Thank you, Chair.
Minister, I wanted to come back to the matter of the children born to Canadian armed forces personnel in the Cold War period. One of the people who has been working on this issue is a woman named Christine Eden from British Columbia. In her informal work on this, pretty intense work, she says she has over 200 files of people who fall into that circumstance, whose citizenship is in question related to having been born out of Canada on a military base while parents were serving with the Canadian armed forces.
You had mentioned that you thought a lot of the passport issues were people who were applying for an initial passport, a first-time passport. Some of the examples, some of the anecdotal stories she sent me, are about people who say they've held several Canadian passports over the years, and when they went to get them renewed recently they were told that their documentation was no longer valid.
She points to a number of examples of people in that circumstance, so I'm looking forward to when she appears before the committee. She is coming to talk to us about those circumstances and her experience of this issue.
But people who have served in the military--RCMP officers, she points out--have had the same experience of renewing a passport and being told that they weren't Canadian and needed to resolve that issue before a new passport could be issued.
She also raises the issue of people who move between provinces. There's one example here of someone who moved from Alberta to B.C. and applied for a B.C. driver's licence but was told that the record of birth abroad wasn't an acceptable document provincially for proof of birth.
I'm wondering if you can tell me what kind of coordination happens between provincial agencies that issue identification documents and your department in terms of resolving issues around what's acceptable proof of citizenship and what's not. For instance, would your department have negotiations with the people who issue licences in British Columbia about what's acceptable ID?