Instead of saying “speech”—discours—I said “discourse”, which is not proper English. My apologies, Madam Chair.
To touch on one of the topics I identified, I will speak about the term “acts of war”. The first problem with this, Madam Chair, is that the term is not defined in Canadian law, yet in the bill itself the sponsor says that if somebody commits an act of war, they need to be punished. The experts who came before the committee clearly and repeatedly identified that it would be very problematic because of the terms “war” or “declaration of war”.
We heard from Colonel Michael R. Gibson that the use of the term “war” or the term “declaration of war” in legal language has actually gone out of fashion in international law, not just Canadian law, since the Second World War, yet our government today wants to bring that back. Sorry, it's not the government. I should be correct. Even though it is highly supported and pushed by the government, it is coming to us in the form of a private member's bill rather than a government bill or government business, so I shouldn't say “the government”. However, it does seem very much that the government is the one putting forward this private member's bill and trying to push it through the back door with less scrutiny, less oversight, less accountability, and less transparency, because it just seems that it doesn't want to do the proper due diligence on such a large topic as the changing of our immigration legislation.
This bill would change our immigration legislation and revoke the citizenship of Canadian citizens. The way it is right now, it would create statelessness. We are signatories to the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, yet this bill, as the sponsor has put it forward and as the government continues to push for it, would create statelessness.
Earlier in our debate, we heard government members say that they want to do due diligence on the study of a bill, and that is why they are putting forward this motion to extend the study of this bill for 30 days. It's apparently a new practice. They've all just woken up and want to do due diligence, but what we've seen time and time again with this government is that they move closure. Earlier today we voted on yet another closure motion. For all those people joining us from their homes who may not know what closure is, it's one form of time allocation. It's one form of stopping debate in the House of Commons. This government has moved motions to stop debate on bills in the House of Commons more than 45 times. At the time I wrote down my notes, the number was 45 times.