Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Again, it's hard for me to put into words how devastated I am by the motion that was passed, so I will put on the record that I'm here under protest and would have preferred to have tabled my amendments at report stage.
However, I do want to commend the Liberal government for this bill overall. I didn't get a chance to speak to it—I speak to these amendments one at a time—but let me say how thrilled I am to see that the damage done in BillC-24 has largely been removed and that citizenship is citizenship is a principle. Much in this bill is to be celebrated. It's doubly hard for me to be so sad at a moment when I thought I would be enjoying a sense of restoration of good principles in our Citizenship Act.
Let me move quickly to this particular amendment before I run out of time.
This amendment seeks to deal with criticisms that you've heard in committee testimony, particularly from the Canadian Bar Association, about injecting, as we do here, in subclause 1(4) the bill....
My amendment is very simple. It essentially removes subclause 1(4), which sets out requirements for income tax returns and ties income tax returns to applications for citizenship. The Canadian Bar Association brief was very clear on this point in its concern that any innocent mistake in an income tax return could have a negative impact on citizenship applications or could even cause confusion such that someone either delayed applying for citizenship or delayed filing their tax return because of an unnecessary linking of the two.