Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It's a great honour to have been invited to appear before your committee. I must say that since I first visited one of these three buildings, at the age of 14 or thereabouts, to attend Question Period, each time I return, I am overwhelmed to find myself at the centre of Canadian democracy. I also have to admit that it's been a long time since I was last invited to appear before a committee, for obvious reasons. I'm delighted to be back again speaking to a parliamentary committee.
Adrienne Clarkson, my Co-Chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, really wanted to be here today with me, but the Secretary General of the Commonwealth invited her to serve on the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding which is engaged in more or less the same type of discussions on immigration, citizenship, integration and so forth. She is in London for a meeting of the commission, which is composed of eight prominent Commonwealth personalities. She has asked me to convey to you her best wishes.
She asked me to excuse her and send her very best wishes to the committee.
I know that you've been talking about the question of loss of Canadian citizenship. I've read most of your conversations and debates on the subject. I am not at all an expert in this area. Our institute, which is brand new, is not at all an expert in this area. It's not that it could never be an area we would become more expert in, but it's not the area we were set up to work in. We've been working very hard to get ourselves going on other subjects. As you know, there are many areas that are difficult, complicated, and interesting around immigration and citizenship.
I've read all of the debates, discussions, and witness testimony. Much of it is incredibly moving and surprising. Don Chapman may not be a citizen, but he certainly seems to be the model of the engaged citizen as far as I can make out. That's what citizens are supposed to do: make themselves heard, get up there and put forward issues, and fight for them. He's a pretty good model for most Canadians. I wouldn't have any trouble saying he's the model for a Canadian citizen in the kind of work he's doing.
In reading this, although there are many unsolved issues surrounding this, as far as I can make out it seems you're working your way toward some solutions. Some of them seem to be already coming along. Some of them are more complicated and further away. But the sense—from somebody who's really interested but doesn't know, who comes at it and just sits down and reads four or five sessions—is that you've made a lot of progress in this. Obviously it's an area where no Canadian wants to feel that people have been left out who shouldn't be left out. So it's really important work you're doing.
Interestingly enough, as I was reading it—I should have thought of it before—I suddenly realized it was very personal to me, because my father was in the Winnipeg Rifles during the war. When he was in England he married a British woman who became a war bride. My older brother Alastair was born in Britain in 1944. They moved back to Canada and I was produced.
I wasn't able to reach him, but I suppose in 1968, about 48 hours before his 24th birthday, we suddenly discovered that if he didn't sign a piece of paper he was going to lose his citizenship because he had been born in England, had a war-bride mother, and so on. I actually remember this desperate work of 24 hours, because at the time he was out of the country and we had to get the Canadian embassy to intervene to get him to sign a piece of paper, and it was done. So having almost had it happen in our family, I can imagine things like that happening in many families. In a sense, these are issues that have to be dealt with—and this is a sort of segue.
We're a country of immigration, and have a history of having done many things right in immigration and a certain number of things wrong—we all know that. But I'm always amazed at how few big errors there have been. Clearly this whole discussion has raised some real problems, and I assume you're going to find your way to the end of them.
Let me raise three points next. You all know much more about this than I do; I realize most of you have been at it longer. But from an historic point of view I'm always struck by the fact that we're in an era when the rule of law is also the rule of detailed administration. It seems as if it were always that way, whereas of course the idea of citizenship being tied to passports and detailed regulations is really fairly recent, not simply in Canada but everywhere in the world. Most people travelled across borders in Europe without passports before the First World War. So all of this is really quite recent. The idea that you needed certain pieces of paper in order to be a citizen of a country is a new idea, and people thought of themselves as being British, Canadian, or French long before the administrative and legal things were accepted.
Secondly, what truly sets Canada apart from other countries like Australia and New Zealand is the fact that it is just about the only country that has adopted a clear position on the link between immigration and citizenship. We welcome immigrants so that they can become citizens. This philosophical and ethical principle is radically different from anything we see in Europe, hence the confusion surrounding this matter. Our position also differs from that of the United States. As you no doubt know, 82% or 83% of our immigrants become citizens. I believe the figure for the United States is 42%, and for Europe, 6% or 7%. Therefore, our approach to immigration and citizenship is truly different from that of other countries.
