Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague who just gave a barnburner of a speech and a clinic to everybody in this House about what is wrong with this legislation. I will try to follow that.
Before I do that, I want to thank everybody who is participating in this Parliament today, but I also want to thank everybody who got us here, specifically the volunteers in Calgary Centre who did a really good job in making sure we have good representation continuing in Calgary Centre. I will do my utmost for my constituents, to make sure their opinions and input are represented well in this House of Commons. I thank the volunteers, of course, and my family and my wife. I thank them all for everything they did to make sure we brought good government back to this side of the House to make sure we hold the government to account, because frankly, I think it is the same old government even though its members protest that it is new. It does not seem like any of its actions are new.
That leads us to today's legislation. Bill C-3 is a carbon copy of Bill C-71 from the last Parliament, and it got stuck every step of the way because of exactly what we are talking about today. There are big holes in this legislation, and the government knows that. The government has put another bill on the table that we get to spend time talking about in this House of Commons when we really should be dealing with things that are much further up the rank in importance. Frankly, we should be talking about the economy, the nation's debt or what we have to do to get projects built in this country again. However, the government is obsessed with repeating the same mistakes it made before.
I am a little surprised that this topic comes up so high on the Liberals' agenda. I was on the immigration committee last session, and this one is back here again. We always thought the Liberals were just trying to co-opt the party that used to be known as the New Democratic Party by making sure they were spinning their wheels and continuing to gain their support. Evidently not, though, because I am not sure the Liberals need the seven votes that are independent over here now because the NDP failed to maintain party status as a result of being the Liberal Party's lapdog for the last three and a half years. It is embarrassing, quite frankly, but this is a game, and this game cannot continue.
If we want good legislation, we have to put good legislation forward. It is our job, as His Majesty's loyal opposition, to make sure we bring forth the problems we see in this bill, and there are numerous problems. We have pointed them out for the last couple of years and said what the Liberals have to change.
I have listened to speeches here from the members across the way today, and it is almost like they are living in an illusion. There are talking points. They are making things up. They are given Liberal talking points and told to just go out there and say them. It does not have to be the truth. It does not have to be based on reality. It just has to be the Liberal talking points. It is all presentation and absolutely zero substance about how this is going to affect the country. I will go through this in a number of ways.
We have the government and the deputy government House leader on the other side. He may be the chief government whip or deputy government whip. I am not sure what position he has been shuffled to at this point; I apologize. Effectively, what we are talking about here is a new government that is just a change of socks from the old government at this point. This is disastrous, but it goes back a long way.
One thing we have always been clear about on this side of the House is that there was a gap in the actual admissibility of Canadians that the previous law had. That was being dealt with. I will get to that later in my speech, about how we were dealing with that, and how the government and the department of immigration were dealing with that without this broad legislation coming in to suddenly change and upend the world.
Conservatives support fixing the issue of lost Canadians. I cannot say how many times I have heard over on the other side that Conservatives are opposed to this. That is a talking point. Conservatives absolutely support the issue of lost Canadians and making sure they become Canadian citizens. We think there are around 20,000 eligible Canadians who are not eligible right now because they have fallen through the cracks of what the previous legislation said were Canadians.
Senator Yonah Martin put forward a bill to address exactly that. It was Bill S-245; that is the numbering they have over in the Senate. It took a targeted approach to make sure those wrongs were righted and that these people did have a pathway to Canadian citizenship, and it was very clear.
Bill C-3 goes way beyond fixing the holes. It goes way beyond any sanity as far as how a developed nation's immigration system is supposed to go through a process when we are bringing people into this country. It is a sweeping overhaul. It opens the door to abuse and weakens the very meaning of what it means to be a new Canadian.
First, this bill would eliminate the first-generation limit on citizenship for children born abroad. Under this bill, anyone born outside Canada to a Canadian parent, regardless of how many generations removed they are, could claim citizenship if that parent spent 1,095 non-consecutive days in Canada. What does that mean? If we count the years, that is three years of, effectively, maybe visiting family three months at a time or whatever the case may be, and suddenly they are Canadian. That is less than three years, with no requirement for consecutive presence and no criminal background check. Effectively, people would be getting around what is a very important and very highly considered international requirement for becoming a citizen in almost any country. Can we get an international background check on this? Can we have some police check? No, this person would automatically be a Canadian citizen.
