Mr. Speaker, as a matter of clarification in respect of some of the comments that we have been hearing back and forth, I recognize that the minister has said that she has identified 450 cases, and that I think is accurate. The comments I made did not speak to those who were identified, but potentially.
For example, from southern Manitoba, and it was not from my riding, the article got it a little wrong, approximately 7,000 Mennonites went to Mexico in the 1920s. The marriages of many of those individuals of course were not recognized by the state, only recognized by the church. The consequence of that is that the citizenship may not have flowed to the children because the children were then deemed illegitimate.
Many of the descendants of those Mennonites have come back to Canada. In one case that I had been working on, a set of twins claimed citizenship. The woman was recognized as a Canadian citizenship, but her twin brother was denied Canadian citizenship when he tried to come back to Canada. Yet, his sister had received a passport. That was under the prior Liberal government, so the mess has been around a long time.
I want to commend the minister for the very prompt action that she has been taking on this file. My constituents appreciate not only her work but the prior minister's for actually dealing with an issue that was evident for so many years. After so many years of asking a minister to act, this minister and her immediate predecessor, my Conservative colleague, also acted on this file.