I would urge the committee to take a look at that part of our brief in particular. Our recommendations are in bold, the first one being that current acts done by the ministry need to be charter compliant. In turning people away based on the gender of their Canadian parent, the legitimacy of their birth, even though we're blaming the 1947 act, the truth is that's a current act. It still enforced the ghost of these provisions, which live on because they're referenced and referenced. The Supreme Court of Canada took one look at this. Mr. Yakabuski wrote a very powerful and well-reasoned judgment in 1997. All nine justices agreed, this is called current discrimination, and give the example—and Professor Galloway does as well—that if this were a race issue, if we were saying to people, “Sorry, you're black, and it used to be that black people didn't get citizenship,” then nobody would stand for that. It's the same with respect to legitimacy.
When the minister was here before you, she gave a few reasons for wanting to appeal the Taylor judgment. I don't really hold her particularly to the legality of what she was saying. She cited a few things, such as if we do this for citizens, then when people come to do their taxes they're going to use the excuse of notification. We argue in our brief that's just poor legal reasoning. There seems to be kind of a speculative fear here of what's going to happen if we open the door. That's just not the way to approach citizenship. That's like saying “What's going to happen if we allow equality in our society and we let women into the workplace?” That was the same horn that was being blown when that issue first came before our country. Now we have a different issue, but once again, that kind of speculative reasoning of “Oh, no, what's going to happen if we give people their rights” is just not the way rights should be approached.