Evidence of meeting #44 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was born.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Don Chapman  Lost Canadians Organization
Wendy Adams  As an Individual
Charles Bosdet  As an Individual
Melynda Jarratt  Historian, Canadian War Brides
William Smith  As an Individual
Christopher Veeman  As an Individual
Barry Edmonston  Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
Donald Galloway  Professor of Law, University of Victoria, As an Individual
Jason Gratl  President, B.C. Civil Liberties Association
Christina Godlewska  Articled Student, B.C. Civil Liberties Association

11 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Our meeting will now come to order.

I want to welcome all of you here today, as we continue our study on the loss of Canadian citizenship for the years 1947, 1977, and 2007.

We have two panels that we will hear from today. Our first panel will go from 11 to 12, and the second panel will go from 12 to 1.

I want to welcome our first panel. Appearing as individuals are Wendy Adams, Charles Bosdet, William Smith, and Christopher Veeman. And from the Canadian War Brides, we have Melynda Jarratt, historian.

I want to welcome you here today. I think you're familiar with how the committee operates, so I'll pass it over to you to begin your opening statements. I think Mr. Chapman will be introducing each of you.

Mr. Chapman, do you want to begin, please?

11 a.m.

Don Chapman Lost Canadians Organization

Thank you.

Wendy Adams came to me not too long ago. She is a Benner child. If you remember, the Benner decision was a unanimous Supreme Court decision granting citizenship to people born outside of Canada to a Canadian parent.

When Charles and I testified before the Senate, the response of Citizenship and Immigration Canada was to come in and basically cancel the Benner decision. In testimony just a few weeks ago, with Minister Finley, they said they had given great notice to people for loss of citizenship. Wendy is going to testify that this is not exactly true, because here she is, still affected by the Benner case.

Wendy.

11 a.m.

Wendy Adams As an Individual

Are we lost?

I'd like to start out by thanking you for having me here. It is an honour. It is my first trip to Ottawa, so I'm in awe. Nevertheless, are we lost? It was in essence the question I was asked. I asked myself this when I chanced upon the February 26 standing committee meeting hearings a few weeks ago. By virtue of several circumstances, my brother and I are lost. We are considered to be lost Canadians. This is how we came to be lost.

Our parents met in 1960 in Cold Lake, Alberta. Our mom was serving in the Canadian Forces as an MP, and our dad was in the U.S. Air Force. They married in 1961 and our mom left the Canadian Forces to be with our dad. Being in the military, our family moved often. In 1963 my brother was born in Peru, Indiana. I was born five years later in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1970 our dad left for a one-year tour in Vietnam and we moved to Canada to live with my mom's family. When he returned we moved to Omaha, Nebraska. Then in 1972 we moved to Spokane, Washington.

Knowing that the next orders my dad would receive could possibly be another isolation assignment where he would have to be away from us for another year, he decided to retire from the air force. With my mom's desire to live near her family and my dad's love for fishing, we moved to Canada. We arrived in the small oceanside town of Powell River, British Columbia, in 1973. I was five years old. We've lived in Canada for the past 34 years, and amazingly, for the most part, in one place. As children, when the topic of citizenship arose we knew we were born in the U.S. and held U.S. citizenship, but we had always been told by our parents that we were entitled to dual citizenship because our mom was Canadian.

At one time my brother even registered to vote until my mom reminded him that he hadn't yet applied for his Canadian citizenship. Aside from being left out on election days, we found that the citizenship papers were unimportant to us, as we could travel quite freely across the border at that time with photocopied documents, papers, birth certificates, and immigrant papers. Then September 11 came. The photocopied documents became a thing of the past and we would need passports and permanent resident cards to travel.

We decided it was time to apply for Canadian citizenship. We filled out our applications for proof of citizenship, had our documents verified for certificates, etc., and paid our fees, $200 each. Our applications were mailed in fall 2004. Then we waited and we waited. After several phone calls and a year later we finally were able to talk to somebody in the immigration department. We were told our application had not yet been processed. Then we waited some more. Finally, in November 2005 we received a letter stating that our applications were denied and we had missed the August 14, 2004 deadline. We didn't even know there was a deadline. Our applications were received in October 2004, so we had missed the deadline by a few months. They were kind enough to send us applications for Canadian citizenship, just as other immigrants would have received. We felt defeated.

