Madam Speaker, I was really enjoying the debate; it is lots of fun. I want to thank my colleague who split his time with me, my friend from Red Deer, for his excellent speech. I am happy to rise again and talk about the bill. I spoke to it at second reading, and I am happy to offer my thoughts again at third reading, although I have some suspicion about what actually happened. I have been in this place a long time, and the fact that we are not debating the bill the committee actually adopted at third reading is interesting, to say the least.
I rise today to deal with Bill C-3, which claims to redress the lost Canadians issue but, of course, goes far beyond that goal and scope in its intent. Lost Canadians are those with strong ties to Canada who have been denied the privilege of being conferred our citizenship because of complexities or outdated provisions in our laws. Conservatives believe those who have been arbitrarily or unfairly denied this privilege should have this error corrected, yet the bill that is currently before Parliament remains a bad one, notwithstanding that issue.
Instead of merely remediating the most egregious cases of lost citizenship, the Liberals took the liberty of creating a system that would completely gut and undervalue the value of Canadian citizenship. While most immigrants to Canada must work hard to acquire their citizenship, something they are immensely proud of, the bill would create a system in which citizenship is not awarded in a merit-based manner. It introduces an extremely weak substantial connection test to gain citizenship.
An individual's parents need only to spend 1,095 nonconsecutive days in Canada at any point to gain citizenship. No criminal background check would be required. This was something Conservatives proposed as an amendment at committee and had passed, but, suspiciously, it has now been removed from the bill at third reading. This is the point I would like to expand on, and it should not be ignored.
In the last few days, I received a response to an Order Paper question in which I asked how many non-Canadians are incarcerated in federal prisons in Canada. That number would not even include the ones incarcerated in provincial institutions, which are for people serving sentences of up to two years less a day. It showed that there are nearly 1,000 non-Canadians in federal institutions in Canada.
If one is serving a federal sentence, the average sentence for a federal penitentiary is 1,787 days. When those 1,000 people get out, they will have now met the arbitrary 1,095 nonconsecutive days test. They can go anywhere they want in the world after they are released from a federal prison in Canada, and, because they have spent that time in Canada, any children they might have could now be conferred Canadian citizenship. Should the children of these people who have spent time in a prison who might be the—