Mr. Speaker, we are here today to debate a bill that was precipitated by the fact that the Liberals decided not to challenge a lower court ruling that would allow unfettered citizenship by descent and create untold citizens of convenience. The department does not even know how many.
We are now on the third reading of the bill after the government decided to gut amendments passed by the committee that would have required basic things like language, cumulative residency and security checks. After not challenging a court ruling, the Liberals gutted these amendments, which were common sense. Even The Globe and Mail said that the amendment we put in place was common sense and that the government should have accepted the Conservative and Bloc amendment regarding the residency requirement.
The parliamentary secretary's comments were rote and kind of feckless, frankly. I want to say why.
This bill deals, fundamentally, with the value of Canadian citizenship. The reason I cannot support the bill, particularly without those amendments, is that, without national identity, integration is impossible and the collapse of our country is inevitable. I want to lay out why we need to put more value on Canadian citizenship, why the bill so denigrates Canadian citizenship and why it is going to create citizens of convenience that some future parliament will have to deal with.
The bureaucrats who are listening in the lobby can mark my words: Future courts will be dealing with this. Future ministers will be looking at evacuations from some country. This bill would create citizenship of convenience. It would take away the notion of responsibility from citizenship. It would impact our country, absolutely, in the future.
What is Canada's national identity? Ahead of every election, I try to find the reason for running again in order to ground myself in that purpose. For all of us, of all political stripes, running is such an honourable thing to do but also comes with a cost to our families. I took my family to visit a visual art installation at the National Gallery that uses Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium. It is a speaker set-up. We sat in the middle of the installation and I tried to explain to my family that this was why I was running. When our democratic institution of pluralism is upheld, Canada is a unique, beautiful thing in history. It has all these individual voices. They have disparate tones and disparate harmonies, but they come together and work together. They are greater than the sum of their parts. I encourage people to go and sit there if they ever want a moment of inspiration in terms of what our national identity can and should be.
In telling them that Cardiff's installation at the National Gallery still offers an accurate analogy for what Canada is today, I may have sold my children a bill of goods. Many in Canada would now describe our nation less as a melodically pluralistic counterpoint and more as a ghettoized cacophony. That sentiment flares up most often in discussions of skyrocketing immigration levels, especially regarding whether Canada can integrate all the people it has welcomed in the last five years.
Attempting to answer that question leads to even murkier waters. In 2025, what does integration into Canada mean, anyway? What is the value of Canadian citizenship? That ambiguity belies the actual problem. Canada's sense of national identify has been eroded by the government to the point of non-existence. Immigrants cannot be expected to integrate into something that is not there.
In recent decades, successive Liberal governments have used legislation and regulation like the piece in front of us today to segregate Canada along regional and ethnocultural lines. Thus, in 2025, our country Canada is perhaps most aptly described as lines on a map, home to tens of millions encouraged by their federal government to prioritize differences over similarities, to reject nationhood for globalism, to take from the country before giving back and to self-flagellate over historical feelings rather than build on the nation's strengths for future resilience.
Upon hearing that statement, many of my colleagues will have a visceral reaction. That is good. How dare anyone question whether Canada still has a national identity. We are a multicultural nation based on the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and equality of opportunity. Canada is the place where newcomers can retain their cultural identity while plugging into a sense of peaceful, pluralistic Canadian nationhood. That is the Canadian national identity, right? Well, it is not today, not after the Liberal government.
While that might be the prevailing romantic notion of Canadian identity held by some colleagues who have eroded it over the last decade, it is no longer accurate to describe it as reality, and admitting the truth is the first step in addressing the problem. For people requiring evidence, it abounds in our country's recent political history. Canada's political left has long led the global postnational movement, best described as the purposeful erosion of national identities in favour of supernational organizations and globalism.
Former Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau set Canada on a postnational course with the 1971 multiculturalism policy, which encouraged newcomers to retain their cultural differences rather than embrace a shared Canadian identity. The erosion of Canada's national identity was further normalized in the 1980s by the Liberal government's national energy program, which deepened economic divisions between western and central Canada.
The aftermath of the 1995 Quebec referendum further contributed to the erosion of Canadian national identity by entrenching exclusive Quebec nationalism. Then, in 2000, former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien stated the following in a speech:
Canada has become a postnational, multicultural society. It contains the globe within its borders, and Canadians have learned that their two international languages and their diversity are a comparative advantage and a source of continuing creativity and innovation. Canadians are, by virtue of history and necessity, open to the world.
Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper's government pumped the brakes on postnationalism during its tenure. On immigration, former prime minister Harper's government prioritized national identity with stricter language requirements for citizenship and a tougher citizenship exam. Regarding Quebec, it enshrined a key nationhood motion, which included the phrase “within a united Canada”.
Economically, Harper attempted to ease western alienation by bolstering Canada's natural resource industries. Culturally, Harper's government focused on heritage spending on platforming nation-building victories like the War of 1812.
However, all those reforms were reversed and far exceeded after former Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015. Essayists discussing Trudeau Junior's famous 2015 postnationalism statement that “[t]here is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” often forget that he did not just say those words but that he also operationalized them through a decade of socialist-oriented, postnationalist policies, so much so that his fervent focus on abolishing Canadian national identity may be remembered as the most enduring aspect of his legacy.
On immigration, the Trudeau Liberals narrowed the age range for mandatory language requirements in citizenship applications, thus diminishing shared language roles in the Canadian identity for newcomers. They eliminated in-person citizenship oath requirements. They sought to erase references in the Canadian citizenship study guide to practices like female genital mutilation as abhorrent, arguably normalizing their importation into Canada.
They turned a blind eye to judicial rulings, allowing immigration status to factor into sentencing violent criminals, valuing the process of entry into the country over the responsibilities associated with citizenship. They allowed Canada's compassionate asylum system to be abused and made a mockery of. Thus we have the bill we have in front of us today.
The Trudeau Liberals have also normalized the practice of importation of conflicts from newcomers' countries of origin, rather than primarily encouraging the shedding of those quarrels in favour of a pluralistic, united Canadian identity rooted in western democratic values. This phenomenon is best exemplified by the Trudeau government's tolerance of diasporic lobby groups' influence in elections and in Canadian institutions while simultaneously turning a blind eye to groups who sought to plant international conflicts and even terrorist principles in Canadian soil. Despite clear evidence of rising foreign interference in elections, the Liberals have yet to implement a foreign agent registry.
The Trudeau Liberals have also prioritized cultural and ethnic differences over a shared ethos of equality in hiring and storytelling. For example, they embedded divisive, quasi-racist hiring policies into federal funding for educational institutions, they allowed Canada's publicly funded national broadcaster to consider abandoning objectivity for racialized narratives, and now they allocate news funding based on whether or not outlets sufficiently highlight ethnic, religious or other group differences.
Rather than enlisting newcomers to help strengthen a cohesive national identity, such as by constructively addressing the nation's historic injustices while simultaneously celebrating its positive achievements, the Trudeau Liberals actively erased symbols of shared historic Canadian identity from public view. They redesigned the Canadian passport to replace images of Canadian national heroes like Terry Fox with inert objects like a wheelbarrow. They supported activities that established the Canadian flag as a symbol of shame as opposed to a representation of patriotism. They worked to erase Canada's founders from places of prominence.
Thus, Canada's political left has profoundly succeeded in transforming Canada into a postnational non-nation, free from the trappings of cohesive national identity.
People who might argue that this was a good thing are very wrong. What Justin Trudeau overlooked in his Liberal government's zealous pursuit of postnationalism is that his father's multicultural vision could thrive only under robust western democratic institutions. Without a government's prioritizing, above all else and especially over partisan ideology, the safeguarding of principles like freedom of speech, secularism and the equality of opportunity, multiculturalism will inevitably destroy a peaceful and democratic nation.
The proof is in the pudding. Today in Canada, after decades of postnational identity's destroying policies, less than half of Canadian youth say they would fight for our country. This marks a startling shift from generations ago, when Canadians fought in great wars for what seemed to be immutable freedoms. Diasporic conflicts now erupt on Canadian streets, hate crimes against ethnic and religious groups have surged and the once-strong Canadian consensus on immigration has been solidly broken by the government.
If Canadians want to reverse the pluralism-destroying course that Liberal postnationalism has set us on, every member of the House, regardless of political stripe, must acknowledge that postnationalism has eroded Canada's national identity to the point of non-existence. That state of affairs is likely the biggest threat to our sovereignty today; no other nation is. History proves this conclusion correct.
For a civilization to survive the test of history, it needs some sort of cohesive shared identity; without it, collapse occurs. There are even examples to be found within Canada's own evolution in the 20th century. In the early 1900s, a Canadian national identity had taken root in spite of high levels of immigration; it was forged in the crucibles of battlefields like Vimy Ridge, where people of many backgrounds fought together as Canadians, united by the shared values of democracy, rule of law, bilingualism and loyalty to the Crown. To be Canadian then was to embrace English or French as a primary language, respect parliamentary institutions and demonstrate civic duty through collective efforts in war and in nation-building.
