All right, Madam Chair.
I move that Bill S‑245 be amended by adding after line 18 on page 1 the following new clause:
1.4 Section 24 of the Act is amended by adding the following: 24(10) A document of citizenship must be provided immediately upon completion of the oath of citizenship.
The logic of this amendment, since we're doing what I would call a statutory review of the Citizenship Act, is that at the citizenship ceremony, when you attend in person, and actually when you attend it virtually as well, the department has you cut your permanent residency card. The PR card is cut. Oftentimes they ask you to cut it visibly in front of these civil servants, because you can't have a PR card and citizenship at the same time, obviously.
What happens then is that they mail a document of citizenship. But they already know who has attended there. They can kind of check them off the list. There's no reason that you couldn't have them just print off the document of citizenship. I personally would much rather that we go back to the old way. I won't fish out my citizenship card from my pocket, but the old cards are much better. This is a big document of citizenship.
The reason that one is so important is that you need that to get your passport. You need that for your passport application. It's 30 days or however long it takes, depending on how remote you are. You may live in a remote community or in an apartment block where there may not be mail delivery every single day, depending on how the contractors work with Canada Post.
The logic of this is to just do it at the ceremony. It's just a process issue. Just give it to the persons as they're there. Because citizenship ceremonies may take an hour or two or three to complete, I think the department has enough time to check off who is there and check them off digitally in the database. Then they can just print off the document at the location, or have them ready to go. Whoever doesn't show up, the department can just bring it back to their offices.
I think it's a huge process improvement for new Canadians.