For 32 of the past 34 years that my brother and I have lived in Canada we thought we were Canadian. Imagine our shock when we were told that we had missed a deadline. What deadline? We didn't know there was a deadline.

We truly feel as though we are Canadian. We have lived in Canada for the majority of our lives. We were educated, we worked, and we paid taxes in Canada. We are married to Canadians and our children are Canadian. We really felt that becoming Canadian citizens was just a formality. Now we have been asked to pay yet another set of fees, to wait 12 to 15 months, and to take a test. Our only alternative is to apply for our permanent resident cards, which means yet another set of fees and time off work, because logistically where we live we would have to take a day off and travel by ferry, which is a $100 expense, to pick up our permanent resident cards. So we weighed our options and decided to consider Canadian citizenship for another day. That was until three weeks ago, when we learned of these hearings and the Lost Canadians Organization. We didn't realize there were so many others like us.

I hope that in some small way our story can make a difference for the thousands upon thousands of Canadians like us waiting for citizenship.

I thank you for your time. Again, it's an honour to be here.

11:05 a.m.

Lost Canadians Organization

Don Chapman

It should be noted that six days ago there was a Federal Court decision very similar to Wendy's--Babcock v. Canada. It was a gentleman in the same position--a Benner case--who applied in July 2004 and they sent him a refugee package, not anything to do with citizenship. So he missed the deadline of applying for a Benner by one month, and he won last week in the Federal Court of Canada, defending himself. This is a decision already determined by the Supreme Court.

Charles Bosdet and I came across each other many years ago. We've testified many times together before this committee. He's one of the smartest people I've ever come across and knows this backwards and forwards from a legal standpoint and a personal standpoint. I think he was thrown in together with the Mennonite group because his grandfather was born in Mexico, but in fact he's not Mennonite.

Charles.

11:05 a.m.

Charles Bosdet As an Individual

I want to thank the committee for an opportunity to speak here today.

My name is Clarles Bosdet. I am pleased to see a few familiar faces from earlier times. I want to focus on some suggestions today, and by way of explaining where those suggestions come from, give you very quickly where I get my perspective on this.

I have been hired by companies to help vet their policies and procedures and to help them prepare for compliance audits, recently helping one company to come into compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which was the biggest change in securities law in the United States since 1934. I've been brought in to help on compliance matters with various regulatory schemes, including nuclear navy quality assurance and other corporate governance matters. Before that, I was news and opinion editor of the largest daily law newspaper in the United States and editor-in-chief of a couple of smaller ones before that. Earlier, I worked as a document analyst in complex litigation cases for a couple of law firms in California.

My journey to this table began when I applied for a certificate of citizenship and the application for the certificate was denied. That began what became a tortuous two-year process that didn't make any sense to me. For starters, it seemed to be following a script, and I wasn't privy to what that script was. I understand policies and procedures and so forth, but it got to the point that what I was receiving in letter after letter from my evaluator didn't acknowledge the stuff that I was sending in and also didn't really match the content of what was in some of these things. It didn't acknowledge, in some cases, secondary evidence that the citizenship policy manual plainly states is acceptable and will be accepted in lieu of primary evidence.

In my case, I believe the evaluator thoroughly violated the proscription against placing an undue burden on an applicant, which says you can't place somebody at an extraordinary financial burden to try to meet the proof requirements that the evaluator is placing on them.

There was also a certain lack of professionalism. This evaluator sought to disprove my own citizenship by applying a foreign nationality law to one of my ancestors. In a subsequent discussion, it was very clear that this evaluator did not understand--was completely ignorant of--the fact that there was a difference between this foreign nationality law and Canada's. The two systems handled things differently, and this person didn't know that. That bothered me a lot, because this person, I was told, is the quality assurance evaluator for the citizenship case processing centre in Sydney. She passes judgment on the other files that come on her desk, and a lot of Mennonite families from my home province of Manitoba were apparently run through the same script that we later surmised she was running me through.

