill C-71, to which the Conservatives said it needed to be a government bill with all those changes. The government did, in fact, belatedly table Bill C-71 in the House. Conservatives then filibustered that.

We now have Bill C-3, and Conservatives are now saying they do not support it.

My question for the member is this: Why are the Conservatives so persistent in trying to prevent Canada's Citizenship Act from being charter-compliant and having the gender discrimination component within it, as it applies to lost Canadians, rectified?

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as I have said before, I wish you could take part in this debate. That is the last time I will say it.

I listened carefully to my colleague's speech. I was obviously already somewhat familiar with his position on the matter, since I also worked on Bill S‑245 and Bill C‑71. Right now, we are working on Bill C‑3. We have been working on this issue for years, so I think we all know where everyone stands.

Does my colleague agree with me that the bill should be sent to committee quickly? When the time comes to send it to committee, it will need to be considered quickly, as well as thoroughly, of course. We need to move on.

Does the member believe, as I do, that the immigration system is completely dysfunctional right now? We need only think of the asylum system, work permits and temporary foreign workers. Should we not be dealing with other urgent issues involving the immigration system? We have known for 10 years how people will vote on this bill.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, as this is my first speech in the new Parliament, I just want to take a moment to thank the citizens of Saskatoon West for once again returning me to Ottawa as their MP.

Of course at the same time, I want to thank some of those who helped me. I start with my family. We all know we cannot succeed in this place without our family behind us. I want to thank my wife, Cheryl; my sons, Kyle and Eric; and my aging parents, Alvin and Irene Redekopp, who were not able to help as much this time, but they are always behind me in spirit.

I had a core campaign team of Steve, Daniel, Jared, Marian, Lisa, Carol, Jason, Deb and Judy, and a core door knocking team of Ope, Yash, Sutter, Rito, Effay and Doug. I want to thank all volunteers, donors and everybody who helped.

I will continue to do my very best to represent Saskatoon West here in this place and bring the voices of Saskatoon here to Ottawa.

I will now talk about Bill C-3. It is recycled legislation, as the minister just pointed out, which was tabled as Bill C-71 in the previous Parliament. Actually, Bill C-71 was retread legislation of Bill S-245, a private member's bill that was heavily amended by the government with the help of the former party that used to exist in this place, called the New Democratic Party. The Conservatives opposed the bill then, and we continue to have significant issues with the bill.

There are three major parts to the bill. The first is citizenship by descent, the second is a provision for adopted children, and the third is fixing a problem with lost Canadians, which is an issue in the current legislation.

Conservatives cannot support the bill in its current form, and the main reason is the citizenship by descent. The bill would dilute the integrity of Canadian citizenship by automatically extending it to multiple generations born abroad with only a minimal connection to Canada. This is a classic Liberal solution to a problem. We have a problem, as the minister pointed out, and I will speak about a court case in a bit, and there are reasons this needs to be done, but the fix the Liberals came up with is a poor one. It is a bad one. It would not really solve the problem in an adequate way.

Conservatives will introduce amendments at committee. As Andrew Griffith from Policy Options said, “Canadian citizenship is a precious gift. At the committee stage, members of Parliament must be able to fulsomely examine the implications of an open-ended residency requirement”, and we will do that.

I first want to speak about citizenship by descent, why it is problematic, and why we will vote against. For some background, how did we get here? Prior to 2009, it was possible for Canadian citizens to pass on their citizenship to endless generations born outside Canada. A person did not need to have much of a connection to Canada; they could have never lived in Canada but yet could pass on citizenship over and over, generation after generation.

Something happened in the mid-2000s, a crisis in Lebanon, and many Lebanese Canadians were concerned about their safety and the situation going on in Beirut, so they made sure they passed their citizenship on to their children. When things got really, really difficult in Beirut, they called on the Canadian government to rescue them. In 2006, the Canadian government spent $94 million bringing about 15,000 Lebanese Canadians to Canada. They were Canadian citizens, but for the most part they had rarely or never lived in Canada. These people benefited from citizenship with minimal connection to Canada, and they became known as the “Canadians of convenience”.

