Sure. Over the past few years we've seen more than a 500% increase in the citizenship processing fee. The justification, of course, is that it will put money into the system to cover processing costs, so it's a money issue. But there are significant long-term problems with that. The most obvious one is for people with low incomes or people who are immigrants or former refugees, it's not that easy for a family to cough up $2,000 in discretionary income to try to get citizenship processed.
We're looking to either reducing the fees altogether or providing waivers in places where it's justifiable.
The other thing, and I'd like the committee to think on this, is that if you put these financial barriers in place or language barriers or other very strict barriers to accessing citizenship, you're essentially disenfranchising a lot of people who are already marginalized who might be in the situation where they can't get to that language level because they're working a lot or they don't have the money. But they're still here in Canada. They're still permanent residents. They still live here. They still work here. They still have children. They contribute to the community. The only difference is that you're essentially disenfranchising them and exacerbating their current marginalization. Then we know if they don't have a vote, the policies are not going to reflect any of their interests.
It's that cycle we're trying to break here.