moved that Bill C-3, An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, let me begin by acknowledging that we are gathering on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
It is a privilege to stand here this morning, as Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, to present Bill C-3, an act to amend the Citizenship Act, 2025. This bill is an important opportunity to address issues in Canada's citizenship legislation with the intention of restoring and providing access to citizenship for those who have been impacted. We often refer to this group as “lost Canadians”, those people who lost or were denied citizenship status because of provisions in previous legislation that we would now consider outdated. The term “lost Canadians” can also be used to describe people who are not Canadian citizens today because they are excluded by the first-generation rule.
Although this bill was introduced as Bill C-71 in the previous session, Parliament did not complete its review before the end of the session. As a result, this is the reintroduction of a bill that had been introduced and on which debate had started. The previous government put in place—