What bothered me wasn't that she was ignorant of the law; what bothered me more than anything was a complete lack of interest in learning anything new. I expected her to say she would check on that, or ask me to send her something that would tell her what I was talking about, or say she didn't know that and would consult with somebody on it. There was none of that. Her response was that we treat this all the same, and besides, I've been doing this for many years, and I've been doing this for a long time. I just thought that was an astounding thing to say.

There followed a series of disingenuous and misleading request letters that looked fine if all you knew was what you read in the letters, but in truth many of the things that appeared in these letters were belied by a stack of evidence sitting on her desk, evidence that she was pretending wasn't there.

She shoved the burden of proof onto me in one really onerous regard, and that was trying to prove a negative. She surmised that maybe somebody in my family tree was born someplace else and suggested that I go out into the middle of Mexico and search the records there, because maybe that's where my grandfather's birth certificate was. I suggested back to her that maybe he was born at any town between the middle of Mexico and Arichat, Nova Scotia, where an entire stack of documents said he was from, including his Canadian military enlistment papers, his registration as a British subject, and his--oh, by the way--Canadian passport in 1942 that was issued first sometime in the 1930s--and she had a letter from the British consulate confirming that.

On appeal, it didn't stop there. I kicked up a bit of a fuss, and my case eventually was taken over by an evaluator in Ottawa. The case processing centre evaluator on my file apparently misrepresented my case to the Ottawa person, and this came to light when the Ottawa evaluator called me, and a whole raft of things came to light. She had been misinformed about the nature of the evidence in the case. She had not been informed about a significant number of key documents. I don't know how you leave out things like registration as a British subject or passports, acceptable secondary evidence, apparently a lot of which wasn't mentioned in this phone call.

The Sydney evaluator--and this is the quality assurance evaluator, mind you--then faxed what she said were the pertinent documents or the important ones in the case. The Ottawa evaluator, when I finally got around to discussing this thing with her, was astounded at the stuff that had not been faxed to her, because she had a deadline to meet. She had to rule on my case. My full file from Sydney did not arrive in Ottawa until hours before the ruling was due on the minister's desk.

If I had not faxed 110 pages of material to the Ottawa evaluator, she would have nothing but the say-so of the Sydney evaluator to go on in making her determination. As I understood it later, the Ottawa evaluator concluded I was a Canadian citizen. I don't hold that privilege right now because somebody else disagreed with that, and that's sort of getting off onto another track already. However, what this did for me, and the reason that I'm here today, is that it pointed out--and I've seen it confirmed at mid-level and at high levels in this department--systemic problems, some of which seem to be the same from top to bottom. There are issues of fairness and issues of inefficiency. There is no real administrative solution at hand to when somebody runs amok, as seemed to be the case with my file. For heaven's sake, this department doesn't live up, in many ways, to the values that we profess to hold dear.

What we need to do and what this committee needs to do is to fix this system in a way, all the way down to the desk level in Sydney, because nothing else you do matters. You can pass amendments, you can rewrite the Citizenship Act to turn out the perfect act, but what I know from my work as a process auditor and from helping people with this kind of stuff is that it's sort of like a relay race. No matter how good the first three people are, if the last one drops the baton, the whole object of the race is defeated, and that's what's happening, in my view, in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in the case processing centre, where all of the citizenship applications go.

I want to turn to two things: evidence and then recourse when evidence goes out the window. As I mentioned, and as members of this committee are probably aware, we have primary evidence like birth certificates. We have secondary evidence consisting of passports or maybe even driver's licences, and other things. They're all spelled out in the policy manuals, CP 14.