The principle behind this philosophy is this: if you're an immigrant, we want you, not simply because you might be a doctor or a plumber, but because you'll become a citizen. Canada's philosophical approach is very original. When a mistake is made, it usually involves this philosophical notion that immigrants come to Canada to become citizens.
And I must say, whenever I meet people and it's evident that they're recent arrivals but maybe have been here several years, I ask them if they're a citizen yet. If they say they're not, I say, “Well, why aren't you a citizen yet?”, which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what would be said in most countries. They would say, “Do you really want to be a citizen?” or “Isn't it a bit soon?” or something, whereas my view is once you're into three and a half years, we really should be saying, “Hey, it's time to take up your obligations and responsibilities as a citizen, and we want you. We want you as part of the working pack of Canadians who are building the country.”
I think immigrants to this country—I've been to a lot of ceremonies, as I'm sure you, as members of Parliament, have all been to a lot of ceremonies—when you talk to them, they get that. There are immigrants here, immigrant citizens here. Right? They get it. They understand that that's the difference here, and therefore we have to judge ourselves on the basis of that philosophy.
That leads me to talking about the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, which I was told you were interested in hearing a bit about. As a lead-up to that, having said that we have this very original approach towards immigration and citizenship, in spite of that we've never really had a full debate in Canada in modern times about what we mean by citizenship, what we're hoping to accomplish. There are lots of sentences that we use. There are lots of clichés. There are things we hope, but we haven't really had an interesting debate.
Here we are, probably the most experimental nation in the world, and that's a positive thing, and yet we haven't really had a very interesting national conversation about the experiment. We've sort of taken things for granted. Many of them are good things, but it's important also to have the discussion. That's another reason why I think the work that you're doing is so interesting. I think it's particularly interesting because other countries have very, very different models. You can go country by country and identify models that are really quite different from ours. They have their relationships, but they are not the same models.
One of the reasons I think we haven't had the debate is because this is a country that specializes in the ad hoc, so we build things bit by bit as a way of avoiding crises and trying to pick the good stuff and how to get ahead. Ad hoc can get you quite a way, and it has advantages and different disadvantages, but we have to be careful at a certain point that we've done so much ad hoc and we really haven't said, “Okay, this seems to work. Now why does it work? What are we trying to accomplish? What's the right language?”
Most other countries have very interesting language, much of which I disagree with personally, but they have interesting language. We haven't done much work on the language to describe what it is that we're doing. I think there is some real work to be done there.
According to an article in this morning's edition of La Presse, approximately 800,000 people have applied and are waiting to come to Canada. I believe the number used to be around 600,000, but things do move fairly quickly. I know that in recent years, we have welcomed approximately 250,000 immigrants annually. Last year, suprisingly, we had 250,000 new citizens. We lead all world countries in terms of the number of immigrants, new citizens and so forth. This is one of the rare fields in which Canada is truly a world leader.
We're way out on a cutting edge. I think that's very good. But being out on a cutting edge means that you have to be conscious that you're doing something no one else is doing.
I notice when I'm in Europe, for example, whatever I'm there to talk about, whatever I've been invited to give a speech about, within ten minutes, they don't want to talk about it, and they say, “Now we'd like to talk about immigration and citizenship in Canada”, because that's what most people in the world think is the first and most interesting thing about Canada—our citizenship and immigration policies.
We can only get so far on goodwill and good luck. We need to understand our own experiment.
The Institute for Canadian Citizenship comes out of a tradition that was begun with the first Canadian Governor General, General Vanier, and Madame Vanier. And the idea was that when a Governor General leaves, if they have an area they're particularly devoted to, the government will help them set up an institute or a program to work on that in their post-Rideau Hall days.
The Micheners did something quite different. The Sauvés have a very interesting program, which is having a big effect on youth.
Adrienne and I, for really a good part of the time at Rideau Hall, as we went to almost 400 communities and met tens of thousands of people, literally, thought about how this was working and what these people were saying and what we could do to help in this area.
So the government and Parliament have very generously helped us to get it going, which we have now done. It's a non-profit, non-governmental organization. It was begun with the support of government, but it's not governmental. It's in its very early stages. It's national. It's volunteer-based, and it's therefore really grassroots. It's as grassroots as you can possibly be. That's what really interested us in it.
The core idea is essentially to encourage citizen engagement, citizen involvement. It's as simple as that. The first big step of the institute is really to work with new citizens.
