Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 19th, 2007

[Don Chapman, Lost Canadian Organization]

Would you like me to just give a statement of how I started this?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Yes, an opening statement might be in order.

[Don Chapman]

Well, I was born in Canada, and I was born in Canada to two Canadian parents, but I am not Canadian. I was stripped of my Canadian citizenship against my will and against my knowledge.

Citizenship has become something that's extremely important to me, and I have to admit that this has nothing to do with politics. I'll embrace anybody who embraces me on this.

I am fighting for rights, just as my father did. My father was an officer for Canada in World War II, and he died not being able to be a member of the Canadian Legion, nor was he a Canadian citizen when he died. My mother was born in Vancouver in 1917, and she is not a Canadian citizen. I am seventh generation. I am very proud of my roots and of who and what I am.

The problem is we're dealing with a country that will not recognize people like me.

The 1947 Citizenship Act was brought about, and it all started back in 1868. Actually, let's go back to 1867. We had the British North American Act, where Canada actually became kind of a separate country.

In 1868, Canada introduced the first Naturalization Act. You were a British subject, but you were a Canadian national. The actual wording of the actual law, word for word, was that married women, minors, lunatics, and idiots were classified under the same disability for their national status. That law remained on the books for the next 79 years.

During World War II, Paul Martin Sr. and several people came up with the idea of having a separate Canadian identity. It was after World War II, when Paul Martin Sr. was walking through the graveyards of Dieppe, that he looked down at the 707 graves and said, these Canadian soldiers died as British subjects; we are a country without citizens.

He came back and did a wonderful thing. He authored the first Canadian Citizenship Act, which went into effect on January 1, 1947. He finally allowed married women the right to be recognized as citizens, but they did not have equality of rights.

The 1947 Citizenship Act was a product of its time. What we had there was language, word for word, that “a minor, a lunatic, or an idiot” will be classified under the same disability for their citizenship.

Now, what happened is that Canada made a grotesque error in the 1700s and again in 1977. In the 1700s Canada abolished slavery, but they did it with this sort of language. Upper Canada said that if you were already enslaved, you would remain a slave until you die, but for anybody new, slavery would now be illegal in Canada. That's what they did in 1977. They came in with a new Citizenship Act. Senator Kinsella was on that committee, and he knows all about it. They talked about children like me, but it was the bureaucracy that stood opposed to it.

So Canada changed the law, but they kind of changed it only for people going forward. They left behind children like me.

Now, it wasn't alone to Canada. This was a very bad thing that came from the British empire. Lots of countries had this sort of language and laws on their books--Trinidad, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, the Philippines, India. A lot of countries have now fixed their laws to incorporate today's language.

I'm from Vancouver, and in the 1940s, if you were Jewish in Vancouver, you couldn't live in the British Properties or join the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club or the Point Grey Golf and Country Club. Asians, Indos, native aboriginals could not vote in this country.

We go back to 1914 and the Komagata Maru. We go back to about 1935, I think, and the ship St. Louis. Canada has had major problems with their immigration and citizenship.

This is the time for Canada to join the rest of the world, update their Citizenship Act to be charter-compliant, and do what every other British colony has done, which is go back and accept all their people.

Welcome the people, even the adults who took out citizenship, because if there's one consistency of Citizenship and Immigration....

Mr. Karygiannis, you said one thing; you said you called CIC three times and got three different answers.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I called them regarding my daughter who was born abroad.

[Don Chapman]

But you got different answers every time you talked to them.

Well, I've been dealing with them all my life. I'm 52 years old, and I tried to get back into this country in 1972 when I was 18 years old. I was turned away at the border and told I was not welcome here. That's the way it has stood for me all my life.

The consistency is that CIC doesn't know what they're talking about, and lots of people have been given the wrong answers. Today the Government of Canada is making the individual responsible when in fact it was the Government of Canada that made the mistakes.

