Thank you, Madam Chair.
As a little background on what's going on here, if you look at the Citizenship Act, subsection 5(5), the headline there says “Statelessness— bloodline connection”. It's talking about granting citizenship.
If you look at paragraph (f), which is the part that I am proposing we amend, it lists some offences. It says that a person can be granted citizenship if they have “not been convicted” of some offences, and then these offences are listed. It talks about “terrorism”, an offence under very specific sections of the Criminal Code, or “an offence under subsection 5(1)” of another....
Basically what it does is it lists some very specific offences. What I am proposing in my amendment is to simplify this a little bit. You can ask why we would not grant citizenship to somebody who has been convicted of this offence but we would grant citizenship to somebody who has been convicted of another offence. Why is there the difference between the two?
What my amendment is proposing is to basically say that, if you have been convicted of anything that is a criminal act—in common terms, it would be anything with more than a two-year sentence—it doesn't matter what it is, any criminal offence that is a federal crime would be the test. Rather than cherry-picking this or that or the other thing, it would simply be that, if you have been convicted of a criminal offence, that is essentially what this is intended to do.
I think it simplifies things a bit, because you're not cherry-picking certain offences to say that one is better than the other, or whatever. You're saying that, if you've committed a criminal offence that is more than two years, that would be the criteria upon which you would not be given citizenship.
I think there are some very good reasons we would want to do that. We don't want to be granting citizenship to people who have criminal records. That doesn't make a lot of sense. If we do that, it can create a lot of headaches down the road. Even from a government perspective, we could end up with a whole lot of extra work in departments, whether it's the immigration department or the consular department or other things. There are a lot of headaches and complications when we discover that we have granted citizenship to somebody who maybe shouldn't have been granted citizenship because of these crimes.
One thing I think about this is that Canada has a bit of a spotty record sometimes on things like money that comes in from countries in questionable ways. A lot of us would be familiar with the Iranian situation right now, and how there are people who would be part of the IRGC in Iran who are now in Canada. I'm not talking about conscripts. I'm talking about actual members of the IRGC or their families.
This is an example of a case where we, as a country, maybe aren't quite as diligent as we should be on some of these situations, and we end up having people in our country—and in this case, we're talking about granting citizenship—who just shouldn't be accepted as citizens of our country because of a criminal background. I think it's okay for countries to have criteria and have boundaries on what's acceptable to become a citizen of the country. We have the English requirements and knowledge tests and things like that, which we require, and this is just another part of that test.
Having this tightened up and having it as something that is clear and simple to understand is a benefit and something we should do.
At the very end, it talks about contraventions. If you're not sure what that is, it's that if it has been reduced to a ticket rather than time served, that would would not be part of this. It's basically that, if you've been in jail for two years or more, that would be the criteria.
That's my preamble to this and I would move this amendment.