Don Davies

[Petitions, March 22nd, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions to introduce today.

The first petition is from hundreds of people who note that Canada is the only OECD country that does not have a national public transit strategy. It notes that over the next five years there will be an $18-billion gap in transit infrastructure needs.

The petitioners call on the Government of Canada to create a Canadian public transit strategy which seeks to provide a permanent investment plan to support public transit, as well as federal funding mechanisms to allow municipalities to create that important public resource.

[Health, March 21st, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, there is a national epidemic of drug overdoses, and the Minister of Health has acknowledged that safe injection sites like Insite in Vancouver make sense and save lives. Public health officials in Toronto and cities across Canada are asking for federal help to open these desperately needed facilities. Yet, Liberals are refusing to repeal Conservative legislation that blocks communities from providing harm-reduction services.

Will the government stop stalling, make an evidence-based decision, and repeal the Conservatives' Bill C-2?

[Citizenship Act, March 10th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to turn the debate to another aspect of the bill, which is the language and knowledge requirements. I think there are reasons for a difference of opinion on this.

I keep thinking of my Hungarian grandmother, Mary Varyu, who came to this country in 1926. In her life, she never fully mastered English. She never could fully speak the language, or read. I have serious doubts as to whether today she would be able to pass a written knowledge test in English or French. Yet, there was no prouder Canadian than I have ever met than my little 4 foot, eleven inch Hungarian grandmother, who proudly voted in every election, who paid her taxes on the button, who did not ever break a law, and who was an outstanding member of her community.

I know that the legislation would improve this by restoring the language and knowledge requirements to between the ages of 18 and 55, leaving people over and under those ages able to get citizenship without passing that test.

I wonder whether my hon. colleague would comment on the issue of language and knowledge and its role in citizenship.

[Citizenship Act, March 10th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, once again I would like to congratulate the member on his speech, but I would also like to put to him a question that may enlarge on the issue of citizenship.

I would remind him that something the Conservatives did, albeit in another piece of legislation in the last Parliament, was strip Canadian citizens who have lived outside the country for more than five years of their right to vote. Members may remember that actor Donald Sutherland and others publicly complained about this. These are people whose careers take them outside of the country, but they have no less of a connection. In fact, there are Canadian diplomats who live outside the country for more than five years who could potentially lose their right to vote.

I am wondering how the member feels about that. Would he agree with me that another useful amendment would be to repeal that piece of legislation by the previous government and restore the right of all Canadian citizens to vote in Canadian elections, even if they have resided outside the country for more than five years?

[Citizenship Act, March 10th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am a little disappointed to hear the hon. member make a defence of differential fees and say that the Canadian education system depends, for its funding, on extremely high differential fees as a proxy for not having enough funding from government, but that is for another day.

The question I would like to ask is this. A related issue that the former Conservative government dealt with was that it took away the right to vote in federal elections from Canadian citizens who have been out of the country for more than five years. We had people like actors and people working around the world who complained publicly that they could not vote because of that.

Will the member's government bring in legislation that would restore the ability for Canadian citizens to vote in Canadian elections, even if they have been out of the country for more than five years but they retain their Canadian citizenship? That is people like Donald Sutherland.

[Citizenship Act, March 10th, 2016]

That is an excellent question, Mr. Speaker, and is high praise indeed coming from my hon. colleague from Burnaby South who is, I think, certainly one of the most eloquent speakers as well in the House.

The reception will be fantastic. I already know, through doing casework in my riding, how damaging and how worrying the previous Conservative legislation was to many people in our riding who wanted to get citizenship.

I think the member from Winnipeg commented earlier on the unbelievable length of time it had taken, under the Conservatives, for someone to acquire citizenship. People are waiting years. That means no Canadian passport. That means an individual is unable to vote in our country. I will be looking to see if the government can speed that up.

