Evidence of meeting #31 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was refugees.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
Now, do you want to amend anything else in the steering committee report as to the number of meetings and what have you?
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
I have two questions on that, and I'd like to speak on it.
I like the idea of saying that you have the minister at one meeting and witnesses at the other meeting, and then the committee can decide if they want to go beyond that. So you have two meetings.
Secondly, I'm wondering why the meetings are placed on a Monday as opposed to our regular meeting days, which are on Tuesday. We had set up an agenda of where we're going through with certain priorities, and if we have new things coming in, we either push back those priorities or take this and put it behind. So my sense would have been, why not proceed on a Tuesday and two meetings? If you want to do it sooner than later, depending on the availability of the minister—which would be another issue, I guess—you'd have two meetings arranged in the next reasonable while, bearing in mind the minister's schedule and what else we're doing.
I think it should be two meetings, and just push everything back and deal with this issue if you want to. But do we need to have a Monday meeting?
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Andrew Telegdi Liberal Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
Well, we have a schedule that's already set out, and the committee feels that we want to make sure that those important issues aren't delayed.
We're faced with a situation where tens of thousands of people—I think it's much more than that, but we'll find out—have their citizenship under threat; it's questionable. Members are getting calls in their offices about the citizenship issue, and I think it's important that we meet that real challenge, because citizenship, as has been outlined by some of the newspaper stories, ends up costing jobs. No jobs means no money. No money means not paying mortgages and losing houses. That's the unfortunate case of Mr. Teichroeb, which was documented.
By having these meetings we accomplish a number of things. We give the minister a chance to tell us what she's doing. We also try to get from the officials a fairly good grasp of what the numbers are in terms of who is at risk, and we can get that by having at least one person in from CIC. I think it's important that we have one person in from CIC.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
I think it should be mentioned as well that we kicked around an awful lot of dates this morning at our steering committee meeting. A number of people could not make the dates that we had set and we substituted with more dates. We didn't want to postpone any of the items that we had in our regular agenda.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Andrew Telegdi Liberal Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
We also noted that at these hearings you need to have three people, in terms of receiving witnesses. But it's an urgent issue and we want to move on it as quickly as possible, and essentially that's what this is about.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
Okay, you have a follow-up comment, and then I'll go to Mr. Karygiannis.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Are we speaking about potential amendment to the subcommittee thing? Maybe I'll just do it quickly and suggest—
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
No. What we're talking about now are the two meetings versus....
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
I'll settle the question by amending the subcommittee report to say that the meeting should be two meetings, subject to the committee deciding if more are necessary, to be held on Tuesday following the order in council appointment meeting on February 6, and everything else should be moved back of that.
That's the motion I propose, and I'd like to call a vote on it.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
I'm moving that motion, so we should deal with the motion.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
The motion is that we go with two meetings instead of three.
The clerk needs it in writing too, Mr. Komarnicki.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Jim Karygiannis Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Once we have the proposed amendment I'd like to hear it.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
Is it reasonable to go to the next one while we're waiting for this to be done up? No?
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Jim Karygiannis Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
I'm not sure if this is in order or not, but whether it's two or three meetings, we have to deal with this in a speedy manner. I do want to thank the parliamentary secretary and the steering committee for addressing this issue.
12:55 p.m.
The Clerk
I'm glad I'm retiring.
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
I propose that the meeting suggested by the steering committee be two in number, unless this committee decides otherwise, and that they take place on Tuesday or Thursday immediately following the February 6 meeting.
12:55 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
I think the steering committee was proposing that this was an important issue that we needed to get to, but we didn't want to delay any of the other studies we had already committed to. That's why we were suggesting extra meetings. So I'd like to urge people to stick with the committee's original report.
We also suggested two meetings to hear from groups, because there are quite a few different categories of people affected by this situation. We know right off the top of our heads that we have enough people to appear on each of those different aspects for two meetings. So I don't think it's unreasonable to talk about three meetings, and I don't think it's onerous on the committee to do that.
