Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister.
Certainly it's refreshing to see the approach you've taken on this issue, particularly when the legislation dates back to, of course, 1947 and 1967. A lot of anomalies were created and hardships flowed from that and have been in existence for a number of years. The steps to address the immediate concerns and allocating resources to do that and then to come forward with some constructive proposals for legislative change I think is refreshing in this instance.
I know you've asked this committee to study the issue and come up with some particular proposals in terms of how to address them. I know we've heard from a number of witnesses—I think Mr. Chapman maybe four or five times, and perhaps more than that—who have certainly identified many of the particular areas that needed attention. There's no question about that, and I think our responsibility would certainly be to give that type of recommendation or advice to you.
As you well know, the committee has been sitting for a long time and there were a number of extra meetings and a number of witnesses called, some more than once, to reiterate the situation without actually coming forward with a report and no report in sight. I think we're venturing now into the issue of undocumented workers, and still you haven't received the recommendation of this report.
This morning I indicated that there's certainly a lot of politics being played with this issue, which is an emotional one and one that is certainly near and dear to many hearts, and it seems to be going on and on, as opposed to constructively attempting to sit down and work together to get this done.
In fact, the conduct we saw in one case was a fairly aggressive approach taken toward junior officials that I would call perhaps shameful and regrettable. Certainly the responsibility for them is to apply the legislation and the regulation as it might be, and it would be our job as parliamentarians to give them something to work with. Certainly I can say that some of the members, and Mr. Chapman in particular, have taken a lot of steps to try to move this along, and certainly had some partial legislation, but we're looking for something far more constructive that would apply on a broad basis that would address many of the situations.
I see you've picked 1947 as a date, and that's the date of the Citizenship Act, and also reserved unto yourself the section 5(4) remedy that will allow you to deal with specific cases. I take it from what you're saying that you're prepared to look at those cases in advance when you have an opportunity to do so.
Again, having heard some of the submissions to Mr. Chapman, and in particular also from the Mennonite community about children who are deemed out of wedlock simply because the marriage was not recognized civilly, how do you see this legislation addressing the concerns raised by those groups, at least, as well as the other specific groups that came before this committee?