I would suggest that the committee consider statutorily shifting the burden of proof from the way it seems to be executed now in Sydney--that is to say, from a prosecutorial standpoint--to having a statement of what is acceptable primary evidence and acceptable secondary evidence, and if somebody submits adequate primary and secondary evidence or secondary in lieu of primary evidence, then you should accept that.

The onus should not be, in my view, on a citizen whose resources are far more limited than the evaluator's are to overcome every single objection. In many instances, those objections seem to have no bearing whatsoever on the case at hand. The denial letters, if they're issued, should inform people of what the recourse is, and I'll say more on that in a bit, but right now the only resource seems to be pretty inadequate.

There is one thing here too. I would propose to the committee that it might consider putting expiry dates on challenges to official documents issued by the Canadian government. If you issue a passport in 1942, somebody 60 years later should not be able to come along and, for no reasons they disclose to you, say this is not acceptable.

11:15 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

I know witnesses would love to have unlimited time, but I know you've been told there is roughly about five minutes for each witness, and we're into about eleven minutes here now, so Mr. Bosdet, could you move to the conclusion?

11:15 a.m.

As an Individual

Charles Bosdet

In thirty seconds?

11:15 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

I'm not going to hold you to thirty seconds. You can move a little bit beyond that.

11:15 a.m.

As an Individual

Charles Bosdet

I would suggest that the current system of citizenship judges is not adequate. I would replace it with an administrative law panel that is fairly typical in tax departments. Such a system works in California, where an agricultural labour relations board and other executive agencies publish opinions and rule in disputes involving people there so everybody knows what the reasons and game rules are and how they're being interpreted.

This would be a significant help to practitioners, to lawyers in Canada, because the case law on citizenship is very thin relative to Canada's citizenship population.

11:15 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Thank you, Mr. Bosdet.

Mr. Chapman, do you want to take a moment to speak?

11:15 a.m.

Lost Canadians Organization

Don Chapman

Charles made a comment to me one time that his family paid in blood for their citizenship. His grandfather, the man they're questioning, took original pictures of Flanders Fields with the poppies in World War I. It's appalling what they've done to Charles.

Melynda Jarratt is the world-wide historian on Canadian war brides.

Melynda, would you like to tell your story?

11:15 a.m.

Melynda Jarratt Historian, Canadian War Brides

Good morning.

My name is Melynda Jarratt. I live in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and I'm an historian of the Canadian war brides. I've been working on this subject for 20 years. This is my third appearance before this committee. I appeared in April 2005 and was recalled in May 2005 to speak again. Now here I am back again, telling the same old story.

I know I only have five minutes, so I am going to try to make this as short as possible. I have three points I want to make, which might turn into five.

My first point is that as the main contact point for Canadian war brides in this country and internationally, through the aegis of my website that I run, called canadianwarbrides.com, which is sort of the clearinghouse, and the listserv with which I'm involved as an Internet-based point of contact for all war brides and their children and grandchildren, I can tell you right now that war brides are not happy about what's going on, and their children are not happy and their grandchildren are not happy. Their fathers and grandfathers and their husbands did something for this country in World War II for which they deserve to be honoured. We hear a lot about honouring veterans, but when it comes to providing the security that these people need in their old age, and they are indeed citizens, all we are hearing from the halls of government is insecurity and uncertainty.

I personally find it depressing. I find it insulting. I find it frustrating, and I just can't believe this. It's beyond the pale. It's ridiculous. You talk to Canadians and you ask them about war brides and what they think about war brides. War brides are a unique phenomenon in Canadian history. They came to this country—and this is my point number two, a brief history—between 1942 and 1948: 43,454 war brides were brought to this country under the system organized by the Canadian government, through the Department of Immigration at first but then the Department of National Defence took over in 1944. They were transported to this country in a government-organized scheme. With them they brought 20,997 children over the space of six years. Those children were welcomed, and the mothers were welcomed with open arms as the best citizens one could ever possibly hope for.

