Madam Speaker, it is a great privilege to rise on behalf of the citizens and residents of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. I say that because citizens and residents are two different things. All of them are important to me as a member of Parliament, but they are different. As a country, we have always made a distinction between those who are citizens and those who are not. The reason for this is that citizenship has intrinsic value. Citizenship is not a right for everyone. For some, it is a privilege.
We are here because we are discussing Bill C-3, which is the Liberal government's attempt at devaluing Canadian citizenship by making it easier for people to access when they do not have, contrary to the way the legislation is framed, a genuinely substantial connection to Canada and to Canadian identity.
We have to understand the idea from which this bill came. It is not just a response to an Ontario court ruling, because the government could have, as any government can, appealed that court ruling. For example, the Federal Court found that the Liberal government had violated the charter rights of Canadians in invoking the Emergencies Act, and the federal government is fighting that ruling tooth and nail in court. For this particular court ruling, the government did not mount an appeal. It did not combat it. It has accepted, at face value, some of the court's arguments. It expanded that now, in Bill C-3, beyond what the court even sought, as a way to make Canadian citizenship easier for people to access and to make citizenship by descent easier, even for people who do not have a truly substantial connection to Canada.
The idea for this came from the Liberals. About Canada, former prime minister Justin Trudeau said, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada”. This is what he said: “no core identity”. There is no meaning to being Canadian. There is no meaning to Canada. He said, “Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.” A postnational state is a country without a national identity, without a core heritage and without a shared belief about what this country is.
We heard the Minister of Canadian Identity unable to even describe what Canadian identity is. We heard the current Prime Minister unable to describe what Canadian identity is, except to make it relative to American identity. He said, “We are Canadian because we are not American.” No, we are Canadian because we have a shared set of values that are tremendously important, which we should, as a country, be so proud of.
In my maiden speech in this chamber, I spoke about Canadians of convenience, people with a new-found patriotism who had new Canadian flags flying from their houses that still had the creases in them. They had never before in their lives identified Canadianism with something specific. It is not just about hockey, maple syrup and beavers. Canadian identity is about liberty. It is about individuality. It is about pluralism. It is about tolerance for different ideas, freedom of speech and democratic freedom. These are Canadian ideas. These are Canadian values. When we try to strip this away from what it means to be Canadian, we are left with the question of what it means to be a Canadian citizen and a Liberal government trying to make only tenuous connections between Canada and Canadian citizenship for people around the world.
When we talk about citizenship by descent, we are not talking about the children of Canadian citizens who may be born abroad. We are talking about the children of children of Canadian citizens born abroad, who may have never resided in Canada, worked in Canada, desired to vote in a Canadian election or desired to run for office in Canada. They are people who have no connection here but who may have spent, at any point in their lives, a little bit of time here. Three years sounds like a lot unless we consider that it could be spread over the course of decades. Under Bill C-3, the Liberals would view that as a substantial connection to Canada.
Canadian citizenship is not something that should be freely given out to people who are not born here. It should be earned and, more importantly, given to people who genuinely want to build up this country and contribute to this country. Some of the proudest Canadians I have ever met are people who adopted Canadian citizenship after being born abroad. They came to Canada because they loved something here: our values, our freedoms or our opportunity. They learned our language or languages, chose to become Canadian and have contributed. We have members of this chamber who are proud, patriotic Canadians who were not born in Canada.
I am not arguing that citizenship should never be available to people. I am saying that we need to make sure that those who become Canadian citizens truly want to contribute to Canada and be Canadian. We do not want what we have seen in the past, which is Canadians of convenience. When a crisis unfolds somewhere in the world, all of a sudden, someone with no desire to live or contribute in Canada pulls out a Canadian passport and demands that the federal government help them. These are people who do not want to be Canadians but who want, when convenient for them, the benefits of Canadian citizenship.
We see the alternative of this happening: Birth tourism has been allowed to thrive in Canada. There are companies that, for a certain amount of money, will facilitate someone's coming to Canada to give birth to a child here who will then become a Canadian citizen automatically, by birthright, despite having parents who are not at all Canadian citizens or permanent residents. They do not even have work permits. They may be here on visitor visas, as international students or as temporary foreign workers. They are people whose relationship with Canada is temporary.
When we put forward an amendment at committee to ensure that birth tourism would not be permitted as a path to Canadian citizenship, it was rejected by the Liberal government. By the way, many of its members, including the Minister of Immigration, said before the House, at second reading, that they would entertain amendments at committee. The committee worked hard across party lines at amending Bill C-3, and to take a bad bill and try to mitigate some of the harms and devaluation of citizenship. The committee, as I said, worked across partisan lines and sent an amended bill back to the House. The Liberal government, with the NDP, rejected those amendments outright.
Despite claiming that they are willing to work with all parties, the Liberals now expect the House to rubber-stamp the original bill they were planning to ram through regardless. This is something that is tremendously concerning. If Canadian citizenship is to mean anything at all, we need to be able to ground it in a discussion about Canadian identity and a connection to Canada, ensuring we have a core identity and set of values that we all know, intuitively, are part of who we are as a people.
I am so proud to be Canadian. As I said, I have spoken to so many people who have spent generations in this country with their families, to people who came here for the first time as a child, or even as an adult, and became Canadian, and to every iteration in between. They are all frustrated by the devaluing of Canadian citizenship we have seen by the Liberal government.
Justin Trudeau said that Canada is “the first postnational state”. That is the core idea anchoring the way the Liberal government is viewing citizenship and what it means to be Canadian. This is not a new idea. There is a class of globalist elites, and the Prime Minister has proudly identified with people who collects passports. The Prime Minister had three citizenships before he ran for the leadership of the Liberals, and potentially has them now. I do not know for sure what the status of that is. What sort of commitment does a person have to any country when they collect passports like trading cards? This is what the Liberal government is facilitating. For people whose primary affiliation or allegiance is to a different country, the Liberals want to make it easier for them to have Canadian citizenship. How does this build up Canada and foster pride and citizenship in this country?
I will be voting against Bill C-3, and I encourage all members of the House to do the same. It is the only way to protect the value of Canadian citizenship.
