Mr. Speaker, I am happy to continue my remarks on Bill C-14, the amendment to the Citizenship Act to facilitate citizenship for children adopted by Canadians overseas.
When I was last speaking, I mentioned that the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration had been working hard on the question of a revised Citizenship Act, on the necessary revisions that are required to the Citizenship Act, which has not been looked at since 1977.
Some of the things we had been talking about pertained to the whole question of revocation of citizenship. I had mentioned that the process for revoking citizenship should be a full judicial process. That is something the standing committee in the last Parliament felt very strongly about. The standing committee felt that there should be no provision in law for an administrative power to annul citizenship and that to revoke citizenship, false representation, fraud, or knowingly concealing material circumstances should be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal court. That was a very important standard that the standing committee wanted to hold up. It is something that is dramatically lacking in the current act.
That higher evidentiary standard is higher than the one that currently exists in the legislation. Right now it is not beyond a reasonable doubt. It is the lower standard of the balance of probabilities, the civil standard. The committee felt very strongly that this needed to be raised to the higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
The committee also talked of the need for a review of the residency requirements for citizenship and that refugees should be able to count their residency from the time they make their claim, not from the date of a positive finding of that claim. Those are very significant issues for many people in Canada.
We need to have a standardization of the residency requirement. We need to honour the time that refugees have spent in Canada from the time of making their claim. That is very important. We want to facilitate the gaining of citizenship by refugee claimants. This would be one way of doing it, something that is not currently done in the act and one of the reasons that the standing committee believed there should be a review of the Citizenship Act.
The Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration also said that we needed to ensure that criminal proceedings against an applicant outside Canada could be taken into account in the same way that such proceedings in Canada are taken into account. Given the concerns that many people have about security clearances, security issues and criminal issues, this was seen as an important addition that should be made to the act.
There was a concern about citizenship court judges. The standing committee felt very strongly that they should be maintained. There have been attempts in recent years to get rid of citizenship court judges. I am pleased to see that the government has appointed some new citizenship court judges in jurisdictions where their services were urgently required, but we need to maintain that important position. I think the standing committee last year was very moved by the dedication of citizenship court judges to their important work and felt that they made a very important contribution that should be maintained in any future Citizenship Act.
There was also the matter of the citizenship oath. There is some sentiment in Canada that the oath does not appropriately reflect the reality of Canada today, that the stress on allegiance to the Queen may be something that needs to be looked at. There should be a question of looking at loyalty to Canada and stressing that in the oath as well, perhaps recognizing the importance of the Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the oath and establishing the kinds of relationships that new citizens have with their new country.
There were all kinds of issues that the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration thought needed to be looked at in a review of the Citizenship Act.
The previous government kept telling us that it was on the verge of tabling legislation. It kept saying that it was almost ready to go and if we only gave it a little feedback, it would be ready to run with that legislation. Unfortunately we never saw it.
I suspect there is draft legislation hanging around in the department, perhaps even in a corner of the minister's office. I would encourage the new Conservative minister to look for it, to blow that pile of dust off of it, to see if it is something he can run with and introduce in the House. There are a number of citizenship issues that are very important and need attention, not just the important matter of adoption and the gaining of citizenship for adopted children.
Another issue that I feel very strongly about in the citizenship file is the whole question of the processing fee for citizenship applications. Unfortunately, the standing committee, in hearing testimony last year, heard of cases where people had to delay their application for citizenship because they could not afford the fee. That is a very serious situation. No one in Canada should be delayed or prevented from attaining citizenship merely because they cannot afford to pay the application fee.
Last year the standing committee said very strongly that the application fee for initial applications for Canadian citizenship should be eliminated. I hope the current government will take that under advisement. No one in Canada should be prevented from taking that step of becoming a citizen because they do not have the financial means to pay for the application. I hope the government will pay some attention to that recommendation.
Many issues in the Citizenship Act should be addressed and many would require a new Citizenship Act. I hope the Conservatives will expand their citizenship agenda beyond the relatively compact issue of adoption and citizenship and move on to a broader agenda around citizenship to update that important legislation.
I want to return to Bill C-14 and say that there was one area that the standing committee thought should be addressed with regard to a citizenship application for an adopted child and that was the case where it was refused. The standing committee, in its reports to the government and to the House last year, recommended that a full appeal on the facts and law should be permitted in federal court on any refusal of an application for citizenship for an adopted child. I know this is not part of the legislation. There is the opportunity to apply for leave to appeal at the federal court, but the standing committee believes that should be clearer and more direct in terms of a direct appeal to the federal court. That is one area where the legislation might be improved.
This is legislation that was long overdue. It would provide a measure of equity and fairness to adopted children and to their families and remove that spectre that many adoptive parents and their children have felt that they were somehow second-class citizens in Canada. The bill will finally address that at long last. I hope every party in the House wants this to receive the attention that it so richly deserves.