Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to participate in the debate on second reading of Bill C-18, the citizenship of Canada act.
Like all other members who have spoken this morning, I too feel a sense of tremendous emotion when I attend a citizenship ceremony in my constituency. Perhaps it is one of the most meaningful and memorable occasions for us as members of Parliament. To join with new Canadians when they take the citizenship oath of Canada and to repeat the oath ourselves is truly a moving experience and a reminder of the great freedoms, rights and privileges of this nation Canada.
This is a very important debate for the House. This legislation is very important. Canadian citizenship is the highest right we as a democratic nation can confer upon those living within our borders. These rights and responsibilities define the egalitarian and democratic values that we hold. No one has legal or political rights extending beyond citizenship. A citizen's right to vote and the right to run for political office are our fundamental democratic rights.
In that context, given that tremendous feeling we have about citizenship, the rules for defining citizenship are very important. They run right to the heart of who we are as a nation.
Canada's population has now reached more than 30 million. The 2001 census data show that our growth rates declined in every province except Alberta when we compare our current rate of growth of population with the early 1990s. We also know from census data and other information that immigration was the main source of growth in Canada's population between 1996 and 2001.
It is projected that by 2011 all growth in our labour force will depend on immigration. What we do here in terms of the citizenship of Canada act, and what we do generally in terms of immigration and refugee policy, is vitally important for the economic growth of the country and the future of this land. In that context we must keep remembering that the diversity of our citizens has become a distinguishing feature of what it is to be Canadian, just as has our language duality.
I want to refer very briefly to an article by Gwynne Dyer which appeared in Canadian Geographic magazine in February 2001. I do not know of a better quotation to capture that sense of what it means to be Canadian and the diversity of our population. He said:
Canada, more than anywhere else, is truly becoming the world in one country. It attracts people for all the classic reasons, such as too little opportunity at home and lots in Canada, but also because of its growing reputation as a country that does not try to impose some new uniform identity on its immigrants--and, of course, for a thousand more quirky and individual reasons.
Canada's multicultural citizenship, our multicultural heritage, is unique and is very important. It has become a defining characteristic of our nation in the eyes of the world.
The evolution of Canadian citizenship truly reflects our evolution as a society from our ethnocentric past to our multicultural present.
I come from a riding that is probably one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in Canada. We have an incredible history of welcoming people from all over the world. We have an area with strong multicultural roots that has always welcomed immigrants from every continent. We have experienced a large influx historically of people of Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish and German heritage. More recently, immigrants have come in large numbers from the Philippines, India, Portugal and many other Asian, Latin American, African and eastern European countries.
Our community with all of that diversity works in harmony. We have demonstrated, as other constituencies represented in the House have demonstrated, that diverse communities work and are a very positive force for building a great future in this country. In that context, I want to reference an article by Winnipegger Gerald Friesen, who wrote in response to outrageous comments made by Jean-Marie Le Pen who, in March of this year in his challenge for the presidency of France, challenged the viability of all immigrant based communities.
Gerald Friesen wrote that Winnipeg offers an alternative vision and proof that in fact diverse communities are viable and work and can be a positive force for social change and for building a civil society. I want to briefly quote Gerald Friesen because what he said is important to the debate we have at hand. He said:
The crucial story is that prairie Canada and Winnipeg, the region's largest city down to the 1960s, conducted Canada's first large-scale experiment in integrating immigrants from diverse backgrounds into a single community. The prairies demonstrated that a plural citizenship was possible.
You might say, so what? Didn't Chicago and New York and hundreds of other American cities have the same experience? Yes, they did. And the U.S. results, despite continuing struggles, are admirable. But Americans are quick to claim that they are unique. They are not. Consider the range of peoples in historic Istanbul, in historic Baghdad, in today's Sydney or London. Like these others, the Winnipeg example puts the lie to Le Pen's basic contention: it demonstrates that people of different ethnicities, races and religions can indeed live together in fruitful, vital cities.
That was a little background on my constituency and why I feel so strongly about this whole debate about citizenship as well as about immigration and refugee policy.
I want to put this in the context of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Since its passage, the charter has become instrumental in enforcing citizenship rights. It is our obligation to ensure that this standard is rigorously applied, especially to something as fundamental as a citizenship act.
The wake of the tragic September 11 events has presented the most significant challenge to our rights and freedoms as citizens in recent years. There are those who would react to this horror by severely restricting the very rights and freedoms that this terror aims to destroy.
We must guard the balance between security and freedom carefully in this defining legislation. In our view it is unacceptable that some Canadian citizens are being singled out for discriminatory treatment. The rise in the occurrence of racially or religiously motivated hate crimes is profoundly disturbing. We know the stories. We have been dealing with this in the House over the last couple of days. Some Canadian citizens have experienced discriminatory treatment abroad, particularly in the United States, due to profiling practices.
The recent case of Maher Arar, a 32-year-old Canadian citizen arrested during a stopover at New York's Kennedy airport on September 26 as he was travelling to Montreal from Tunisia and deported to Syria, brought home just how fragile our citizenship rights have become. That the confidence in Canadian citizenship has weakened to the point that one of our foremost authors, Rohinton Mistry, who was born in India, felt compelled to cancel engagements in the United States because of continued harassment by United States airport security authorities is unacceptable.