I do not know why that is a point of contention. Perhaps it is because breaking the system and then bringing it back in front of this House in two years' time, if the Liberals manage to push this bill through with some support, would be something that occupies the House's time. There would be some more and some more, as opposed to dealing with the issues one time, fixing everything right and getting it done.
This bill does not provide a substantial connection to being Canadian. It is a loophole. It would allow for multi-generational flow-through citizenship to people who may never have lived in Canada, paid taxes here or contributed to our society in any meaningful way. It is an open door, telling people they get to come to Canada because they have a long-term, long-ago connection, that they have, effectively, been able to passport shop and come here.
I am going to go into the last prime minister's statement about how we got here and what we are doing here. This is what people call the postnational state. I say the previous prime minister, but as I say, the new government seems no different from the old government. “Postnational state” refers to a perspective that acknowledges the diminishing importance of the nation-state, Canada, and national identity in favour of global, regional and local entities. It does not mean the end of nationalism, but rather a shift in focus and power dynamics where supranational organizations, multinational corporations and globalized culture play increasingly significant roles.
What does “supranational organizations” mean? A supranational organization is like the United Nations, many nations. We talk about multinational corporations. What is a multinational corporation? Well, Brookfield would be a multinational corporation because it has holdings in many companies. There can be a government that, maybe, has some considerable expertise in these areas and a shiny new face that was both head of a United Nations body and also head of Brookfield. This is part of what we are drifting down.
The whole thing about looking at a postnational state suggests that national identity and loyalty are becoming less central as other forms of belonging and identity gain prominence. If we are going to have an open door to coming into Canada, effectively Canadian citizenship will mean less, and I do not think Canadian citizenship means less at all. We also have postnational citizenship, the idea that citizenship is no longer solely defined by national borders and that new forms of participation and belonging are emerging.
Now, I am the great-grandchild of Canadian immigrants on one side and the great-great-great-great-grandchild of Canadian immigrants on the other side. That makes me a Canadian. I can tell everyone here that my family has contributed to building this country, as every Canadian immigrant family has all the way along. We build and grow this country, and we are proud of this country and the contributions made by everybody who comes here and makes sure they build lives here, build families here, seek opportunities here and develop this great country into what it could be. To change that, where somebody can get Canadian citizenship very easily, cheapens the work we have done, everything we have accomplished in this country and what we build here for all generations.
It would be a loophole, as we have said, and it needs to be fixed. It needs to be addressed, because if it is not addressed this time, it will have to come back to the House and get addressed another time.
What do I mean by that? This is my third term as a parliamentarian. I have seen a number of ministers of immigration, and it has been an absolute disaster. Canada went from being a country where about 350,000 people, maximum, were new immigrants per year, to 1.2 million per year, for two years. I can tell members pretty clearly that it had no connection with the reduced health care that occurred across Canada and with the reduced housing that occurred, the housing crisis and the health care crisis. Those have no connection, because we can increase demand without necessarily increasing supply, if we do not believe in actual economic rules.
However, all Canadians face this because of a more or less disastrous policy. As a result, one minister got shuffled out, and then the next minister came in and reversed many of those policies. There was an impact from that reversal. That reversal caused this: A whole bunch of people had been given expectations about what the path to becoming a Canadian would be, and all of a sudden that changed. That changed whether someone was in a post-secondary institution or just on their pathway to becoming a Canadian citizen. All of a sudden, new roadblocks were put in their way. Delays were incurred. Effectively, people were pushed out of the queue, and that is not meeting expectations.
People build their lives, and it is an onerous process to become a Canadian citizen. Sometimes it takes five to seven years. It is a long process. People have to be committed to it and want to become Canadians. It is a prize to actually get in here and contribute to this society. We are honoured to have such great people come into our country and contribute here, but an open door does not make that worth its while. We have to close that broadly opened door so we can actually have a managed system like the one we used to have.
When I was on the immigration committee, I guarantee we received anonymous phone calls from bureaucrats talking about how badly the system was being run by the party on the other side and how there was no managerial control being used. The Liberals effectively opened the doors, shortcutting a whole bunch of security processes in order to just push the number of people coming into Canada.
