As I said in my opening comments, there's a huge problem with the whole procedural aspect of this bill. There's no provision for any procedure, so you have to go back to the Citizenship Act, which describes renunciation. The Citizenship Act doesn't really give you an indication. You make an application for renunciation and then it's presented to a citizenship judge. First, an officer reviews it and determines whether the person qualifies for renunciation. It then is passed over to a citizenship judge. There's no requirement for a hearing and the citizenship judge makes a final determination with respect to renunciation.
This bill provides for no due process and would have huge charter problems if it were implemented in this form. If you're trying to rescind someone's citizenship, section 6 and section 7 would certainly be engaged. Without making clear what the process is in the legislation, there would be serious suspicions.
The legislation doesn't provide for a court hearing at all. It provides for a review by a citizenship judge. The judge has the right to hold the hearing, but one would wonder, depending on where the person is, whether a hearing would be practical. It doesn't provide any indication of what the evidentiary burden would be.
As I said, there are huge evidentiary problems here. Number one, how do you determine whether a person has a second citizenship? Number two, how do you decide whether the conviction, especially if it's a foreign conviction, is valid and should be respected by Canadian law? These are very complex factual or legal issues and this bill provides for no due process with respect to any of these concerns.