Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 25th, 2007

[John Ralston Saul]

Are you certain?

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Can I put my question? It will only take a few seconds.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

You have a full minute left, so ask away.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

A full minute is a real luxury. Usually, I'm thirty seconds over my allotted time.

Have you introduced into your research and your documents a discussion on the recognition of Quebec as a nation?

[John Ralston Saul]

This is not something that you will find in the documents of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. We have not had any discussions on the definition of citizenship. I have written a great deal on the subject and my views are stated clearly in my writings.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

However, do you feel that this recognition will come about one day?

[John Ralston Saul]

I think that could be part of an interesting debate. In Canada, we must always be careful not to debate semantics rather than the fundamental issue. Obviously, the danger of that happening arises each time we debate words. That's a very interesting and very important debate.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Fine then. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Madame Faille.

Ms. Nash.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I welcome the witnesses this afternoon.

I want to pick up on the comment that was made about what we mean by citizenship. You've spoken about citizenship as not only a sense of pride, but as a democratic responsibility and an opportunity for renewed citizen engagement. Obviously citizenship also entails certain rights, responsibilities, and access to certain benefits. It's a legal question too.

Something that I've been made aware of is that while we have lots of immigration specialists, immigration lawyers, we don't have citizenship lawyers. It's not a specialized branch of law. I'd like to know if you are aware of that, if this is something you've come across, and whether you think this ought to be a branch of legal study. Should we encourage lawyers to become specialists in citizenship as well as immigration law?

[John Ralston Saul]

That's a fascinating point. I had never focused on that.

Since you raise it, I think that's part of what I'm talking about. We haven't really had the discussion about citizenship. If we did, many of the things you are struggling with here would fall into place more easily. You'd say, oh, that falls in there. That makes sense because now we have a theory of citizenship that includes these people who were excluded, as opposed to saying, well, there's a problem; let's just change a line or something. I think there's room for some thought.

We have an idea of citizenship that is so complex in Canada, it's very important to try to expand it. I don't know of another country that accepts the idea that at the same time we stay the same and we change.

In many ways, you can find the principles of Canadian democracy in Louis-Hyppolyte LaFontaine's address to the electors of Terrebonne in 1840. I pulled out a couple of things, which I could give to your chair, and they can be photocopied for you. LaFontaine made a statement on immigration in 1840, and this is the basic document that led to democracy in 1848. You could take that paragraph, and most people would think it was written by you today. There is a theory underneath what we're doing, but it's not evoked sufficiently.

We don't really talk enough about how not only immigrants change and stay the same when they become citizens, but other Canadians change and stay the same when immigrants become citizens. It's a constant metamorphosis of what it is to be citizen and a person who is very stable and yet changing all the time.

I don't think most Canadians understand that we're now one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world. If I were to make one criticism of members of Parliament, it would be that you use the words “new country” too much—maybe not you, but others. It should be taken out of all speeches.

[A voice]

New government?

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Ralston Saul]

We have been using fundamentally the same constitution since 1848, which was rewritten in 1867. The principles are basically the same; it is enormously stable. I would argue that we're the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United States all went through civil wars, breakdowns, coups d'état, but we didn't.

Our citizens have a remarkable experience of stability and change. Of course, the only area where we fall most behind is in reintegrating the essential aboriginal element into the idea of our citizenship—not dealing with aboriginal problems, which is the way we tend to think of it, but actually integrating the aboriginal idea back into the core of our idea of citizenship and democracy as a nation.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

I just wonder if we had that kind of debate that you're describing and perhaps if we had people who made it their focus, made the area of citizenship and citizenship law, for example, their area of focus, that the kinds of injustices as have been brought to our attention of people being denied citizenship might perhaps have been dealt with in a more preventative way, a more efficient way, and we wouldn't just be sticking our finger in the dike every so often when problems arise.

[John Ralston Saul]

That's right. I agree.

When I say “public debate”, we're not caught in this situation that other countries are of people being for and against. We're very lucky. Most Canadians are “for”, so once you have a really big national consensus it becomes so important to say, “What are the roots of this national consensus? How does it work? How can we make it work better? How can we get to the roots of the problems? Why do we have these problems?” Somehow they have been lost, perhaps because of a technicality, but that technicality wouldn't have held had the theories been clearer and more popularly understood.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Ms. Nash.

Mr. Komarnicki.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll share whatever time is left with my colleagues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Yes. You have seven minutes.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Certainly it's been—

[John Ralston Saul]

I'm in no rush, by the way. You may be, but I'm not.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I guess we'll be in a rush when 5:30 rolls around.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Certainly you put an interesting perspective on citizenship and the issues related to it. It's certainly insightful. Even though we face a lot of challenges, it also presents itself as an exciting opportunity for us to accomplish perhaps some uniqueness to the solution into who we are as Canadian citizens.

