Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you again to our witnesses for appearing before us today and for your informative testimony.
I'm going to make a few comments and ask a couple of questions. We've heard from the witnesses today, both in the first session and in this session now, some commentary on the residency requirement and language requirements and the application of those potentially moving forward when this bill is passed by Parliament.
On the issue of residency requirement, a question came from a member of Parliament to a witness in this committee, asking, “I am a naturalized Canadian, basically, and if I wanted to leave the country and take my Ph.D. studies for five years outside the country, could my citizenship be revoked?” Nothing in this bill would prevent any Canadian citizen, naturalized or otherwise, from leaving to study in the United States or somewhere else around the world for fear of their citizenship being revoked. There is no such thing written in any clause in this bill, and it would be a tremendous stretch for someone to suggest, whether the person were a legal expert or not, that yes, it could be applied in the case where somebody left the country and decided to do a Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York. You became a Canadian citizen 15 years ago; we're not going to revoke your citizenship.
It is just so out there, so far-stretched, that I think we have to be very cautious when we're reviewing this bill—all of us here on the committee, and certainly all parliamentarians—that we don't use extreme examples that have no basis in law or no basis in substance for determining how we move forward in our assessment of this bill.
On the question of language requirements, I have this now back to the necessary residency requirement going from three years to four of the last six years and achieving a level of language requirement, and the language requirement age changing from 18 to 54 to 14 to 64.
We firmly believe that allowing more time in Canada for all aspiring Canadians to develop language skills will give them a better opportunity. They will be more integrated into Canadian society, and it will give a better opportunity to have much more potential for successful outcomes moving forward, and what we want for newcomers coming to Canada is for them to succeed. We want them to do well and we want them to have every tool at their disposal moving forward as Canadian citizens, and that's the spirit in which Bill C-24 was drafted, and that certainly is the intent of the bill.
I believe it was Mr. Collacott who said that it is in line with, in fact, even more generous than some of our peer countries around the world in terms of their requirements for residency and language. There is no country that we could point to that we would consider a peer country that would have only a three-year requirement for residency, and then you automatically can apply for Canadian citizenship.
I want to talk about a few things in the bill because mention has been made on the backlog of Canadian citizenship. I believe one witness we heard over the course of the discourse here said that the backlog has been created over the last few years because we're focusing more on fraud. Well, let's just be abundantly clear about that. If we need to take more time to do due diligence to ensure there is no fraud in the system and that only law-abiding people want to become citizens of our country, we are going to do that, and 90% of our applications get processed, and there is no issue.
If we're going to focus on that 10% to make sure that only people who are in the same bracket as those 90% can come into Canada and become Canadian citizens, then that's exactly what we're going to do. We want law-abiding citizens coming into Canada. We certainly don't want anybody who's perpetrated fraud in any way, shape, or form. If they have, then they're not welcome to come here.
In addition to that, I might add, the best way for someone not to have their citizenship revoked is not to commit the crime. It's very easy. It's very simple. One of the witnesses exercised the option of pointing to the names of the people sitting around the table at one point, and said that, look at the names around the table, she could be talking about us. Well, guess what, none of the people around this table are perpetrating crimes. We're not worried about being kicked out.
My name is Menegakis. It's clearly not a native Canadian name. My parents came here from Greece. If I don't perpetrate the crime, my citizenship is not going to be revoked, nor is my children's or anybody else's in my family. That is the best way to avoid having it revoked.
Let's just go back a little bit to reality here. I have one question.
Do I have any time left here?