Thank you for the question. The statement I made back in regards to Bill C-24 has not changed.
I would like to reiterate what my colleague Professor Tamara Lenard has stipulated.
When people like immigrants, refugees, stateless people come to this country, they're not looking for ways not to become citizens. They're not looking for ways in which they can throw roadblocks and involve themselves in criminal terrorist activities. It's not to say that the odd one might, but truly we should not be using a cannonball to stun a flea.
The fact of the matter is that if somebody commits a criminal act, and let's make no mistake about it, a terrorist act is a criminal act, then they fall under criminal law, and they should be handled by criminal law. If citizenship becomes the goal that everybody must reach, and there's impediments put in the way, especially if those impediments are pointing at or targeting one specific group of people—and again the professor is quite correct, the group of people that it was targeting in Bill C-24 were the Canadian Muslim population, I've seen no evidence to suggest otherwise—we have to retrench, and we have to look back.
I have to say that I was both amazed and quite gratified that a decision was made by the minister to revoke that concept and put back into law the importance in the power of citizenship.
When my late father came here he was stateless. What does that mean to be stateless? He didn't revoke his Polish citizenship. He was just not interested in continuing to be a Polish citizen, so he became a Canadian citizen in incredible ways. He had a little flagpole in the front of his grocery store, and every Dominion Day, as he called it, he would raise the flag. He became a strong citizen, and everything that I've seen, from Muslims to Somalis to Southeast Asians, all these new immigrants who have come here, all I've seen is them embracing Canada. That, to me, is what we should be looking at: the glass half full, not the glass half empty.