I think it was appalling when I realized that in fact it's a bureaucratic decision. There is very little right to due process. In fact, people don't know they've lost their citizenship, so they're operating as if they're a citizen and they don't even know.... That's the first problem. You can be stripped behind your back; you can be making decisions that assume you're a citizen. It can deprive you of your livelihood. The number of decisions we make every day assuming we're citizens is amazing. Our lives depend on assuming we're citizens of this country. If it's stripped from behind us without us knowing, the implications are dire.
There has to be due process, absolutely. We should have all kinds of rights to first of all know that we're losing it, and the conditions under which we can lose it should be so laid out, and obviously they should be extreme conditions. We have all kinds of people who are born today in Canada that we don't like very much, necessarily, but we have to keep them. We shouldn't necessarily strip others of their citizenship for trivial reasons.
If we are going to have exceptions of fraud, and that's the only condition I see--certainly not somebody who is born here or born to Canadian parents; that's preposterous. We need due process. People need to know they've lost it, and they need the right to counsel, they need the right to appear at some level--I'm not a lawyer--before an accepted decision-maker, such as a judicial decision-maker, and the right to appeal. The consequence of losing it is so dire that we should make sure there are no injustices here. If people have to be stripped, there should be enormous process involved. I don't expect that this is going to be often. In fact, it took a long time for MOSAIC to convince me we should even have this provision. I think we should have one group of citizens in this country.