Thank you.
I understand that our written submissions have arrived and are before you as of this morning. I apologize for our tardiness, but I hope you have a chance to review them.
I'm going to use what little time we have in order to outline our key recommendations and hopefully make some constructive comments regarding how the Department of Citizenship and Immigration might engage in a realignment of priorities in order to change their fundamental approach to this problem in order to better comport with the value of Canadian citizenship.
The starting point is something that Professor Galloway did an excellent job of emphasizing. We have the same starting point, which is citizenship is a right. It's not a special dispensation. It's a fundamental right, and it's more primary, more conceptually primary in a lot of ways than some of the other rights that are enumerated in the charter.
Our primary submission is that you need to send a strong and clear signal to the ministry that it is time to start taking this citizenship seriously and that doing this does not mean shutting the door on as many people as possible to keep it special, but rather doing whatever we can to make sure that Canadians are never lost or rejected or turned away by their country.
Our basic recommendation to accomplish this, the one that's emphasized in our brief, and that hasn't really come out in many of the submissions that we've heard so far.... Most people are arguing that we need a revamp of the Citizenship Act, and we agree with that on a fundamental level. However, we've also heard that you've had your funding cut for this project. We have the uncertainty of an upcoming election, and in light of this kind of political climate, what we'd like to emphasize is the idea that there is some discretion in the act. There is some discretion within the current legal framework, and this committee is in a position to urge the minister to start using this discretion to start fixing this problem now and to start changing the attitude within the department toward people with citizenship claims.
I believe that Mr. Galloway did a good job emphasizing citizenship as a fundamental right, so I'm going to focus on how we might tell when somebody has what I would call a prima facie claim to citizenship and what follows from this.
In her evidence, the minister has stated that she has created a task force within her call centre in order to deal with individual situations on a case-by-case basis. We support this step, but she has also admitted that she has, so far, only used this discretion with respect to 33 people. They're appealing the ruling in Taylor v. Canada. We have Senator Dallaire inspired to used the term “bureaucratic terrorism”, and the question is why. What is going on here? What are these people up against? We think maybe the department is taking a bit of a guilty until proven innocent approach, which is simply not appropriate in this context.
Our key recommendation is to take steps to ensure that people are dealt with in a careful and sensitive and judicious fashion when they can produce at least some evidence that they may have been or had good reason to consider themselves Canadian citizens, which is to say people with a prima facie claim to citizenship.
What might this look like? I'd like to draw your attention to three themes that emerged in the evidence presented to you already, and that we argue form the basis for this prima facie claim. The first is birth in Canada. The minister assured us several times that in most cases those who are born in Canada are Canadian. We submit that this represents a widely shared and accepted view of Canadian citizenship that deserves better recognition and protection.
The second is being born to Canadian parents. As Professor Galloway points out in his submission, one of the primary benefits to citizenship is the right to pass it on to one's children. The fact that this is a common-sense principle of citizenship is reflected in how shocked we are all are to hear that the sons and daughters of World War II veterans and tenth-generation Québécois are being denied their citizenship or stripped of their Canadian citizenship without notice while abroad.
The third is probably a little more controversial, but in a lot of these stories we hear of a big pile of administrative errors, failures of due process, and lack of notification, which adds up to a reasonably held belief in Canadian citizenship that's gone on for years. The citizenship cards are a good example, the ones without expiry dates. People are holding them because they think they're Canadian citizens, for a good reason. We think this adds up to a situation where the government should be stopped from suddenly turning around and denying them citizenship without good, charter-compliant reasons.
How this might work legally is elaborated in our written submissions, which I'll refer to you, but basically we think things should be sent to the task force and that the specialized administrators need to help people build their cases for a grant under subsection 5(4).