Thank you, Chair. Thank you to the witnesses.
Actually, I do not quite share that the courts in the future will interpret it differently because all you have to do is look at the Supreme Court's decision on our constitutionality on changing the Senate. They went back to its original intent of seven provinces and 50% of the population.
So I think if the people who are charged with interpreting our laws are consistent, I think these substitutions will not happen. I appreciate what Mr. Veeman said. What happens if you have a permanent resident who came here to study and then goes to the United States or goes to Oxford to study?
As long as he intends to come back to Canada to be a Canadian citizen, which in my case I did.... I went to the United States for my graduate studies and I came back and it was not an issue, but then that was under a different immigration law prior to 1976.
My question, actually, I'll speak about a corollary to this. You know, in the current bill, as with the previous one on Bill C-31, what we did was we started to regulate immigration consultants and we started to make sure that immigrants in Canada receive sound and proper advice. Now we're proposing a similar request in the Citizenship Act to also regulate citizenship consultants.
I was previously in the public accounting area and I said great, the more legislation that the government comes down with, the more there is for us to work on and to be interpreted. It becomes sort of like a work creation for us.
When I listened to Richard I asked how regulating both the immigration consultant and the citizenship consultant would benefit Canadians overall. How does this benefit the industry overall or are we just creating another avenue of business for all these consultants? Perhaps you can share your thoughts on this and how you would strengthen our immigration and citizenship acts.