Thank you.
I will direct most of my questions to Mr. Edmonston.
I should say that unfortunately this issue has in a lot of ways become politicized. Mr. Telegdi has indicated that the Citizenship Act had been introduced, but it hadn't been since 2002. There was opportunity to get it done and they failed to get it done. And there's no question we'll do some small steps, like dealing with the issues we have before us with the various categories of the lost Canadians, to see if we can tackle the small problem before we address a larger one. The minister has invited us to come forward from this committee with some unanimity as to the amendments that would specifically address these issues, so that we can actually deal with them and deal with many of the concerns.
With respect to the numbers, there have been some wild fluctuations and, as Mr. Edmonston mentioned, some really high numbers, but obviously you've tried to at least identify who might be involved in these categories. If I were trying to get an educated guess, or perhaps a ballpark estimate of what we might be talking about in categories--but let's just take them category by category. I'll do two.
First of all, on the war brides and the war babies, the previous witness, Ms. Jarratt, indicated there were a number of war brides. I'm not sure of the number she quoted. It was perhaps 65,000 or so. In your estimation, you've indicated that there are about 25,000 to 30,000 war brides. Dealing with war brides alone, I understand that the majority of those war brides who entered Canada have remained here as citizens, have always been citizens, and don't actually have problems with citizenship. Would that be correct?