The overwhelming documentary evidence in the files of the National Archives—and you can believe that over 20 years I have explored it to no end--thousands and thousands and thousands of sheets of paper on microfilm, not to mention newspapers and contemporary accounts and just plain old archival documents that children, the wives, and the grandchildren have saved over these years and have sent to me.... And the archival evidence is what I want to talk to you about as point number three. The archival evidence is so astounding; it's a mountain. What is going to happen here in the next couple of years is a tsunami of applications for people's old age pension and Canada pension and passports and they're going to get caught up. This morning we heard the figures. An estimated 25,000 to 35,000 war brides and their children are going to be affected by these problems in the old 1947 Citizenship Act. Something has to be done.

I'm going to show you just a couple of small things, and let the government try to deny it. Here are some of my juicy ones. I call them “my juicy ones” because they're so obvious.

There is no date of printing on this one, but I believe it was 1944. It was called the Canadian Cook Book for British Brides. It is a Canadian cookbook on how to cook potatoes and lobster and all that sort of thing. It's kind of funny actually, when you look at it these days, on how to iron clothes and the Canadian lifestyle. This is what they say: “You are now a Canadian and these are your services.” This was in 1944, before there was a so-called Citizenship Act. They're not saying “You are now a Bornean.” They're not saying “You're from New Guinea.” They are saying “You are a Canadian.” There was a concept called Canada before the Citizenship Act came into being. They're not saying anything else. They're saying “You are a Canadian.”

Here is Princess Alice, the sister-in-law of Queen Mary, who was married to the Governor General of Canada at the time. She had been asked to write a foreword to the welcome to war brides. It was printed in 1944 by the Department of National Defence and the Wartime Information Board. In it she says, “I have been asked to prepare this by the Canadian government.” Assuming the way the government is today and the way they were back then--in wartime they would have been very concerned about every detail--one would wonder if there's no such thing as Canadian citizenship, which the present citizenship and immigration department is trying to say there isn't, why then would they have an entire chapter on Canadian citizenship in a 1944 document?

I'll read one sentence from it. We just laugh when we read this stuff because we can't believe that people are trying to deny it. “Coming from the British Isles to become a new citizen of Canada, you will have...”, and then they go on and on. They are not saying you are going to become a new citizen of Borneo, they are saying you are going to become a new citizen of Canada.

Here's another little one that was given to me by Marion Vermeersch, who testified last week. This was a document that was given to every war bride--it's really beautiful, actually, colourful--“Dock to Destination”. It was two pages, folded. I've scanned it for this presentation. In the introduction it explains to the war brides what they can expect when they arrive in Canada on the ship:

As soon as the ship docks, Canadian immigration officials will come aboard. These men will complete the formalities for your entry into Canada, which automatically makes you a Canadian citizen.

Now, what else are they saying there?

Can I just make one more--

11:25 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Yes. I'll give you about 30 seconds. We're on to eight minutes now.

11:25 a.m.

Historian, Canadian War Brides

Melynda Jarratt

Okay.

The last thing I want to say is that as far as the Minister of Veterans Affairs.... And so many other ministers were dragged into this over the course of those years, because everywhere the war brides met, or interceded with any government department, the ministers would get involved. In that regard, the Minister of Veterans Affairs, in 1946, specifically stated in a document that war brides are Canadian citizens, and he got agreement with that from the trade and commerce minister and the Minister of Immigration.

In that regard, Eswyn Lyster, who is a war bride--I'll make this very quick--wrote to Her Majesty the Queen in October and asked Her Majesty to intercede on behalf of war brides, who she felt were being treated so shabbily by the Canadian government. Her Majesty has asked the Governor General of Canada to deal with it, and the Governor General has asked the Minister of Veterans Affairs to deal with it.

Now it's in the Minister of Veterans Affairs' lap about what people thought in 1946. What was the Canadian government saying? They were saying Canadian war brides are Canadians. To say anything else is a bunch of malarkey.

11:25 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Thank you. That's a very interesting presentation, Ms. Jarratt.

Is there any introduction needed for Mr. Smith?

11:25 a.m.

Lost Canadians Organization

Don Chapman

Yes.

By the way, General or Senator Romeo Dallaire fits into that category as well, and she has his landing documents.

