I have had the opportunity.... I'm probably one of the few people in the country who has actually explored the bowels of the National Archives microfilm, which is huge for the war brides. One thing about the military, they kept excellent records. So you know some pretty...Privacy Act be damned. They didn't care about the Privacy Act there. You know who had venereal disease and who didn't and everything else. It's quite interesting, but you also know a lot of the wonderful stories, of course.
What you see is suddenly there is a change, and I have tried to pinpoint it, but we can't seem to find when there is a change in saying these are citizens and then suddenly they're not. I would like to spend more time doing that work, but I unfortunately have to support myself with my business--I run an Internet company--because historians of Canadians war brides are not very highly paid. As a result, I can't spend 24 hours working on this, although I'd like to. I have a lot of the documentation on a website. There's quite a bit there.
There was an agreement. There was a consensus at the highest levels in 1946 and 1947 that war brides and their children were citizens. We're talking about the Minister of Veterans Affairs...right across the grid, all the departments. You've got Trade and Commerce, which would probably be the precursor of...whatever department that would be today. You've got DND, Veterans Affairs, MPs and mayors, people all talking about the problems arising because of war brides' marriages breaking down and being sent back. They wanted to leave Canada and go back to Britain and Europe. The mayor of Edmonton, for example, was begging for help, and the Canadian government was saying sorry, they're Canadian citizens; they can't be treated any differently than anybody else now. So I guess you're all going to get treated like crap, and I guess that's the one theme that still seems to run through the system, that all Canadians who have come up against the department get treated the same way, which is, in my view, not very well.
So yes, there is a consensus that they're citizens, but there was a change somewhere. When? How? Who decided? We don't know.