Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise and probe a little further the question I asked on March 5 of the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. To remind the House, the question was with respect to the new citizenship guide and some omissions and deletions in the preparation of it.
I will begin by saying that for me citizenship is much more than just about voting. It is actually about full participation in the life and fabric of our society. It is the way people choose to exercise that participation economically, socially and culturally that we celebrate when people become citizens.
Every month I sign anywhere between 80 and 200 certificates for new Canadians who have taken an oath, pledged their allegiance and decided to become part of Canada as citizens and take up those responsibilities. To help them in that process, the government has come up with a new citizenship guide. I want to applaud the government for some of the new inclusions in this fuller and quite beautiful guide about Canada.
The guide has included a military history, which was not there previously, and a greater focus on Canada's first nations and other aboriginal peoples, but there is a glaring omission or perhaps exclusion. That has to do with the history of gay and lesbian people in the fabric of our society and in full inclusion. That is quite a disappointment for me because I think there are two reasons that becomes important.
One of those reasons is that new Canadians can celebrate the advancements made by gay and lesbian people as part of their history when they become citizens. They could actually celebrate the human rights agenda, equal marriage rights and those things that perhaps they did not have in the country they left and this new country has. Part of the embrace of Canada is the embrace of gay and lesbian people.
We cannot be naive about this because that document is also an educational tool. It reminds people of the things they might not know about this country. It also tells us that some of our rights are fragile. The minister's own actions, with the exclusion of gay and lesbian history, is part of that fragility. It is incumbent upon the government to stand up for all people and reflect the goodness of this country and the greatness of its people.
The public record is pretty clear. Documents received under access to information have clearly indicated that the department requested that the minister include gay and lesbian history. Unfortunately, he made the decision to exclude it, which is his right. The government has the right to exclude anybody from history it would like to exclude, but it does not have the right to not explain fully how that happened and while I was not party to the meeting with the director of Egale, it is clear on the public record that the minister denied his responsibility on this and said that it was a mere omission.
It is time for the minister to own up to his responsibility. He said that he was responsible for the guide. I hope he can now take this as an opportunity to assure the House, as the government needs to and which the parliamentary secretary hopefully will, that gay and lesbian history will be included in an update to the guide, that there will be no exclusion by a minister or his or her office and that there will be no attempt to rewrite Canadian history but to give every new Canadian citizen the opportunity to know he or she is written into our history the day of arrival and will never be written out of history. That is the goal and I hope the government can make that pledge and commitment today.