Madam Chair, thank you.
Effectively this was the legal concept or regime for access to citizenship if your child was born abroad to a Canadian under the 1947 act. These were requirements that applied up until the law changed in 1977. For all of us who were born abroad—and I can include my own example in that if it is useful to illustrate—it means that the Canadian parent had to demonstrate that their child could legally be considered a Canadian and have access to that proof of citizenship, having been born abroad in the circumstance of fitting within that definition under the law at the time of “responsible parent”. That meant that if your father was Canadian, your parents had to be married for you to be considered a Canadian citizen. If you were born abroad to a Canadian mother, then your parents had to be unmarried. If the converse were true, you were not considered by law to be a Canadian citizen or to have access to Canadian citizenship.
That created many lost Canadians. Those provisions were changed in 1977 and were removed to make it equitable regardless of who your parent was or whether or not they were married.
The issue was that in 1977, when the law was changed, there were no remedies for those who had been excluded previously. Those remedies came only many years later, in 2009. Many of us know people who have benefited from those provisions in 2009 to restore citizenship to those who were born to what we would describe as the “wrong” responsible parent, the unmarried Canadian father or the married Canadian mother in cases where the child was born overseas.
I hope that's a reasonable summary. Thank you.