Interestingly, what happened is that a lot of these people were rescued from Beirut, came to Canada for a bit, but many of them went right back to Lebanon, and that was it for their connection to Canada, but it cost Canadian taxpayers $94 million. This led to a bill by the Harper government to create what was known as the first-generation rule.

After 2009, the rule changed so a citizen born outside of Canada could pass their citizenship to their child born outside of Canada for one generation, but someone from the next generation born outside of Canada was not automatically a citizen. That was called the first-generation limit, and the bill now would effectively abolish that rule and allow people to confer citizenship on their children generation after generation for one measly requirement of spending 1095 days in Canada, which I will talk about a little more. All someone would need to do to meet the requirements is live a few years in Canada.

Why are we doing this now? In 2023, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the first-generation rule was unconstitutional, so the Liberal government, in its great wisdom, chose not to appeal it but to just accept that ruling. It could have appealed it to a higher court, and it chose not to; it committed to changing the law.

The court did say, though, that it was reasonable to apply a substantial connection test. It understood that we cannot just give citizenship out like candy; there has to be some sort of a connection to Canada. The court said that if we put in some sort of a substantial connection test, that would be okay according to the law.

The Liberal government chose to create a substantial connection test that is not substantial at all. The test is 1,095 days, which is about three years. People would have to spend that much time in Canada prior to the birth of a child. It is not consecutive days; it could be a month here, a month there, and three years is very weak. The government would not even know, really, if people have been in Canada for that time. There would be an affidavit that a person would sign. It is a very weak way to commit to being a Canadian citizen and then to confer that citizenship onto children. It is not a real test of commitment, because the days do not have to be consecutive.

The other issue is that there would be no criminal background check at all. Once again, we could be passing on citizenship to children who potentially could have serious convictions or a criminal background, but we would not know because we would not even check. When we have newcomers coming to our country, the government puts a lot of effort into checking the security background of those people, and it can take up to a year or longer for newcomers to get processed through security.

Andrew Griffith, from Policy Options, said:

To remedy the issue, Bill C-71 [speaking about the previous legislation] uses residency as the “substantial connection test.”

However, the new standard in Bill C-71, which requires a foreign-born Canadian parent to have spent a total of 1,095 days in Canada...differs significantly from what is required of new Canadians.

...the government has failed to fully consider the implications of such an open-ended condition.

I might note that in the U.S., people can confer citizenship only to the first generation. They have to have at least five years in the U.S., with two of those years being after the age of 14, and there is also very strict screening. In the U.K., it is only the first generation that can be admitted. There are some very strict rules in our partner countries that the Liberal government has chosen not to enforce, creating an extremely weak connection test.

This brings up a question: What does it mean to be a citizen? I believe that the bill cheapens that. There is an organization called the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. It does great work on this subject of citizenship and helps a lot of newcomers in our country. Daniel Bernhard, who is the CEO, said this:

The sense of belonging is very powerful. If people don't consider Canada to be their society, then they won't dedicate themselves to it, or get involved in our culture and contribute their utmost to making our society a success. That's a danger of concern to all of us.

We must roll up our sleeves to restore the value of being Canadian.

Citizenship is a connection to one's home country. It is being there for one's country in times that are good and bad. It is enjoying the peace of Canada, proudly participating in wars when necessary and being available for keeping the peace at other times. Also, people need to understand the current situation in our country. They need to live here to understand how things are and some of the issues we have right now in our country, with an epidemic of crime; expensive and unavailable housing; difficulties in health care, including trying to find doctors and waiting lists; high taxes; and a drug crisis, including fentanyl, in our country right now. People do not know that if they are living in another country.

It is also important to understand our history and be proud of our accomplishments, such as being proud of our sports teams, even though some people may cheer for sports teams outside of Canada. Nobody does that, right? We need to be proud of our teams and of the beauty in our country. We need to believe in our Canadian values and norms: democracy, equality and not engaging in religious squabbles and wars. Many people come to our country from other countries, and they bring their culture, food and all the good parts of their countries. Often, they are escaping bad situations, including war and fighting. We do not need to bring those wars to Canada; we can bring the good parts and build a country and a society that works for us here.