There is a very simple solution. It's one paragraph in Trinidad. They could come in with a paragraph 3(1)(f) in the current act and basically end this almost overnight. I went into Ed Komarnicki's office a while back and said we could make the Taylor case go away with a subsection 5(4), but this government persisted and put him in court. But they got something they never bargained for; they lost bigger than they ever imagined. And they're going to lose even harder if they continue pressing forward, because in British law, the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act was not legal.

So we have to go forward, pick up the chips, rewrite the Citizenship Act, and make it charter-compliant for everybody. We start with a paragraph 3(1)(f) and make the Taylor case go away. We get promises...we can't even get promises; promises don't work with politicians. We have to redo a Citizenship Act that everybody can agree with that is charter-compliant. There's your problem. We have three separate classes of Canadian citizens in this country right now.

I'll take any questions, but that's the gist of where I'm coming from.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We have approximately 14 minutes.

Mr. Telegdi is our first questioner.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chapman. The minister said that people born in Canada are Canadian citizens. Obviously you and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people like you don't fall in that category.

One thing that has bothered me in terms of this government.... We had previous attempts at citizenship act...with Bill C-63, Bill C-16, Bill C-18, that we attempted to put through. In the last Parliament, at the invitation of two ministers, we produced three reports in this committee that would give guidance to the government on how to fix the Citizenship Act. We had a budget attached to that for the Citizenship Act. Had we not had the election when we did, I dare say Canada would have a new Citizenship Act right now.

Those recommendations--which were supported unanimously, I might add, by the Conservative members of the committee and in the House when the occasion arose--gave guidance to the government on how to fix the Citizenship Act.

Now, with the new government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in less than a year we've had two ministers of citizenship and immigration. Citizenship and Immigration is a difficult department. If you want to do nothing in a department, what you do is you put in a brand new minister. I quoted Mr. John Reynolds before, who made the comment that CIC is one department that needs a massive clean-up, and we have to straighten that mess out.

The problem is that the department is spending all sorts of money fighting court cases. They had the Benner case in 1997. It went to the Supreme Court. The Benner case was very clear. It gave direction that they cannot discriminate on the basis of whether it is the mother or father who has citizenship. The department ignored it. They have the Taylor case, where they're fighting against the son of a veteran who fought for this country in the Second World War to deny him his birthright. They ignored the ruling of Justice Luc Martineau. They have said they are going to the Federal Court of Appeal, and if that case is lost, they'll go to the Supreme Court. So essentially they're using taxpayers' money--after they eliminated the court program--to fight the sons of veterans from reclaiming their legitimate birthright.

Does this come down to the fact that when this government did not appoint Diane Ablonczy, who is the most knowledgeable person in the Conservative Party, as the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, they were really sending a signal that they're not interested in this issue, so let the bureaucrats keep running the department.?

[Don Chapman]

Well, I would like to have seen Diane...because she certainly knew this portfolio.

The courts are the wrong places to fix this. It becomes a barnacle. The minute you have one decision, it affects another, and you have results you don't expect. The Benner decision was odd. It went to the Supreme Court of Canada. In essence they ruled that the 1947 Citizenship Act was blatantly discriminatory, thus granting the effect of citizenship to foreign-born children of a Canadian parent. Therefore, had I been born outside of Canada, today I would be Canadian and so would my children. But I was born in Canada, so I was passed over.

When I brought that little anomaly to the attention of the Senate, every senator's head in the room was going up and down as if saying this doesn't make any sense. Seven days later, the then acting director general of Citizenship and Immigration, Patricia Birkett, said they were going to throw out the Benner decision effective August 14, 2004. That brought in all of these other lost provisions. It didn't work, and that's why we have all these different groups.

By the way, I do know the numbers. I know the numbers very well on how many people are lost Canadians. Why? Canada's leading statistician on this, Dr. Barry Edmonston--he's coming before this committee--has worked with CIC before. He's a PhD. He has been at the University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, and he's currently at the University of Victoria. He knows the statistics, and he has shared them with me. So I do know the numbers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We'll go with five-minute rounds, I guess, because of the time constraints.

