I'm quite surprised that the members on the Conservative side don't see those kinds of cases in which temporary residents didn't realize that they needed to apply for citizenship. Many people from France certainly have no idea. We make sure we inform them in my riding, because we've seen a lot of cases like that.
I've also seen cases in which a woman will marry a Canadian man and move here but he hasn't't filled in her papers properly, but she doesn't know it. It can be really frustrating. There are plenty of different situations that I see in my office. Every immigration case is different. We have to understand, when we're making legislation, that there will be cases that may not immediately fit your idea of how it's going to work, that there will be exceptions.
The key point I want to make, though, is something that I haven't heard said much but which I think is definitely motivating what the opposition is trying to say.
If someone comes here as a small child and grows up in this country and as a young adult, for instance, falls in with the wrong crowd and makes some mistakes, that's our society's responsibility. It's our society that has led this person to fall in with the wrong crowd, to feel that there are not many opportunities.
This is not the country in which that person was born. It's us. We therefore have a responsibility to prevent that kind of thing and also to make sure that such people are rehabilitated and reintegrated into society. That's something we're not doing. Instead, we're saying, that the person spent six months or a year in this other country where the person was born, and therefore it's now that country's problem.
To me that doesn't make any sense. I want to put that on the record.