In terms of changes, there are problems with the bill that I would hope the government looks to amend. One of them is that the bill still gives the power to the minister to revoke citizenship, based on a paper review with no judicial hearing. There is still a prohibition on citizenship for people charged with a criminal offence abroad. Also, it still provides the minister the discretion to privately grant citizenship to individuals.

I hope the Liberal government would be open to reasoned amendments in this regard, to make a good bill even stronger.

[Citizenship Act, March 10th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I wholly concur with my hon. colleague's point in that regard.

I can give a real life example. One of my constituency assistants, Wei Qiao Zhang, came to our country as a student. His wife is actually doing a Ph.D. in law at UBC in her third language, by the way. He came here to do a degree in philosophy at the University of Toronto. When he came to apply for citizenship, the previous legislation would have allowed him to count the time he spent in the country, or a portion of it, prior to becoming a permanent resident toward the time allocation to become a Canadian citizen. The Conservatives brought in legislation that eliminated this time.

Here is a young man who made a commitment to this country, who had been in the country 10 years and who wanted to count part of that committed time toward his citizenship, but would not have been allowed to have done so by the Conservatives.

This legislation restores that balance, as it properly should do. It does give credit to those young people who are students who come to our country and decide to make a commitment.

That is another advantage of this legislation and I congratulate the government on restoring that.

[Citizenship Act, March 10th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I hear “nonsense” coming from the Conservatives. They should read their own legislation. I will give them an example.

It used to be that someone coming to this country had to pass a language test if they were between the ages of 18 and 54. The Conservatives extended that and said that people wanting to get citizenship in this country would have to pass a language test between the ages of 14 and 17 and between the ages of 55 and 65, making it harder for young people and seniors, many of whom were the parents of their sponsors in this country, to acquire citizenship purely because they might not have been able to speak English or French. The Conservatives did that.

They made Canadians wait longer, in fact between four and six years after being a permanent resident to acquire citizenship. They made it easier to strip citizens of citizenship and, in fact, in some cases even without a hearing. The Conservatives created two tiers of citizens, where someone born in this country who had dual citizenship could be deported and stripped of their citizenship for committing a crime, but a Canadian who was born here and did not have dual citizenship could not. The result was two tiers of citizens.

The Conservatives brought in a medieval concept of banishment in which if someone committed a crime, albeit a very serious crime, the Conservatives' response, like that of a medieval king, was that “You're banished from the kingdom, away with you”, instead of the modern notion of a democratic state in which, if someone commits a serious crime, we deal with them in the justice system properly and not by taking away their citizenship.

The Conservatives increased the cost of citizenship, in some cases making it cost a family of four more than $1,000 to apply for citizenship.

These were the Conservative notions of citizenship.

When listening to the former immigration minister in the House last night talk about things like democracy, I thought there is no government in Canada over the last decades that I can remember that did more to damage democracy in this country than the previous Conservative one. They prorogued Parliament to avoid votes they knew they would lose. Talk about disrespecting democracy. They brought in closure to limit debate in the House a record number of times, more than any other government in the history of Canada. They changed the Elections Act to restrict Canadians' access to exercise their vote. Therefore, to hear the former minister of immigration lecture members on democracy was the height of irony. He talked about extremism. Again, in my lifetime of watching Parliament in this place, the Conservative government did more to foster extremism, division, and regional enmity than any other government in history.

I am really happy to see the current government make changes that I think restore the notion of citizenship that the vast majority of Canadians have come to cherish in this land.

I want to talk about what the bill does. It removes the ability to revoke citizenship on national interest grounds. I think that is important. If a Canadian citizen commits treason, or spies on Canada, or fights for a different armed forces across country, no Canadian and no member in this chamber would countenance that. The proper penalty for that, though, is to send them to a Canadian jail and make them pay their price to Canada, but do not strip their citizenship and create two tiers of citizens.

The bill also removes the obligation for a new citizen to declare their intent to reside in Canada. The former Conservative minister of immigration made a big deal out of that too. Canadians have the right to move and live where they want in this world. In the modern global world, that is what Canadians do.

