Yes.
I don't have the current act right in front of me, but if you look at section 8, in my larger brief, at the very end, I refer to a possible amendment to section 8. The first overall paragraph would stay almost as it is, but then there are a couple of subpoints that would simply be eliminated. They would have, as I've indicated in my larger brief in paragraph 21—Maybe it doesn't help if I read what I have there. I'll explain what it means.
Right now citizenship can be passed on to an indefinite number of generations. I'm virtually sure that whenever there is a new citizenship act, whichever party is in power, that generosity will be restricted somehow. It will not be quite as generous as it was made in 1977.
We can live with that. We're not asking for something of greater generosity. We're just asking for it to be workable, to be changed so that people in the second generation would have until age 28 to apply for a certificate, and if they did, then that would remain permanently valid; if they did not, then they would be out of luck. They would have to apply for landed immigrant status after that. At present, people in that second generation have to apply and then they have to re-apply before they turn 28.
Now, if you imagine yourselves being administrators, you're telling someone that they have two options. You're telling someone that they have a certificate that looks perfectly valid but it isn't valid, sorry. You're telling them that they've turned 28 and they should have applied for something. It's not valid any more. That's a difficult message for an administrator to convey to anybody.
A different message, which is a little bit less difficult, is they are not eligible for a certificate in the first place—they're passed the age and so on. So administratively this would be a lot easier than first issuing certificates and then saying they're not valid.
That would be a change. Then the other changes that we've recommended, and I'm not sure that they would be in the legislation, would simply be a policy of not recalling those certificates if the only reason why you might recall them is that a grandfather or grandmother has been found to have been born of parents who were married only in a church, not in a civil marriage. I think that's a regulatory change that could be done.
It's not only that it makes sense, but the fact is that when these people are in Canada, usually, as my colleague outlined, the government will find another way of letting them stay. But it takes, as Mary mentioned, half a dozen years and through permanent residence and immigration processes and questions about work permits and health coverage and so on. The end result is that people have usually been able to regain status, but many people just stay under the cover—they don't apply. So they're out there. They're not really citizens but they have certificates. It's a very messy situation. It doesn't honour the idea of Canada's law.