Mr. Chair, the amendment I propose is intended to remedy one of the most egregious parts of this bill, which has to do with the powers that are being proposed to strip citizenship from people who have been born in Canada or those who have otherwise shown no misrepresentation. Also my proposed new subsection 10(3.1) would ensure:
a person shall not cease to be a citizen nor shall the renunciation of citizenship by that person be deemed to have had no effect without having had access to a fair hearing before an independent decision-maker.
I know I don't have much time, Mr. Chair. I take the point of my friend Mr. McCallum that he is the third party. Well, we're the fifth party here. I don't want to take much time, except to say as clearly as I possibly can that what is happening with this bill is a retreat from the fundamental understanding of the nature of citizenship. It violates sections 7 and 15 of the charter, and essentially it amounts to, as this committee has heard from numerous witnesses.... I want to just quote briefly from the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, the “deprivation of citizenship breaches security of the person under s. 7; citizenship, lawfully obtained, ceases to be a secure status and becomes contingent and insecure”.
In face of that, Mr. Chair, my amendment would delete everything that appears between line 24 on page 20 and line 11 on page 25, and would replace it with confirmation that citizenship shall not be withdrawn from any person unless that person obtained, retained, renounced, or resumed citizenship under this act by false representation or fraud or by knowingly concealing material circumstances. Those would be the only grounds for deprivation of citizenship.