The bill would restore the length of time that a permanent resident must actually be present in Canada. It restores the counting of pre-Canada time before someone is a permanent resident for the purpose of their acquiring citizenship. It removes the language and knowledge examinations and puts those back to between the ages of 18 and 55, as they should be.

This legislation is good because it respects citizenship and makes it easier for Canadians to acquire that citizenship they care so deeply about. It brings back fair process for Canadians. I am proud to stand in the House and congratulate the government for moving bill, and I will probably vote for this legislation.

[Citizenship Act, March 10th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured and very pleased to stand in the House today in March of 2016 to speak to Bill C-6, an act to amend the Citizenship Act and to make consequential amendments to another act.

I want to start by congratulating the government on bringing forward this legislation. It is long overdue. It is thoughtful and very important to Canadians. It undoes what every thoughtful Canadian and, more importantly, most new Canadians in the country regarded as regressive changes made to citizenship by the previous Conservative government.

I find that we often do not support each other enough across the aisle in the House when legislation or proposals are introduced that are helpful. We tend to criticize each other and find fault, but while the bill is not perfect—and I will speak to a few items that I hope the government would be open to amending—I want to congratulate it on tabling the legislation and say that the vast majority of Canadians will receive this legislation very well.

I want to talk about citizenship for a moment, broadly speaking. Citizenship is extremely important to Canadians. I do not think there is a person in the country who does not deeply value and profoundly treasure the fact that we are lucky enough to be Canadian citizens in this world. This citizenship is cherished not only by those fortunate enough to be born on Canadian soil but also equally by those who have come to Canada, who may have been born in another nation.

In my riding of Vancouver Kingsway I have one of the most multicultural ridings in Canada. We are home to one of the highest percentage of new Canadians of any riding in the country. Whether people came from Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines, China, or anywhere else in the world, when they reside in Vancouver Kingsway, and I would dare say in all of my colleagues' ridings in the country, they are incredibly proud of the citizenship they have been permitted to acquire in our country.

I must say as well that Canada does not have an unblemished record when it comes to citizenship. In fact, the record on citizenship in our country has been checkered with discrimination, racism, and sexism. Last week, I was fortunate enough to tour the Canadian Chinese military museum. I saw artifacts of soldiers of Chinese descent who fought in World War II. They were born in our country, fought for our country, and had certificates issued to them at birth that said they were not considered Canadian citizens because of their race.

Prior to 1947, children born to Canadian fathers and non-Canadian mothers were treated better and differently than children born to Canadian mothers and foreign-born fathers. There was gender discrimination in that as well.

Citizenship has long been precarious. In fairness, this applies equally to Liberal governments of the past as well as Conservative governments. For the Liberals, between 1947 and 1976, citizenship could be revoked for issues like treason or acts of war. Then of course the Conservatives brought in their infamous citizenship legislation that once again made citizenship precarious for Canadians, where it could be revoked for treason or terrorism. Both parties have introduced measures in the past that made citizenship revocable in our country, based on the medieval concept of banishment. That is something I am very happy to see the bill remove from the legislation.

Before I go further, there has been a litany of issues since 1947. There were problems with citizenship that still exist to this day that we need to address. The legislation goes a long way in addressing and fixing these problems.

Citizenship, of course, raises important considerations. What criteria ought to exist in order to acquire it? Are there any circumstances in which it is appropriate for a citizen, once granted citizenship, to lose it? These are important considerations that engage every member of the House. I will talk about this in a moment.

I want to talk about the legislation introduced by the previous Conservative government, which this legislation very properly attempts to fix. The Conservatives essentially made citizenship harder to acquire and easier to lose. They increased the language requirements for people coming here.

[Petitions, March 9th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, my final petition is signed by many people in the riding of Vancouver Kingsway who are presenting a very real concern in British Columbia around affordable housing. They are calling on the government to develop a national housing strategy to maintain existing federal support for co-operatives, non-profits, low-cost and rental housing, and lastly, to make the investments necessary to address what can only be called a housing crisis in this country.