I found that appearing at the citizenship ceremony and then having a social aspect after where we intermingled to be quite touching and more moving than I would have expected it to be. It certainly has that element to it. There is a bonding that takes place. And when you speak to the new citizens and interact with them, it certainly also identifies some of the unique obstacles, if you want to call them that, that they face and the challenges they have.

Proceeding beyond that in terms of round tables and further discussion I think is a good thing, and certainly it will help us along. I know that there are of course needs for fixes. I know my colleague, the Honourable Andrew Telegdi, doesn't pass up an opportunity to pinpoint those and sharpen the points for us to see.

I sense from you that although there is a desperate need for a fix, we should do it in a principled way and not rush ourselves into a short-term, knee-jerk reaction, but look at it more on a long-term basis. Certainly the charter compliance is something that would be hard to argue against. But it would take a bit of doing to ensure that the act was done properly, to see that it was indeed compliant.

I know that we've talked a bit about what it means to be a citizen, what the privileges or rights might be, what the responsibilities might be, and whether there are various definitions that might be involved. You mentioned building maybe a national consensus and perhaps the principles of it. In what type of forum would you see this taking place? What type of structure or administration might you set in place to evoke that type of consensus or principles that might be the underpinnings for where the future Citizenship Act might go?

[John Ralston Saul]

You know, I think that's almost more your domain than mine. I think there are many ways it can be done, and I don't think it needs to be done in a single way. I think that if members of Parliament and senators and people like us started to talk about the ideas of citizenship, and in great numbers, and really started to search for it, we'd begin to see a discussion develop.

You wouldn't want to close it into something that was too administrative. Because of course when you have problems like the problems you're dealing with now, you have to do both the short-term and the long-term at the same time, as you know. There are fixes that need to happen really fast when there's injustice. There are things that are more complicated that take a little longer. And then there's the need to start, really, as soon as one can, thinking about the larger picture and how we can avoid getting into these situations again and thinking about what the principles are.

I'm sure you've all been to citizenship ceremonies. What do you say to new citizens? What you would say to a new citizen is what you would say to your child. It's the basis upon which you would have a relationship with another citizen. When I go back—and I suppose I could claim to be an expert as a kind of Canadian historian, but it's a little dangerous to say it, since I don't earn a living doing it—the recurring themes of what's best in this country are the ideas of building justice and egalitarianism and place. So there are three very interesting ideas that are not really what you would find in most countries.

The idea of justice you'll find in other places, although the type of justice has already been defined pretty clearly by the charter.

The egalitarian idea, which is different from the idea of equality—because the idea of equality is just about counting up the numbers—goes right back to the sources of Canadian democracy. It's right there in 1848. Again and again the best speeches on Canadian democracy, the best comments, the best writing, have all been about egalitarianism. There's a fabulous paragraph, again, from the address to the electors of Terrebonne on egalitarianism.

You know, this is the country where the source of possible cooperation between citizens—francophone and anglophone and others—is the egalitarian nature of the country. It's been there for 160 years. It's quite remarkable, again and again and again. It's very different from the United States. It's completely different from Britain. It's very different from France and Germany and so on.

The third element is this obsession with place, because we have a lot of it, and it's so difficult. At first, the immigrants thought place was all about developing it, but of course when we looked at it more seriously we realized that it was always more complicated, because the earlier immigrants understood, with the aboriginals, that it was actually about living in the place, not about just developing it. Now we're actually catching up with where we were in about 1740. That is to say that we're actually understanding what the pre-modern, if you like, the pre-1840 Canadians sort of understood, which was that in order to live here, you have to live with the place. Now it's called environmentalism. We've gone in this large loop.

I think those three things get you pretty close to the nature of the country: an idea of justice, a reality of egalitarianism, and an idea of the place in which you develop it and protect it and live with it at the same time.

I think the idea of volunteerism—We talk about volunteerism as if it's something different from citizenship. It's actually another word for the engaged citizen. We have this 20-something percent of engaged citizens—it's not high enough, they're not young enough, they're not varied enough. I think that's right at the core of it. Certainly, when I talk to anybody about citizenship, I say it's about getting involved in your local communities. It's about your local schools. It's about making things work on your street and in your communities. It's about making your public services work in your communities. And it's about speaking up and being engaged. I don't think we say that enough, that we really want people like Mr. Chapman, you know, people speaking up and making themselves as annoying as possible, because that is the nature of a healthy democracy.

For me, there you have the elements of a pretty good definition of citizenship, but that's just me.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Mr. Komarnicki, your colleague will have to wait. You've gone over your seven minutes. You were too long-winded, I think.