Thank you, Mr. Chair.
With the two minutes remaining, I'll try to address as many of those issues as I can, as time permits.
Unfortunately, I do not have the number of cases at hand at the moment, but I am told we can get them before this hearing is over.
I'd like to address the issue of the numbers again. When I said 450, that is the number of cases we have identified--people who have contacted us and with whom we have identified an issue arising out of the application of the various acts. Also, sometimes it's the interpretation of those, and people who have failed to renew or retain their citizenship when they need to.
In 1947 it was a very different world than it is now. Common-law marriage was not considered acceptable, and illegitimate children unfortunately had a stigma attached to them, which no longer exists. Times have changed, but as I'm sure the honourable member is well aware, the laws of the time were applied at the time. The way the laws are written, anyone who was affected by them was affected by the laws that were in place at that time. So if someone were born in 1946, that predates the Citizenship Act, so the laws under the Citizenship Act classically do not apply.
That's what's being debated in the courts right now, whether the laws are in fact retroactive. Up until this point, if someone were born in 1948 when Canadian citizenship did exist, the rules would have been different than they were in 1946. Those laws changed again in 1977. This is where a lot of the confusion arises because the rules changed once again, so someone born in 1978 was working under different rules than someone in 1976.
We're dealing with a variety of circumstances, and that's why I think it's really important that we look at each case individually on its own merits and look at it within the eyes of the law, not politically, but how do we do the right thing for these people? What is right by Canadian standards, the standards we hold dear today, and still fully within the legal system with respect to these individuals?
There has been a lot of speculation about the numbers, no question, but we've only identified the 450 individual cases to date. That's why we set up this special hotline so we can hear if there are more, because we want to address them as quickly as we can.