Madame--

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Chair, wouldn't it now come to me? In this next half-hour, if we're going back and forth--

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Well, no, we started a new round of witnesses. The rule is that you have to go down the table and back again.

So Madam Faille is next.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

In the case of Ms. Jennings, there's one thing that I don't understand. The minister told you earlier that Ms. Jennings was born in Canada; so she's necessarily Canadian.

The act normally applies depending on the person's date of birth. So under the 1947 act, it would have been her father's citizenship that was transferred to her. Was it under the amendment made in 1977 that Ms. Jennings received Canadian citizenship?

[Don Chapman]

No, she had it...because I was a Canadian child. But we were still chattel of our fathers. Really, about looking back, I would suggest it's time to look forward and correct these laws. We shouldn't go on witch hunts of who is and who is not a Canadian. This is clearly a common-sense issue and can be dealt with very quickly. One paragraph for a lot of countries did the trick.

So the minister got her citizenship by being born in Canada, but she could have lost it because of her father. These are really wacky, screwy laws, and we should go forward with common sense.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Ms. Jennings still has her Canadian citizenship because her father didn't give up his American citizenship?

[Don Chapman]

Right.

I talked with one of the bureaucrats back here, and he assured me that Ms. Jennings is Canadian. There is one section in a CIC document that says quite clearly that if you are born in Canada to a non-citizen father and a citizen mother, you are not Canadian. So it is subject to interpretation. But never should Ms. Jennings or anybody else have their citizenship put in question. This is a pretty common-sense issue.

By the way, when it comes to that, we talked a great deal about remedies, such as subsection 5(4). They don't work, because for children such as me, my citizenship was stripped away based on the 1948 act. But the remedy they're giving me is out of the 1977 act. In 1947, it says that any child like me can come up to Canada at any time by age 21, and they will grant citizenship. I did that, and they didn't give it to me. Then it says that with special circumstances, anytime in your life you can come back and the minister must give citizenship. Guess what? They're ignoring that.

So this case-by-case subsection 5(4) doesn't work.

Citizenship should never be in the hands of politicians. It should either be judges or very good legislation—and that's our problem: we had lousy legislation in 1947 and lousy legislation in 1977.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

From what I understand of your answer, Ms. Jennings could have come up against a bureaucrat who interpreted the act differently, and she then could have lost her citizenship. Is that correct?

[Don Chapman]

In that case, yes. We have lots of bureaucratic errors. Next week you're going to hear about some people who have come in and who have been on their third passport. It wasn't until then that they were told that they were no longer Canadian. In fact it was the government that made the mistake, but it forced this person into court and forced this person out of Canada.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Do you have any questions, Mr. Siksay?

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chapman, for being here. Your passion about this has always inspired the committee, and I have a feeling that we're in the process of this happening yet again. Someday it would be nice not to have to do that.

You've mentioned a couple of times that a number of countries have solved this problem, and you said there's one paragraph that would do the trick. Can you tell us what that paragraph is?

[Don Chapman]

I think Mr. Telegdi has it, and I will provide it next week.

Trinidad had a solution that was one paragraph. Australia had a little better solution. Trinidad just said that if you ever lost citizenship, you are now a citizen again. Australia added one word, that you have to be of “good” character. Now, what “good” is, I don't know. Then Australia went a little further and included children, war brides, war brides' children, and then they gave preferential treatment for the spouse to get into the country.

Traditionally, Australia has been one of the hardest countries to get into. So I dare say it would be nice for the committee to go travel and take a vacation in Australia. And if they haven't had all these problems post-9/11, I doubt Canada will.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Are you finished, Mr. Siksay?

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I have a couple more questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Okay.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Chair, I have a point of order.