Thank you, Madam Chair.
Again I thank you all for coming today. It has been a very interesting discussion.
I want to underline the unusual nature of the hearings we're having today. We're in committee debating these matters before this bill has been presented to the House for a vote on second reading, which means that we're essentially having a pre-hearing. I think it speaks to the complexity of the nature of the questions in front of us that the government would ask us to do this. It's very unusual. Again I'd like to underline the gratitude I have for your participating in this unusual process.
I want to raise a couple of concerns that I have with the bill. One follows from Mr. Leung's interventions. Concerning the quality of the person requesting citizenship, one element is whether or not they've been found guilty of a crime. I think we have to be careful here, because we've already mentioned—I think, Mr. Fogel, you brought it up yourself—that when some of those crimes happen overseas, the criteria are different. We have people performing legitimate political protests in other countries that, by those countries' definitions, are quite illegal and not permissible, and they end up in jail.
My first exposure to that was when I was quite young, when my parents admitted somebody from Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring as a refugee in this country. I think it was the first opportunity I had to realize that in some other places people are living lives a lot more difficult than ours.
I just want us to be very careful about how it can be that people can be discriminated against by the nature of laws abroad when they are making applications here in Canada. I know you touched a little bit, Ms. Sadoway, on the question of being discriminated against by virtue of the nationality laws of other countries. Could you continue to elaborate on that?