William Smith called me a while back. He's one of these people who, when you look at his story, it just devastates your life. It also shows the complete inequity of treating siblings differently. His brother, same situation, same parents, same everything, but the brother is employed by the Canadian government, and Will Smith is being denied. It has broken him financially. It's just total devastation.

William, tell your story.

11:25 a.m.

William Smith As an Individual

Thanks, Don.

I appreciate the invitation to be here and to express some of my reaction to the situation. One of the first things I'd just like to clear up is that unless somebody can admit there is a problem, the solution to the problem will never be found. It's not obvious to me, and it's certainly not evident, that there is an intent or an ability to resolve that problem. I think the situation has been well explored over a long period of time, but it doesn't look like we're there yet. That's just my observation.

My understanding of laws is that they come into being to maintain order and provide security. They're supposed to serve the interests of the public. They're supposed to be based on common sense and be tempered with reasonableness.

I don't know what happened, but something went tremendously wrong. I really cannot believe this was part of the original intent of the citizenship law the way it was written. I also note that 1945 to 1947—the time it took before this became a law—wasn't a long period of time, but it's certainly taking an awfully long time to modify the shortcomings and to take care of the evolutions of the law that have been lacking.

There are obligations of law. There's tort law, the duty of care, and responsibility for the actions and the consequences. The shortcomings of these obligations, when they fail, damage and cause harm to other people. That's something to which somebody has to pay serious attention.

For me, there's one very fundamental right. In French it comes out better than it does in English: un droit acquis, an acquired right. A mother and father decide to have their children. The child grows as it's conceived. Along the way, before it is born, it acquires the right to life while it is being fed before it is born. Throughout the life, even after birth, rights are added to those rights that are acquired at the first instance. Looking back over everything, one of the things I feel I acquired was the right of the citizenship of my father genetically, before I was born, and I'm not going to flex on that.

Later on, after completing all my schooling in Canada, I was able to acquire my social insurance number, which allowed me to work and which allowed me to pay taxes. I vote in elections. I've even been summoned to serve jury duty in a murder trial. Those are pretty Canadian experiences, but there were errors along the way.

The first error occurred three weeks after I was born, in April 1949. My mother, with her new child, was accompanied by my father, who made the trip out to the United States to accompany his wife and his new son back to Canada. When we arrived at the border, on the train, Immigration's only comment was, “Oh, you have a new Canadian”. There was no documentation of my entry into Canada. Somebody was representing Immigration at a border point during the entry of a child into the country, and something should have happened. Nothing did.

This was followed up by a second visit by some gentleman. We believe he was from Immigration, but it was a long time ago. He left a document that traces back to December 7, 1951. The gentleman came to acquire the information about the citizenship status, birth certificates, and marriage certificates for my parents and all of their children, in order that the children could be enrolled into and receive benefits or so our parents could receive the benefits on our behalf from the federal baby bonus program. He took all of the documents and we were enrolled and our parents received those benefits.

It has always been my understanding throughout my entire life that I have dual nationality: from where I was born, the United States, and also from the citizenship I acquired through my parent.

The consequences of that failing is that I have lost my employment security. The positions in which I seek to be employed all have a requirement of proof of Canadian citizenship. Through a long and lengthy process, I have not been able to get that. It has caused me many months of waiting, from March until November of last year. After not receiving any reliable information, even though all the calls down to Sydney are recorded for quality purposes, not one person I talked to had any status related to reality, and just said that somebody would be in contact with me.

When I finally received a letter I was so blown away, it was like somebody shot the light out in a room and all I could see was red, and I vomited blood for three days and was hospitalized. At that point my wife asked my older brother, who had worked for the federal government until his retirement, if he would take a look into the matter. My older brother is a very tenacious, consistent, and detailed person. He wrote letters to Prime Minister Harper, to the Governor General, and to every level of administration within his reach, looking for a solution and trying to do his best on behalf of me, his brother. I think his intent was very noble.