This is speculation, but one of the reasons is that the Liberals did not want to actually see the GDP of Canada go down, because their policies across the way were punitive to the economy. If we are just increasing the number of people, of course there is a GDP associated with new people, but if we look at the actual math, we can see the math actually shows that our GDP per capita was not increasing. There was a problem with that, because we were no longer meeting our growth as a country. Inflation was more than our GDP. That is a problem. It is a problem in any country, and we cannot just paper over it by throwing a whole bunch more people into Canada. That would be increasing one number without a quality increase.
I have always speculated, and I do not mind saying it in this House of Commons, that the reason the Liberals intentionally make a mess of this file is that they have a large constituency that profits from the middle of the immigration mess. They have all kinds of consultants, and I think that one of their previous ministers of immigration was actually from that very constituency, the ones who actually make money from legal representation, consulting and everything else. Of course, billions of dollars of taxpayer money goes off the table for what is often a very long process of getting Canadian citizenship. It is a very big constituency, and I know my colleagues on the other side of the House profit from that, because they collect money from it. It is a bit of an aberration.
Let us not forget something here. The first-generation limit was introduced in 2009. It was a response to the 2006 Lebanon crisis, where Canada spent $94 million evacuating 15,000 “Canadians of convenience”, as they were called at the time: people who held citizenship but had little or no connection to Canada. I see that, on the other side of the House, they have no hesitancy to run up the numbers in Canada; $94 million is $94 million, and we cannot repeat that again. We have to make sure that the people we are actually helping across the world when there are actual conflagrations, as there are all the time and we are expecting more and more, are actually Canadians and actually will continue to contribute to our society going forward.
As Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill, puts it, “Canadians living abroad sometimes can be a burden for the government in the sense that if we need to evacuate them, during an armed conflict, or if they come back to the country, to seek health care and so forth.” That is part and parcel of being Canadian. It is just not open to everybody all around the world. We have to make sure that we understand what it means to be Canadian, the value of Canadian citizenship.
Let me be fair. We support, again, the concept of restoring the citizenship of lost Canadians. We support, clearly, treating adopted children the same as biological children when it comes to citizenship, but these provisions were largely addressed in Senator Martin's bill, Bill S-245. They do not justify the massive overreach in Bill C-3, nor in Bill C-71.
I have a quote here, on the commitment we talked about: “Introducing tens of thousands of new [Canadians] without a robust integration plan is reckless. Our social infrastructure is buckling, and health care is under severe pressure. The lack of a clear strategy for accommodating this potential population surge only heightens concerns.” What is the surge we are talking about here? We think there are about 115,000 people who would immediately qualify over the first five years of this program, and then continuing all the way through, because once they have a connection to Canada, their children do, etc., from children to children. This is something that is going to continue to escalate until it is addressed, until it is actually amended. In doing our job here, we look at making sure that this is the case.
There are also logistical factors. This is going to cost over $20 million just for administration, per year, as these come through our IRCC department. Again, government members do not understand the numbers, even though the Parliamentary Budget Officer has clearly put the numbers on a plate for them. They will not even quote the number of how many people this is going to affect. This is just ignoring what is actually happening out there. They do have some modelling. They do have some clarity that they have been provided on this, but they do not want to see that.
I am suggesting that maybe they are doing that for a reason. They are putting some canards out here to make sure there is some debate that continues to spend time in the House of Commons, as opposed to coming up with a real bill that actually gets things done.
This arose from a court ruling, a superior court ruling in Ontario. People do not really know this, but a superior court is a lower court. It is not the Supreme Court, as one of my colleagues on the other side said this morning. It was appealable. It was not a great decision, because this is already dealt with. Although it is not a law, there is a process by which the Minister of Immigration, and one of my colleagues on this side said that this is how it is dealt with currently, can actually deal with these lost Canadians very easily with her current power. She knows that. The government knows that, but it will not admit it.
That is the problem here. The government is doing something here, but it already has tools to address it, and it is widening the whole approach to this to make sure we are doing something. Most Canadians would say, “What are you doing, and why are you doing it?” It effectively says that we are opening the door here, for all intents and purposes, for the foreseeable future and confusing everybody, causing some problems that we are going to have to address one way or another.
Canadian citizenship is not just a passport. It is a privilege, a responsibility and a bond to this country. Bill C-3 would weaken that bond. It would allow people with minimal ties to Canada to claim the same rights and benefits as those who have lived, worked and contributed here.