Traditionally, in the 19th century and early 20th century, we took it for granted that it would take maybe two and a half generations for an immigrant family to become so involved that they would start running for Parliament, or writing books, or doing things that are, let's say, non-utilitarian. Now we just don't have that kind of time. Within five or ten years of someone's becoming a new citizen, we really need them to become involved.
So that's the area we're really putting our efforts into at the moment. We have a series of programs. One of them is really going already, and it's basically something we're doing in partnership with both the citizenship judges and the department, and it has to do with the citizenship ceremonies. There were 3,200 ceremonies last year, with a very small number of judges and not as many civil servants as one might imagine to organize all of this. Very few of them are community ceremonies. Technically, I think over 200 are, but in reality under 100 of them would really be community ceremonies.
What we began to work out when we were still at Rideau Hall and now have begun to put in place with them is a new approach towards the ceremonies. You take something that normally lasts about an hour, and you expand it to about three hours. This is a very important moment in people's lives, and you know that. It's a very important moment. So you expand it to make it an even more important moment in their lives.
The first hour is a discussion, the second hour is the ceremony, and the third hour is the relaxed get-together. The discussion is a round table on citizenship issues between established, engaged citizens—members of the Order of Canada, who can actually swear in citizens—leaders of non-governmental organizations, and leading community members, who come and sit down with the new citizens for an hour and chair a series of round tables, with somebody chairing the whole thing, and they discuss citizenship.
It's not at all maternalistic or paternalistic. It's really a discussion. And often the established, engaged citizens learn more than the new citizens do. And often they're as eager as the new citizens to be part of this, because it's an astonishing opportunity to sit down with the people in your town who are going to be your co-citizens and find out what they're thinking, and then try to encourage them to become involved. It's a great opportunity, frankly, for the volunteer sector to capture new citizens.
If we look at the volunteer sector, as many of you know, it's looking older and older and white—not entirely, but older and older and white. We have a desperate need to get these new citizens in. There are invisible barriers, and these round tables are partly designed to interest new citizens in what we're doing and to come to the next meeting. These round tables are also designed to find out what the real problems are. We've heard a lot already about loneliness and obviously about job qualifications. I've been sitting at these round tables when somebody says they can't figure out how to do something, and somebody says they'll do it for them. Working out what established citizens can do on a volunteer basis for new citizens is core to it.
We've done three formal ones so far, which doesn't sound like much, but we don't want to make mistakes, so we're going quite carefully. The first was in St. James Town, which is 30,000 new immigrants in about five skyscrapers in Toronto, and then one in Red Deer, which is perhaps the leading small city in terms of experimenting with how to attract and keep citizens, and one in Vancouver in March. We have an expansion program, which will now move quite fast.
This year we have three committees up and running. We'll have 16 this year, we hope—and it's a hope—and do 20 ceremonies in 2008; this is our aim. Forty committees doing 100 ceremonies in 2009, then 100 committees doing 300 ceremonies, and so on. The idea is not to move as fast as we can, but you know how hard it is to do volunteer grassroots stuff at a national level. You can't just pop it out on a 24-hour basis. You have to get these citizens involved. We already have people asking to set up committees in Yukon, in Hamilton at Mohawk College, two in Waterloo, in British Columbia through the 2010 Legacies Now initiative, the University of Toronto, and we have a plan to roll out. Obviously, we have nothing yet in the Maritimes, nothing in Quebec. So to move quite probably toward Sherbrooke,
Montreal and Quebec City, where we've had some discussions, and to other parts of the country, where we hope to set up more committees.
Why are so few ceremonies held in communities? Because of the formalities involved. We've been able to hold this kind of ceremony since 1947, but each time, it's done on an ad hoc basis. It takes time, effort and the participation of government employees.
This idea is you have permanent volunteer committees and they establish a certain number of places, places of the public good—Parliament, city halls, legislatures, schools, universities, and they do more than one ceremony in each place—two, three, four, five ceremonies a year in each place. So it costs less and less as you do it. It takes less and less of civil servant time. It's more and more efficient, and everybody gets used to working together. We hope we'll be able to draw in the high school kids who are doing citizenship courses, to help organize these. So it's not just about ceremonies. It's about using the ceremonies as a break point where you get a chance to work with every single new citizen and see if you can work back toward their needs earlier in their arrival and their needs later, after they become citizens.
Sorry, I should stop.