People who come here enjoy our social safety net, but it is so important that they participate by paying taxes in order to enjoy that. It is something that Canada is proud of; we take great care of our people, but there is a cost for that. It is very unfair when people who have never had any participation in our tax system then expect to receive benefits from it.

Canadians proudly display our Canadian flag on Canada Day and, of course, are allowed to vote in elections to decide governments.

In 2010, one of our best immigration ministers ever, Jason Kenney, said the following:

Citizenship is about far more than a right to carry a passport or to vote. It defines who we are as Canadians, including our mutual responsibilities to one another and a shared commitment to the values that are rooted in our history, like freedom, unity and loyalty. That is why we must protect the values of Canadian citizenship and must take steps against those who would cheapen it.

I think the legislation would actually cheapen it. The Liberals have worked hard to cheapen what it means to be a Canadian citizen. I point to the comments made by the previous prime minister, Justin Trudeau, about Canada being a postnational country and about how citizenship and being Canada does not mean much other than the borders around us.

We just have to look at the passport to see that. The way the Liberal government changed the passport to take away all the symbols that mean anything and replace them with meaningless pictures and things that do not mean anything and do not provide any sense of what it means to be Canadian is just a small example of the way the government has been moving to cheapen citizenship. I believe that the bill would just add further to that.

One of the big concerns that I have is also the uncontrolled citizenship expansion that would be allowed through the bill. Ken Nickel-Lane, who is an immigration consultant, said in the Times of India, “This announcement, at least on initial reading looks like it will open up the chain of citizenship without end”. He is completely correct about that.

When the issue under the previous legislation was at immigration committee in the previous Parliament, we asked many questions to IRCC department officials about how many people would receive citizenship under the provisions. They could not answer the question. They would not answer the question. We asked repeatedly, and we asked in many different ways. They never answered the question.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer actually did a study on the bill, on Bill C-71 in the last Parliament, and estimated that it would create at least 115,000 new citizens in the first five years, most of them living abroad. Of course, that number could then double every generation, so we could end up with a lot of new citizens who really have minimal connection to Canada and just do not ever actually participate in anything in Canada. Andrew Griffith from Policy Options said, “There are an estimated four million Canadians living outside Canada, [and] about half of them were born abroad.”

We have to be very careful that we do not add to our burdens by giving citizenship to people who do not participate in Canada at all. It is just no surprise the government cannot answer questions about numbers. People who were here last week might recall that when we were questioning the minister on the estimates, we asked all kinds of questions about really key marquee policy items.

One of the marquee policies of the Liberal government is to reduce non-permanent residents. I was asking the minister about these numbers, and she did not have any clue what they were. Another marquee policy is reducing the population this year. The overall population is projected by the government to drop by half a million people, but it has not dropped at all yet, and yet the minister seemed to have no knowledge of that. Therefore it does not surprise me that the minister and the department have no clue how many people the legislation would impact. I think that is really to know how it would impact Canada.

Another issue that goes along with that is the cost. How much would it cost taxpayers to have the legislation? Again, IRCC officials had no clue; they did not have an answer to that. Apparently they had not looked into it at all, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer did and estimated it would be about $21 million in admin costs over five years. That would be to process additional claims for citizenship, passports and applicants to social programs.

By the way, if 115,000 people started getting old age security at age 65, if these people actually came to live in Canada and collected old age security, that would be a billion dollars a year. The potential for cost to the Canadian taxpayer is very, very huge here. We cannot underestimate that.

Andrew Griffith said, “IRCC needs to determine and share estimates for the approximate number of new citizens expected under the change, along with the incremental workload and resources that are required before the bill goes before committee.” I would echo that. We need to know those numbers so we can properly study the bill.

