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.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
That would help us identify the actual problem numbers that we do have. Is that correct?
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
If we knew that, yes. If we knew the precise immigration history, marital status, all the things that we normally would see if we were doing a review of them, that would help with the number. But we don't have that from census data.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
You also indicate that 21% of those would have been born to Canadian mothers.
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
That's right.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
And if they were born out of wedlock to Canadian mothers under the legislation as it then existed, they would have no problem with their Canadian citizenship.
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
They shouldn't.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
No. So do you know what number that is, of the 21%?
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
No. We don't have a marital history on any of these individuals.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
So would it be fair to say that what you've done doesn't establish the number of problematic or problem cases--people who don't have Canadian citizenship because of legislation?
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
That's right. The only accurate number we would have, if we turned to administrative records, is the number of cases that are actually under review and on which some decision has been made, and that's a very limited number.
Conservative
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Of those you've identified as being born outside Canada, and with the numbers that you have, there may be some who do not desire to have Canadian citizenship. Have you identified that number?
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Edmonston and Mr. Komarnicki.
We'll now go to our second five-minute round.
Mr. Karygiannis.
Liberal
Jim Karygiannis Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for coming.
I'm not going to play with numbers. I'm going to call a fair shot a fair shot. Mr. Komarnicki might want to play with numbers and sort of do a run-about and say is this this, or is this this?
The number I'm looking at is what the previous individuals who were here said--that there were 20,000 children--and I believe it was Ms. Jarratt who said so--who came with their mothers. That was about 60 years ago, plus. So when you take that over two generations and think of each child as having two kids, you could be looking at 80,000 Canadians who could be affected. That's simple math that anybody who's a mathematician can put together or any individual can put together. It doesn't take a lawyer to do a reversal, as Mr. Komarnicki did, in order to do this.
However, going on the record here, the minister was in committee on February 19, and when the question was put to her, “Have you advertised?” she turned to her official, and her official said, “Yes, we have advertised”. Since then, the deputy minister has issued a letter to this committee apologizing for having--I don't want to use the word “lied”, because it is improper as far as parliamentary terms are concerned, so I'll use another word--misled the committee.
Now, I'm wondering if they had, in your estimation, done an aggressive campaign of advertising, telling Canadians what they could face, how many people you would guesstimate would be coming out.
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
That's a good question, because we're seeing what we are right now only because of needs for passports. We're seeing lots of people for the first time applying for their certificates of citizenship. I've tried to get a ballpark idea in terms of bounding the problem. When we hear people saying there aren't very many, that there are only a few dozen, and then someone else says there are millions, I think it's useful to get some better measure than that. Whether or not the number is as high as the numbers I'm giving, I've been fairly clear in saying that there are certainly people who would not have citizenship problems if they actually applied. In fairness, there are probably some people who will never apply. They're not in a status in which they need to be concerned about it. I think an application that was advertised and on which people knew what they'd have to do would be the kind of thing we could get a closer number on.
Liberal
Jim Karygiannis Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Would any of you, or even the previous witnesses, care to take a stab at what numbers you think would come out of the woodwork?
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
My guess would be tens of thousands.
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
Tens of thousands at least.
Liberal
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, As an Individual
There are 100,000 in Canada, so I don't think it's going to be much more than that.
Liberal
Jim Karygiannis Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Then again, we do have the children who are born abroad.
My other question is about somebody who says we could be in a tidal wave or a tsunami, so let's extrapolate from this. A Canadian is abroad and something similar to what happened in Lebanon happens, and we're there to evacuate Canadian citizens. Somebody, in this case, is a child of a war veteran who gave his life, whose blood was shed for this country, and because of whom we have today the freedoms and rights that we have. What are we going to tell that child? Sorry, we can't take you on board the ship because you're not a Canadian citizen?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
If that's a question, anyone can respond or comment if they want to. If not, we can move along to the next question.