Madam Chair, as I indicated when asked this question before by the committee, we estimated that in terms of what the bill and amendments to the bill thus far are addressing, the numbers the department estimates would be addressed by the remedy for the lost Canadians affected by section 8 are a limited cohort. As I mentioned before, the department sees in the range of 20 to 30 such cases per year. There may be a few more who come forward, benefiting from this bill, but it could be in that range.
With regard to the remedies extended through the amendments to the bill discussed thus far, in terms of extending citizenship automatically to second-generation children born abroad to a Canadian, we estimate that number could be significantly larger. It could be in the thousands. As I mentioned before at this committee, it's difficult to know how many of those may come forward to the department and request a certificate of their Canadian citizenship. The bill as amended, if passed, would make them citizens automatically by law—citizens in law. Those who elect to come forward to apply for the proof would be a subset of those untold thousands.
The third point I would mention, to wrap up, is this: For the past legislative remedies combined—the remedies in 2009 and 2015 for lost Canadians—our updated figures, as I shared with the committee before, are that just under 20,000 such persons have come forward for proof of citizenship in the past. It's conceivable that we could be dealing with numbers in the range of a few thousand, or up to that number. However, until we see in what form Parliament decides to legislate and pass the bill, it's difficult to know with any precision.
Those are some of the orders of magnitude that we consider not unreasonable.