I work in an office in Aylmer and have been there since 1989, and the kinds of implications this bill is talking about we see every day in our office. When we have one person giving a letter, easily a couple of hundred of people can be affected by that same letter, and yet they go on living their lives thinking they are Canadians.
Usually what happens is that it only comes to the surface when someone loses his citizenship document, or it is stolen, or they apply to register and retain, and then, sometimes years later—three, four or five years later—a letter comes back saying “I'm sorry, but you never were a Canadian citizen.”
It is devastating to people who have been here for a long time, who think they are Canadians, who live as though they are Canadians, who have always seen themselves as Canadians, to be then told they never should have had it and to please return it. Often there is no alternative given as to what they are then to do.
Usually local offices have been very supportive about trying to find a way to help these people establish legal status. Recently I had a case where the local immigration office took a family.... There were eight children and the father who were not Canadian, but the mother and the eight children had come in as Canadian citizens, and she had sponsored her husband to become a landed immigrant. Now they find out that she's not Canadian, and all of those certificates had to be returned. They did their best to grant permanent residence to everyone in that family so that they could begin the process legally again, but it has taken a long time to get to that point, probably five or six years. They came to Canada first in 1999, and we are now at the point where the members of that family will be permanent residents and then will go through the process of being here for three years and then applying for Canadian citizenship.
A lot of work goes into those kinds of cases. Just recently, a cousin of that family arrived from the States, where he had been most recently living, because he had heard that this had happened to his cousin and he knows he would be affected by that same marriage certificate, but he doesn't want to lose his Canadian citizenship. Although he had lived in Canada for a number of years, he was concerned that if he weren't living here he wouldn't be able to do anything about it, so he has moved back in order to be here and to also try to apply for permanent residence. There are probably another 150 or more people affected by that same marriage certificate.
The only other comment I want to make is about the retention. There are many people out there who just did not realize they needed to do this. Unfortunately, in the early years, in 2005 when the first ones became 28 and were at the point where they needed to apply for retention, when they went to the local CIC offices, they were often not given accurate information. For example, in one southern Ontario office two siblings went in, because they had the letters and they knew they had to retain before they were 28. They went into the office and the officer told them “Once a Canadian, always a Canadian”, but they knew they had to retain. They went home and got their letters and went back to the office. The officer then showed the letters to the manager who said he didn't know anything about it and checked it out. They came back a few days later and were told by the officer that they were right, and that the documents needed to be completed, and that they were sorry, but that they had told a lot of other people “Once a Canadian, always a Canadian”.
We have people coming into our offices, then, asking why they should believe me, when someone in a CIC office has told them there is no such thing. I don't think that is happening much any more, but in the first couple of years it definitely was the case.
There are many who don't think they need to and who haven't done it, and we are constantly faced with what to do when people come into our offices who are already 28 and have not applied to retain but should have, or they come into Canada two months before their 28th birthday and cannot prove they have been here for a full year in order to apply. Some clarity here would be really helpful.