To summarize citizenship by descent, it would remove the first-generation limit and allows citizenship to be conferred generation after generation with a simple, weak, “substantial connection” test of 1,095 non-consecutive days in Canada. There would be no criminal background check at all required with this. For those reasons, we cannot support it.

There is a second provision in the bill, and that is the provision for adopted children. Currently, if a person adopts a child from abroad, once the adoption is completed, they have to go through the process of applying for permanent residency for them, just like anyone else would, and it takes a long time. There are a lot of costs involved, legal costs, and it can be a stressful time for a new family. The bill would essentially treat an adopted child from abroad as though they were born in Canada, so once the adoption is finalized, that child would be given Canadian citizenship. We support that. We support the equal treatment of adopted children. We have done that in the past, and we will continue to support that. It makes sense. It is a common-sense change, so parents would not be penalized for adopting children from overseas and those children could be treated in the same manner as they would be if they were born in Canada. I spoke to this in the previous Parliament when it came up at committee. The chair well knows that we supported it, and we would support this provision if it were by itself.

The third part of this legislation is on restoring lost Canadians. This part is also reasonable, and when it came to committee, we were supportive of it. The easiest way to understand it is that immigration and citizenship law is very complicated. When changes are made over the years, sometimes there are unintended consequences, which is what happened here. There was a group of people born within a four-year stretch, from I believe 1977 to 1981, who had to apply for citizenship by the age of 28, and if they did not, they lost it, which was never the intention of the law. It was just a glitch that ended up there because of the way the laws were amended over the years, so this does need to be fixed, because nobody should lose their citizenship. In fact, Senator Yonah Martin brought this forward in Bill S-245, and she said:

Many of these individuals were raised in Canada from a young age. Though they were born abroad, some came to Canada at a young age, as infants, in some cases. They went to school in Canada. They raised their families in Canada. They worked and paid taxes in Canada, and yet, they turned 28 without knowing that their citizenship would be stripped from them because of the change in policy [in] 1977 that required Canadians...to apply to retain their citizenship when they turned 28.

That is the essence of what this piece of the bill would do. It would fix a problem that came about because of unintended consequences. The bill that was brought in by Senator Martin was intended to just fix this issue, because many had tried to fix it, but nobody succeeded. Unfortunately, when it came to committee, the Liberal government, with the help of the former party that used to exist in this place, the New Democrats, actually ganged up on Senator Martin's private member's bill and made substantial changes to it to incorporate things such as citizenship by descent. It was a very unfair thing to have a private member's bill commandeered by the government, with the help of NDP members, yet that is what happened, so that bill did not make it forward. It is a reminder to the House that we need to respect certain things, and private member's bills are something that really need to be respected.

To summarize, there are elements of the bill that we support, as I mentioned. We support the elements dealing with adoption and with lost Canadians, but we cannot support citizenship by descent for endless generations. We cannot allow endless generations to have a very weak connection to Canada and still get their citizenship conferred. We cannot stand by and not have a background check, and we have to be very careful that we do not create new unintended consequences, as has happened in the past.

I must remind everyone that the Liberals broke our immigration system. For years, Canadians agreed on immigration. We brought in skilled labour to fill gaps in our labour force. We helped displaced and poorly treated people from all over the world find a new home in Canada. We had a balanced, reasonable and fair policy for immigrants, which was good for our economy and it was good for Canada, but then the Liberals blew it up. They opened the floodgates. They brought in millions of people and jammed up the bureaucracy so that files now take years to process, and having too many cases led to mistakes. Last year, a father and son were given a security clearance even though there was a video from 2015 that showed them violently participating in things, and they were actually planning a terror plot. Mistakes happened because of jammed up systems.

Let us be clear that this is not the fault of newcomers to our country. Clearly, it is the fault of the government. Immigrants were just doing what the Liberal government asked them to do. They had no idea they were coming to a country that was not prepared for them. This left all Canadians dealing with housing shortages, sky-high job shortages, health care problems, etc. Conservatives believe in strong, fair immigration citizenship rules that respect—