Fast-forward to today. Our domestic efforts have failed to build critical national infrastructure and have allowed our military to atrophy to the point of near non-functionality. Our foreign policy rewards the tactics of terrorist organizations and abandons western allies in times of crisis.
Logic dictates that if the Liberal government continues eroding the western democratic values that once but arguably no longer underpin Canada's rapidly disappearing pluralistic national identity, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and equality in the application of the rule of law, then collapse is what should be expected of Canada's once-vaunted pluralism.
People looking for a remedy from the Liberal Prime Minister who sits here today will be disappointed, as evidenced by the fact that he put forward a bill like the one that is before the House and then gutted amendments on things like language requirements.
The Prime Minister has long been an adherent to the World Economic Forum's globalist brand of postnationalism, and the best definition of Canada's national identity he managed to muster was that we are not the United States. His new Minister of Canadian Identity managed an arguably worse response, offering pithiness like “I won't stand here and pretend that I can tell you what [a] Canadian...is or should be.”
It is telling that neither of them could define Canadian identity as rooted in shared respect for things like the rule of western-based law, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and equality of opportunity. Nor could they talk about the supremacy of this place and the fact that we here, who represent all the Canadians in this country and abroad, have the right to challenge court rulings and to set law; that is a core part of what we do to strengthen Canadian national identity.
The reality for the current Liberal Prime Minister is that his government must reverse the many changes his predecessor made under the Liberals' aggressive postnational doctrine, in order to rebuild Canada's national identity, prevent pluralism's collapse and retain Canadian sovereignty.
How can we talk about things that are in the national interest if the government cannot define what the national interest is? If the current Liberal Prime Minister fails, the effect will be the same as if he were to tip over the art installation in the National Gallery I spoke about, a shameful and purposeful squandering of an intricate and delicate masterpiece. That is why I stand here and oppose the bill.
There should be no citizens of convenience. If somebody is to be a citizen of this country, they should be able to speak one of Canada's official languages. They should have a clear and demonstrated ability to understand that the responsibility of Canadian citizenship is to uphold our democratic institutions. How can we measure that? We can do so through a citizenship test, but the Liberals gutted that amendment we made at committee.
The fact that the government put a bill forward after not challenging a lower-court ruling on something as vital as the value of Canadian citizenship and who should be eligible for that is bananas. It says that the Liberals do not give a rip about Canada's national identity, and it reconfirms the current Prime Minister's continuation of a postnational doctrine.
We have been in a period of time, especially with the trade situation we find ourselves in with our neighbours to the south, when the Prime Minister is talking about the need to have nation-building initiatives and whatnot, but he cannot even talk about what Canada's national identity is. The only thing I have heard the Prime Minister talk about with respect to that is the fact that we are not American. What are we, then?
There are very clear definitions of what it could mean to be Canadian, even in Canada's citizenship guide right now. There is not a cohesive definition, but certainly on this side of the House we could manage a definition that was rooted in pride, in democratic institutions and in how to maintain pluralism and multiculturalism through respect for the rule of law.
What we have seen with the Liberal government is the denigration of Canada's democratic institutions, the Supreme Court ruling this week on child pornography, and censorship bills that take away our ability to speak truth to power. These are all things that erode Canadian sovereignty and support postnationalism. There has never been a more important bill to oppose than this one.
For people who might have been affected by the small number of lost Canadians, there was a bill in front of the Senate years ago that would have addressed the issues, but the Liberals expanded the legislation far beyond the scope of what our colleague in the Senate tried to do. The minister already has powers to rectify circumstances of citizenship.
However, what the Liberals would do today in the bill before us, especially by gutting the amendments the Conservatives put forward, is entrench the sense of postnationalism in the country, further erase our national identity, erode our pluralism and further devalue Canadian citizenship.
Oftentimes in the House, we are tasked with the mundane details of program spending or of different types of policy, but we have to be tasked and seized with restoring Canada's national identity and with restoring and protecting the value of Canadian citizenship.
I implore colleagues to vote against the bill, to make the Liberals go back to the table and come forward with a bill that is narrow in scope. There are tools at their disposal that they could use to challenge court rulings, but they have chosen not to. The value of Canadian citizenship, our national identity, is worth something more than what is in front of us today, so I implore colleagues to vote against the bill, protect our heritage and protect the value of Canadian citizenship.