It is critical that this legislation is consistent with Canadian values that are enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, often taken for granted by those who are born here and acquire those rights as their birthright.
Just as changes to our view of citizenship have acted as markers of our social progress, citizenship has also provided the focus for several of the most shameful incidents throughout our history, occasions wherein we as a nation have failed to rise above our bigotries of the moment, some racial and some gender.
In that context we ought to acknowledge the work that has been done inside and outside the House to seek recognition for Ukrainian Canadians who were interned and who were considered enemy aliens. I want to acknowledge the work of the member for Dauphin—Swan River who has a bill before the House to seek official recognition and restitution. It is important for us in this regard to acknowledge the work of those who are struggling to achieve recognition and restitution among the Chinese community and to deal appropriately in this place with the Chinese immigration head tax and the Chinese exclusion act. These two incidents in our past still haunt us. They must be addressed and deserve to be considered in the context of this debate about citizenship.
As we consider changes to the Citizenship Act, they remind us that we must be vigilant to keep our vision and ideals at the highest level and to resist the ever present pressures to backslide or settle to lesser, divisive and exclusionary alternatives. At the time, assigning the restricting of citizenship rights to certain citizens or to deny citizenship altogether to certain identifiable groups may have been acceptable to the majority. Women had to engage in an incredible struggle to attain the right to vote. First nations only won the right to vote in 1960.
These and many other affronts to our current norms were promoted as reasonable by contemporary authorities. Race based immigration policies have only been formally dropped in recent years. Some Canadians contend that lingering vestiges of that bias may still be systemically embedded in our current policy. These issues are not ancient history.
As we examine Bill C-18, the Canadian Citizenship Act, our first question must be, does the bill meet the test? Is this the best we can do to express ourselves to set the parameters for defining Canada in the year 2002?
One key objective of the bill before us is to encourage those eligible to be citizens to in fact take the final steps to become citizens. We must acknowledge that in that process our full knowledge and sense of what it means to be Canadian, respecting the rights and freedoms of all people within the borders and boundaries of this country, must be respected.
We have just completed a lengthy parliamentary discussion and debate to finalize the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The government's stated objective in introducing that legislation was to increase Canada's openness to immigrants. The House of Commons citizenship and immigration committee reviewed that legislation and also put a considerable amount of work into studying this in its report, “Competing for Immigrants”.
I am pleased to see today that the minister has tabled a response to the committee's report, “Competing for Immigrants”. I want to register at this time some concerns about the failure of the government to address the main issue of many in our committee, and those who appeared before our committee, about setting a tone, establishing a vision. This included encouraging immigrants to come to this land, not closing the door to legitimate aspirants, or putting in place double standards that clearly are disincentives to those looking at Canada as a country of choice and emphasizing a renewed multiculturalism.
What we have looked for, and still look for, from the government both in terms of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and now the Citizenship Act, is a proactive strategy that encourages people from all walks of life to choose Canada, not one that puts in place a double standard in terms of people within this land nor differentiates between people for who are Canadians by birth and people who are here as landed immigrants or are refugees seeking protection. We want a proactive strategy to promote positive race and ethnic relations to strengthen respect for diversity in tandem with a clear and immediate response to any racially or religiously motivated hatred, and we know from recent events that is more important than ever.
Both the minister and the Prime Minister have stated that the future of Canada's prosperity depends on our success in attracting immigrants. Last July the Prime Minister, in a prelude to the dredging job done in the throne speech on resurrecting broken Liberal promises, reaffirmed the government's 1993 commitment to a 1% immigration target.
We just got the annual report for immigration for 2002. Where are we? We are not close to the 1% target established by the government as a desirable goal for immigration. It is certainly below the levels anticipated for this year. What happened to that dream? What happened to the vision?
We have some significant concerns with the legislation, in the context of the issues that I addressed, with respect to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and to our traditions as a nation that assures due process is always in play. We acknowledge the work by the government to move the matter of revocation of citizenship from ministerial and cabinet decision making and discretion to the Federal Court of Canada. However we also note that many discretionary powers still remain with the minister, and vague wording applies in terms of criteria to be applied.
I want to reference, as many others have and will continue to do, the discretion to annul citizenship for false representation or to refuse citizenship based on the following words, “flagrant and serious disregard for the principles and values underlying a free and democratic society”. As parliamentarians we deserve clarification of those words. We deserve to push as hard as we can for the government to recognize the need always for due process including the right to appeal and the right to have information to defend oneself in the face of accusations.
I also want to note for parliamentarians our concerns with respect to the abolishment of citizenship judges. One would assume that we would favour objective set criteria for determining citizenship, as we are, but we also know that we lose a great deal when it comes to the role of citizenship judges in showing some flexibility and understanding of extenuating human conditions. We know that by moving the process from judges to bureaucrats we may have a more clearly defined set of rules but we will possibly lose some humanitarian approaches in terms of extenuating circumstances that cannot be ignored and must be addressed. Our concern is to hear from the government how those considerations will be met and how people in real life circumstances will have their needs addressed.