Mr. Speaker, in some of my speeches, I recount an experience I had when I visited our immigration mission in New Delhi. I sat in on an interview with a lady of Indian origin who had been a Canadian citizen for about 15 years. She was making a sponsorship application for a spouse. What concerned me was that the lady could not conduct an interview with the Canadian official in English. She is from Surrey, British Columbia.
It struck me that a middle aged woman could not discuss with a government official some basic questions about her personal life in English even though she has been a Canadian citizen for about 12 years and a resident for 15 years. It struck me that we had let down this woman and, I fear, many others like her by not applying in a consistent fashion the legal requirement of the Citizenship Act that people speak English or French to obtain citizenship.
We want to continue to benefit from our country's diversity with some of the highest relative levels of immigration in the world but we want our model of unity, diversity and pluralism to continue being a success. I fear that may not happen if we allow large numbers of citizens to live in Canada without ever learning one of our two languages.
That is the key to economic success and to socio-economic and cultural integration, and it is not inconsistent with our best traditions of pluralism and of respecting the heritage languages and cultures of our ancestors to learn English and French. It is a necessary part of becoming Canadian and we are there with newcomers investing in those services to help them do so.