Madam Speaker, it is fortuitous, or even perhaps unfortunate, that I may be the last speaker on the Conservative side to speak to the legislation before the House. I am sure the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader will have another question for me, because he always does, and I appreciate his interjections.
I am a new member of Parliament. I came from the business community. I am probably, I think, the oldest rookie in the House of Commons, and I am perplexed by the process the legislation came through. I spoke at second reading, and the parliamentary secretary asked me a pointed question after my speech, which was why we were holding the bill up at second reading and why we would not let the Liberals take it to committee, where we could make concrete and substantial amendments to it. He said that committee was where we could make a better bill, and he asked why we were filibustering on the floor of the House of Commons.
I wish we were still at second reading, because the committee members, including the member for Markham—Unionville, spent hours and hours talking about substantial and reasonable amendments to the legislation. With the support of our colleagues from the Bloc Québécois, we were successful in making proposals to make the bill a much better piece of legislation.
The original legislation was fundamentally bad, and now that the amendments that the Conservatives and the Bloc managed to get through at committee have been reversed, as my colleague said, what a waste of time this has been. We have wasted weeks and weeks on the legislation, only to come back today to where we started. I am very disappointed.
The government members asked us at the beginning of the session to collaborate and co-operate with them. They asked us to give them things they could work with to help them build better legislation. We did that, and we see today at third reading that it was all for naught.
I want to tell a bit of story. Three of my grandparents were born in the U.K., so my father and, I think, a couple of my uncles were born in the U.K. My father was entitled to citizenship, and his was the last generation that would have automatically been entitled to citizenship in the U.K.
Canada and the U.K. share a sovereign. Canada is a parliamentary democracy in the British tradition. My roots go back to England and Wales, yet I am not entitled to British citizenship. In addition to that, I did my graduate work in the U.K., in England; I studied there. That did not entitle me to U.K. citizenship.
Under this legislation, those two factors would provide me with citizenship, if I were outside Canada studying for three or four years, or spending 1,095 days in the country. Countries across the world are limiting these opportunities. The legislation is nothing more than chain migration. It is the postnational mentality, where there is no more value to citizenship. It does not seem that the government puts a highly regarded value on citizenship now.
Most of the Liberals who have been talking today have been giving examples about first and second generations. The legislation would provide access in perpetuity to Canadian citizenship. Someone would not need to speak the language, go through a security check or have a substantial knowledge of Canada. They would not go through the normal citizenship process that people who want to come here through normal citizenship applications do.
I do not think it is unreasonable, in the amendments we proposed to the legislation, to suggest that pegging a value on citizenship should be based on having a substantial connection to Canada, not just 1,095 days or a five-year period, or just that someone went to school here to get a degree or spent the summers at somebody's cottage. In the bill, this is exactly what would give someone the access to Canadian citizenship, and that, to me, is wrong.
It is also not unreasonable to suggest that people who want to get citizenship but who are multiple generations down the line should go through a security and background check. We want people with good records, not criminal records, to be part of our country. We also believe it is not unreasonable for these people to speak one of our two official languages, and that, in the legislation, would also not have to be the case.
There have been several iterations of this legislation from previous parliaments. Those iterations also failed on the floor of the House of Commons before the last election, but this new piece of legislation today, which has now gone back to its original form, is severely flawed. The Conservatives would have supported a bill that had the substantial and reasonable amendments that we proposed, with the support of our Bloc colleagues. They would have made this bill a lot better.
We are now faced with a budget coming in a few hours that will provide a generational impact, as noted by the government. It is a “generational” budget, but it is also going to be a generational budget of debt. With this legislation, Bill C-3, the generational impact of access to citizenship would undermine the value of that citizenship and saddle other generations with the debt we are imposing on them today. That is unfair.
We on this side of the House believe the value of Canadian citizenship should mean something more than just having a loose connection to this country. It would undermine the fabric and history of our country. When we see the flag beside the Speaker, we need to understand the roots of it, what it means to be a Canadian and what it means to understand the history of our country and the education, knowledge, language and security of that flag as a meaningful representation of citizenship.
I am disappointed that this legislation is now reverting back to a very bad piece of legislation simply because the government feels it has been pressed into doing something by the end of November. The government had the option to appeal the decision of the superior court; it did not. There were several layers of judicial applications that could have been proceeded with that would have given the government more time. Early in this session of Parliament, we had an opportunity to get the bill right. Despite the arbitrary deadline the government believes is there, there were options to have it extended again.
In conclusion, I am saddened to say as a new member of Parliament, having gone through this whole process and understanding the legislative process, that I believed the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader was being sincere when he said to me that the bill should go to committee, where we can make solid amendments to benefit it and make it better. We did that, and we are back to where we are now. That process seems to me to have been a waste of time. For that, I am sorry to see we are back to where we started.
