Mr. Speaker, 60 years ago, Prime Minister Mackenzie King declared for the first time, “I speak as a citizen of Canada”, to the participants in Canada's first citizenship ceremony.
The spark that led to the creation of the Canadian Citizenship Act was created in 1945 when a young member of Parliament visited the Canadian War Cemetery in Dieppe and noted that the names on the crosses were French, they were English and they were also from the farthest approaches of the world. He noted that these young men and women could no longer be called only British subjects, that the Canadian Citizenship Act had to be brought into being.
That MP, the minister who later created the act, was my father.
Canada is known to the world as a beacon of hope, respect and decency. As generations of Canadians have built our country, Canadian citizenship has become the mortar of our nation and the emblem of our achievement.