Thank you, Madam Chair.
I just want to remind everybody that the original intent of Senator Yonah Martin, when she put this bill forward, was to try to avoid the problems that had happened in the past. In the past, this bill—a very much similar bill—had come forward.
As we know there are different categories of lost Canadians. Each category of lost Canadians requires a certain correction or a fix or repair to the Citizenship Act in order to bring those lost Canadians back in as Canadians. Each of them stands on their own. It's very complicated. It's very complex. The act is actually very complicated, as my colleague Tom has said. It's very difficult to understand. I thank, very much, our officials for providing that knowledge because it's very hard to understand how this affects that and everything.
When there is a bill that changes that, it's very complex. When you try to solve one, two, three or four different problems, you end up with that many chunks of words, of amendments, to the act that all impact different parts of the act. It gets very complicated. Lots of questions have to be asked. It's not something that's simple to do. It takes a lot of time, first of all, just to draft it and to get it written properly. Then it takes a lot of time here to deal with it.
This was the whole point of why these bills have failed in the past. The process required, when you do that sort of thing, takes a long time. You can't just simply have a meeting, explain it and it all makes sense, and then everybody votes and it's done. It's not like that because there are so many pieces to this puzzle. They're all very complicated. They all need to be double-checked.
The whole reason we're here is that previous changes to the legislation had been made, and unknowingly, there were unintended consequences. Because proper due diligence wasn't done.... I'm sure the people who did it did their best, but they could have asked more questions because they obviously missed things. Those things then resulted in what we refer to as “lost Canadians”. Another way to refer to that is “unintended consequences” of a bill.
What has happened since then is that much more scrutiny is being put on citizenship changes for that very reason. We don't want to create new unintended consequences. Bills have failed in the past because they extend too long, they require too much study and, being in a minority situation, inevitably, we aren't able to go the full four years. Then an election happens, and that's the end of the bill. That has happened before.
That's why, when Senator Martin decided to bring this bill forward, she wanted to take a different approach. She was unhappy with the fact that this had failed. In fact, constituents who spoke with her relayed that concern: The approach hadn't worked, so a new approach was required. That's where her idea came for this. Let's just take one of these groups—one of the larger segments of this group of lost Canadians—and let's just try to fix one thing.
One thing that would be quite simple.... It's not that it would be simple. That's not putting it right. It's that it would be limited. The explanations, while complex, would be somewhat limited, so it wouldn't take eight meetings to figure it out. It could be done in one or two.
To that end, that's what she decided to do. It had the bonus effect of the same exact issue that had been talked about in the Senate before. To her advantage, the Senate didn't actually need to restudy it, because it had already studied exactly that thing. She was able to move it through the Senate very quickly, because the Senate agreed that, since there had been no changes to the original bill—the previously studied bill—it didn't need to restudy it. It agreed with Senator Martin to just pass it through the Senate to the House.
When it arrived at the House, what could have happened—what I have before described as track A—was that we could have brought it here. We could have asked the hard questions that needed to be asked on this particular group of lost Canadians. We would have been done by now, I guarantee it. As I said, even though the questions are complicated, and the answers are difficult to explain, it's a very limited segment of information that was required.
We would have had that information. We would have asked the questions we needed to. We would have made sure—and actually, the department had some good suggestions for wording and language changes to Senator Martin's bill that we agreed with—that the exact correct words were there, and there would be no further unintended consequences. That was all done.
That would have been completed. It would have been through this committee many weeks ago, and it would have been back to the House. All that would have been required for it to become law was a vote. It probably would have been the law of the land by now.
That was track A. That was the track we were on. That was the whole logic of what Ms. Martin had planned as a different approach to this problem and a different approach to this legislation actually getting through the system.
That was the plan. That's how it would have gone on track A. What really happened, as we know now, is that the government and the NDP got together and decided they wanted to try track B, which just so happens to be the same track that was tried before. We know what the result was before. The result before was that it didn't get through because it was too complicated. We had people tell us—and we know from the previous Senate testimony—that constituents said that, if this was going to get overly complicated, it would not pass in time, and they would rather have at least one piece of it dealt with, and then we could come back and deal with the others later. That was the testimony of people. That was the testimony of the sponsor of the bill. She specifically requested that we not expand this so as to slow it down. That was her main request—that we just leave the bill as it was so that we would not slow it down and not conflate different issues that would add time and cause this bill to fail again.
Unfortunately, that's the track we're on. Not only did it take longer for us to process and analyze all these issues here in this legislation and to make sure there were no unintended consequences, but the really sad part is that now it will eventually make its way back to the Senate because it's not in the same form it was when it was sent from that place.
What's very likely going to have to happen there is that the Senate will look at this and say that this is not what they agreed to. It's not the same thing, so they will ask what all the changes are. They are going to have to study this bill. The way the timing goes on these kinds of things, it's not something that will happen next week or tomorrow. This could take a long time before it actually gets the chance to be talked about in the Senate and referred to committees there. This will potentially add many months to this process.
This is the danger we spoke of at the very beginning of this process when, as my colleague Mr. Kmiec said, the bill was vandalized. We had warned about this, that besides taking longer to get through the House of Commons, it was going to be studied in great depth again at the Senate, and there would be many questions with potentially further amendments at the Senate that then would have to come back. It could have been done. Track A could have been done. With track B, there's a bunch of uncertainty. It's going to extend it for months, guaranteed. In this environment of a minority government, you never know when an election could be called. Should an election be called, all of this work will have been for naught and it will all get thrown out, and some future parliamentarian will have to address this and start this again.
That raises another good question. If the government was so intent on making further amendments, why did it not just introduce a bill? It could have let this bill deal with this piece of the puzzle, let it go through and be done with it. The other changes the government wanted to make could have been introduced in another bill. It would have very much been within the scope of the immigration minister to do so. The government has the ability to control the agenda and to put bills through the House of Commons. This would be quite a logical and sensible way to do this so that we would both preserve what Ms. Martin had intended in hers and put the government changes through on their own bill. What the government has done is vandalize this bill.
We always have to remember that we as parliamentarians have few tools with which to legislate, but one of them is private members' bills. When we put forward a private member's bill, the intention is that we are communicating our idea, the thing we want to do, and we are putting that forward to Parliament to be voted on. When the government comes along and says essentially to delete everything and replace it with what they want, it's no longer our bill. I don't think any of us around this table or any of us in the House or the Senate wants that approach. We all want to retain the right to push through our legislation the way we envision it.
The government should not be able to take over our private member's bill, throw out what they want and put in what they want, but that's what has happened here. I think that's another significant abuse of a private member's bill. It's not something that we should think lightly about.
This has huge implications for precedents, as well, because if the government did it here, you can guarantee this case will be referred to in the future. They will talk about what happened at this committee and they will use it as a precedent to destroy some other future parliamentarian's bill. I can assure you that it is going to happen. It's very disappointing, and it's disappointing that I have to be a part of that, because it's not something I see as a good precedent in our country.
I am really disappointed—I guess that's the best way to put it—in the process that has happened here and in the way the government has taken this bill, put in these changes and, frankly, taken advantage of the private member's bill of a fellow parliamentarian, rather than doing the work it should have done on its own, which is produce its own bill to make the changes that the government wants to change.
That summarizes my thoughts on this. I'll allow someone else to speak on it.
Thanks, Madam Chair.
