I want to thank you both for coming here, and all of your members. And I also want to acknowledge the work that you've done in order for us to be able to be here today. If it weren't for the vets and for the sacrifices you made, and your wives and children, we wouldn't have a democracy today and we wouldn't be here.
I'm going to give you some figures that I want you to please consider and also take back to your membership. The department finally gave us some figures on the weekend. It reads as follows: between 1947 and 1977, 114,000 registrations of birth abroad certificates were issued. So between 1947 and 1977, we have 114,000--in 30 years.
And then the department gave us the figures from 1982 to 2007, although we asked for 1977 onwards, and they didn't come up with some numbers. What they've given us is that between 1982 and today, 368,520 Canadians were born abroad. When they were asked for second generation, they only gave us 2006, and that was 2,412 people, Canadian citizens, born abroad.
I also want to thank you for having this in your statements. It says, “Anyone who was born abroad at any time to a Canadian mother or to a Canadian father, if he/she is a first generation born abroad, should also be deemed a Canadian citizen”. I'm not sure if you mean the second generation or not, but I want to thank you.
Now, what happens if you take the numbers of second generation between 1977 and today, 1982 to 1989, is that there were 56,000 people born abroad. From 1990 to 1999, 121,144 were born aboard. And here's the real kicker, folks, from 2000 to 2007, 187,260. And if you were to extrapolate and take the mean--because in my former life as an industrial engineer, I did statistics coming out of the ears--per year, from 1982 to 1989, 7,000 Canadians were born abroad; from 1990 to 1999, per year, 10,095 born abroad; from 2000 to 2007, 26,751 born abroad. If you forecast that into 2010, that will hit about 56,000 first-generation Canadians born abroad.
So if you take those numbers--and I'm certainly going to pass this graph around to you--by 2020 we might have close to a million first generation born abroad. Gentlemen, that's 10 times as many Canadians as born abroad between 1947 to 1977.
If you take the number of second generation born abroad in 2006, that was 2,412. And if you extrapolate that to the same degree, you're going to have about 5,000-plus in 2010 to 2020 of second generation born abroad.
If my daughter, first generation born abroad, were to get married to somebody who's not a Canadian citizen and they're stationed in the gulf.... In the gulf, as you pretty well know, if you are somebody who was born there, you're stateless. So my grandchild, this baby, will be stateless if he/she is born abroad. This child, that baby, has nowhere to go if we have an emergency. And if you, the forces, today's people, go in to take us out, you will say to the mother, “Yes, you're a Canadian citizen, please come with us”. You will say to her, “I'm sorry, your baby can't come”. But let's say that by mistake you do take the baby and there's something wrong with the baby, the baby is not born perfect, and the baby comes to Canada, that child, my grandchild, the person you fought so hard for, will have absolutely no coverage of health care or anything in Canada.
Yes, I've known people say to me, “But your daughter can sponsor her child into Canada and she can do this until that child is 22 years old.” So I ask you, who have fought so hard for this country and with all the fights that you have done, why should my daughter, who has lived all her life in this country, have to sponsor her child into Canada?
Please, I want you to consider those numbers, and if you have something to enlighten me, something to tell me, as a father, and possibly a grandfather of the grandkid who will be born abroad tomorrow, if my daughter is working out there, if you can convince me that the fight you fought for this country....