Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join my fellow members in addressing Bill C-63, but I cannot say I am terribly impressed with what we have to work with in the bill.
It has become typical of the government to spend months and years responding to a report and then drop a band-aid piece of legislation in our laps that it claims to be in great rush to push through. In this case we have a bill that tinkers with some definitions and procedures but completely ignores what really needs to be addressed in this country.
Our immigration system has been in crisis for years. It is in a tailspin. It has been abused by groups and gangs from around the world because they have found they can manipulate our system while legitimate refugees and law-abiding new citizens wait in a bureaucratic limbo to have their cases heard, reheard and deferred for months on end.
Thousands of known criminals walk our streets with impugnity after brushing off the most cursory examination at border points while mysterious legions of organized criminals and drug fuelled gangs set up shop in our cities, apparently beyond the reach of our Canadian securities.
What does the government have to respond to all this? At least these people still have to swear allegiance to the Queen at present, but it should be expanded to include Canada as well. Since we are here to deal with what little the government has to offer by way of a legislative agenda, I will point out where I believe the government has gone off the rails.
If a woman in this country has a baby then we confer upon that child the blessing of citizenship, and that is how it should be. However, if a woman comes here from another country to have a baby we have a bit of a problem. The Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration recommended that the child only be considered a citizen if one or both of its parents were a permanent resident or citizen. There should be some leeway for refugee claimants who have been accepted, but the idea is that for Canadian citizenship to mean anything it should be held up to a certain standard.
We should ask people who are coming here to observe our laws and accept our requirements. Simply having a child here, then claiming that it would be unfair to be deported because one is the mother of a Canadian citizen is nothing but twisted logic and an abuse of that child.
What does Bill C-63 say to that? It says in clause 4 that the government is not prepared to lay down the law but apparently to wait for the supreme court to make up the law as it sees fit. We all know where this perverted logic led recently.
Unfortunately where the Liberals do not want the courts to rule they put the authority to interpret into the hands of the minister. In a perfect world we could all assume the minister and all her heirs would rule with a benevolent hand and never let politics or special interests affect her judgment. Of course in a perfect world we would not have people taking advantage of the generous nature of Canadians by trading off their children in this manner.
There are no fewer than 16 paragraphs with a number of subparagraphs describing what the minister might arbitrarily decide behind closed doors about how this act will work. Most are administrative and no doubt there is a sensible rationale for applying them, but I cannot help thinking that the more such clauses we have, the more open ended the law is and the more open it is to abuse or incompetence. We know how difficult it is already for opposition members and their constituents to get satisfaction from a government department after a case has wound its way through the labyrinth it must follow.
There is also a clause in the bill that the minister can delegate her authority. Once again maybe this is necessary to keep this creaky thing rolling along day to day. I do worry, though, that the minister saw fit to include the phrase “without proof of the authenticity of authorization”. That is kind of an open ended statement. That comes from subclause 44(1). I hope this is not intended to be some sort of escape clause for future screw-ups but it certainly would not be the first time.
The minister has given herself the authority in the bill to decide what the criterion is for people to have an adequate knowledge of our official languages. There is no definition of what adequate is. It surely leaves open an opportunity for some cracker jack immigration lawyer to appeal on those grounds.
We see a clause that says that potential immigrants cannot use a translator to take a language test. This would be a laughable inclusion if it were not so sad that the Liberals never thought of this before.
The minister has given herself the authority to define what constitutes a relationship between a parent and a child for the purpose of determining entitlement to citizenship. We have to wonder why this relationship has to be defined at the door when we are thinking of letting somebody into the country. There is already a reference to adoption outside the country in clause 8, and aside from being the birth parents we are left with a big question of how this authority might be applied.
Maybe subparagraph (i) hints at the many possibilities for relationships the minister may have in mind. She has taken upon herself to define who is a spouse for the purposes of this act. As is its usual practice, we know the Liberal government has left it up to the courts to allow some special interest groups to redefine what constitutes spouse.
We can interpret this subparagraph to be anticipating that court case or, if we are generous, we might say that the minister will simply decide if a couple is married or not. I find that a little hard to swallow. This clause is wide open for the social engineering which many Liberals favour and of which Canadians have repeatedly made clear they are not in favour.
The minister's powers are even more frightening when we move on to grounds for refusing citizenship. Clauses 21 and 22 suggest that the minister can decide arbitrarily what constitutes the public interest and having disqualified someone under this heading can refuse that individual an appeal.
Ironically members opposite build their careers on the insupportable assertion that this party wants to keep immigrants out. That is not the case. However this clause puts incredible power in the hands of the present minister to do that very thing.
The problem is not that the minister may keep criminals out, something they do not seem to be terribly good at now, but that this act does not define what this or any future minister might decide is public interest. Might this one day apply to someone who holds opinions contrary to some accepted government wisdom? It is not clear here where the guidelines are.
It is likewise with the term national security which appears in clause 11(f). The minister may grant citizenship to someone who has not been convicted of an offence against national security. The problem is that there is no specific category of offence in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act or the Criminal Code here.
There is merit in prohibiting people who constitute a risk to the country or who have demonstrated that they cannot behave according to the laws of this land or any other for that matter, but it is weak legislation that leaves this concept open to interpretation to abuse. It leaves the country open to dictates by the courts, and that is not why our constituents have sent us here.
One of the flaws in Canadian politics is the difficulty in dealing with subjects such as immigration, as if to raise the issue itself were tantamount to questioning its benefits, the place of immigrants or the value of a certain category of immigrants.
This kind of unspoken censorship has been a chronic problem for politicians for years. We firmly believe that the government must account for the way the objectives of immigration programs are being met. This is in accordance with the rules that allow the true exercise of the democratic rights of Canadian citizens.
Only then can we restore the public's faith in the management of immigration programs. At the same time we will restore the confidence of those who implement these programs and in the end all those who elect to settle in this great country.