The outcome of that is still unknown, but it has left me financially destitute.

11:35 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Thank you.

We're into eight minutes now, so in order to ensure that our committee members have some time to question, of course, we have to—

11:35 a.m.

As an Individual

William Smith

I'd just like to say that my Canada includes me.

11:35 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Thank you. It was a very interesting presentation.

Our last presenter will be Mr. Veeman.

11:35 a.m.

Lost Canadians Organization

Don Chapman

Again, although my brother and sister have turned out to be Canadian, I am not; and with William, his brother turns out to be Canadian. Or is he? You never know in this process.

Now, to come back to another thing, we have Chris Veeman representing somebody who has to do with this committee.

Diane Finley testified and said they were correcting this with subsection 5(4) of the Citizenship Act. Well, we have a couple of the brothers who received subsection 5(4) consideration, but one brother is being denied citizenship—and Chris represents that brother. So again there is an inequality within families.

March 26th, 2007 / 11:35 a.m.

Christopher Veeman As an Individual

Thank you for the invitation to be here.

I'm not a lost Canadian, at least I don't think so. I was born in Saskatoon, and until I got involved in this file I had no doubt in my mind that I was Canadian, but stranger things have happened, I guess.

Anyway, I'm a lawyer and I am representing Robert Gene Clark, who is caught up in this border baby situation.

I want to give you a bit of the history of his family. His grandfather arrived in Manitoba, having immigrated from Ontario back in the late 19th century. Mr. Clark's father was then born in Manitoba in 1909. His mother was born in Manitoba in 1916. They were married in 1939. Mr. Clark's father served in World War II in the air force. Then Mr. Clark's sister was born in 1940. The three brothers were born after the war. Mr. Clark was born in 1947, immediately after the first Citizenship Act came into force. They lived right by the United States border in southern Manitoba, and the nearest medical facility was in Westhope, North Dakota. That's where all of the children were born. They all came back to Canada immediately after their respective births, and all have lived in Canada ever since.

During that time from 1947 to 2006, Mr. Clark and his brothers and sister considered themselves to be Canadians and did everything that you would expect a Canadian to do, including going to school, working, voting, borrowing money from Farm Credit and paying it back, receiving family allowance cheques. In 2006 the beginning of the situation came to light when Mr. Clark was convicted of an offence and somebody discovered that he had been born in the United States. This commenced an immigration inquiry. Ultimately he was told that he is a foreign national in Canada and has no status here, and because of the conviction he was issued a deportation order.

The Federal Court stayed the deportation order on the basis of the argument that he is in fact a citizen under the Citizenship Act, although it's an interim stay. Fast forward another few months: Mr. Clark's two brothers are granted citizenship under section 5(4) of the Citizenship Act, so that means that they are citizens as of February 2007. They apparently had no status in Canada until that time, but Mr. Clark has not received the same treatment, presumably because of the criminality involved.

We say that he is a citizen. The whole family in fact are citizens by operation of law. But even if we're wrong in that, I submit to you that something is wrong with the system that permits people to live in Canada for 59 years, openly processing themselves to be Canadians, and then be issued a deportation order after a summary hearing in front of a bureaucrat of the Canada Border Services Agency.

The points I wish to make to the committee are if you're considering revisiting the Citizenship Act, limit as much as possible the use of discretion in the act and consider also the establishment of an independent decision-maker for these types of questions, as suggested by Mr. Bosdet.

11:40 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Thank you.

11:40 a.m.

Lost Canadians Organization

Don Chapman

That's very interesting. That just shows you why section 5(4)'s don't work, because you can't do this by discretionary authority. We must legislate an answer, and I want you to remember on this committee that two of these people did not know about these hearings and what was going on until this was televised and broadcast across the country and people were coming forward and saying “I am not alone here”.

11:40 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle

Thank you, all witnesses. Thank you, Mr. Chapman.

We will now go to questioning. We don't have time for a seven-minute round, but we will begin with a five-minute round with Mr. Alghabra and we'll continue around the table. We will have to call our second panel by 12.