Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be back in the House among friends of all colours.
Before I speak to the bill before the House, if the House will indulge me, I would like to make a few brief comments about a constituency matter. I would like to recognize the immense contributions of Dr. Ryan Topping during his period of service at Newman Theological College in Edmonton. The college is not in my riding, but Dr. Topping is a constituent and the college is very important to the Edmonton Catholic community. All of us are, therefore, deeply invested in the institution's success, its fidelity to its mission and its decisions around ensuring ongoing, strong Catholic leadership.
Dr. Topping played a central role in significantly developing and building up this institution. He was central in the design and accreditation of a new B.A. program and a significant expansion of the student body in bringing new programs to the college, establishing fruitful partnerships and bringing in significant new funding.
Since Dr. Topping's announced departure, I have heard from many students and community members who are immensely grateful to Dr. Topping for his contributions and are sorry to see him go. I want to add my voice, and will continue to add my voice, to those recognizing Dr. Topping's noble, selfless and effective service.
The act to amend the Citizenship Act introduced by the Liberal-NDP government threatens the integrity and security of Canadian citizenship. In December 2023, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the first-generation cut-off rule was unconstitutional. The court stated that there was a 50% error rate in citizenship-related services managed by the Liberals, along with abnormally long delays.
The Liberal-NDP government responded by introducing Bill C-71, which grants citizenship to children born abroad to a parent with Canadian citizenship who has spent at least 1,095 non-consecutive days in Canada. I should also point out that Bill C-71 does not require a strict criminal background check. Bill C-71 is irresponsible, since it will bring in tens of thousands of new Canadians with no plan to integrate them. If this bill becomes law, the government will have no idea how many people could be automatically granted Canadian citizenship.
Registration, eligibility checks and resolution of legal disputes require considerable resources that could better be spent in other areas. They could be spent on housing, our health care systems or our defence, but, unfortunately, these are not priorities for the Liberal-NDP government. Its priority is creating thousands of new citizens without verifying who they are or how they will contribute to Canadian society.
Apart from its economic costs, Bill C-71 could compromise Canada's national identity. Citizenship represents more than just legal status. It represents a shared acceptance of national values, culture and responsibilities. A sudden increase in citizens with no real connection to Canada could weaken the country's identity and undermine its social cohesion.
Once the Conservatives are back in government, we will stabilize and fix our broken immigration system, which the Liberals and the NDP neglected. We will set a more responsible bar for obtaining Canadian citizenship. We will reduce, if not eliminate, the error rate in citizenship-related services and end the unjust delays in our immigration system.
After nine years, this Prime Minister is not worth the chaos or the incompetence. Only the common-sense Conservatives will stop this government's reckless mismanagement and fix our broken immigration and citizenship system.
We are debating Bill C-71, a bill that would make a number of significant changes with respect to citizenship in Canada. I want to say a few words about citizenship before I delve into the specific components of the legislation.
I think it is important to understand and reaffirm that citizenship is a profound compact between a group of people, a people who take on membership in a shared community, who commit to working to advance a shared common good, who commit themselves to being invested in the common good of a people in a particular place, and to understand the common good in terms of, generally, particular virtues, particular practices and reverence for a particular history.
It is not the process merely of claiming certain rights or entitlements. Of course, there are rights that flow from citizenship, but citizenship is not merely a collection of rights. Citizenship is a moral commitment that we make to each other as part of a common community. I am very glad that in Canada, citizenship is not defined by ethnicity, by religion, by race or by a single language, and that Canadian citizenship is understood in terms that are accessible to anyone, regardless of their background. However, that does not mean that anybody who wants to become a Canadian citizen necessarily can, nor that anyone who asserts that they are or should be a Canadian citizen is a Canadian citizen.
Our citizenship is not constrained or defined by a particular ethnic identity. Our citizenship is defined by certain shared civic values, by a place and by the commitments we make to each other in that place. Citizenship ceremonies, the times at which people who were not Canadian citizens become Canadian citizens, are therefore profound and monumental moments, comparable in many respects to a wedding.
We have seen under the government, I think, a declining appreciation for the power and moral significance of citizenship, expressed in the declining reverence for citizenship ceremonies. Imagine if we or someone in our life were getting married and needed to get a justice of the peace to perform that ceremony. They called and were told that their only option would be a virtual marriage. That is all that would be available now as there are no in-person weddings anymore. People have to go on Zoom calls and take their vows that way. That is all that is available. That would be, obviously, outrageous.
However, the message, for a long time in some cases, for people seeking to go through the process of becoming new citizens was a virtual citizenship ceremony. Still, I think, in many cases, people are pushed or encouraged toward that option. I think that is unacceptable. We should recognize and appreciate the profound significance of citizenship and citizenship ceremonies.
I encountered another problem this summer. I think it is important to bring it to the attention of the House. There are instances where public servants, representing the executive branch of the government, are demanding the right to vet and approve the remarks of members of Parliament being given at citizenship ceremonies. I experienced this. I was invited to participate in a citizenship ceremony that served people in my own constituency. I was excited to be there. A very good personal friend of mine was receiving her citizenship at that time, as were many other new Canadians.
I was told that I had to send my remarks to public servants in advance, who would then review and approve those remarks or not. The parliamentary secretary is shaking her head. I welcome her comments on this, because I think it is a serious matter that should concern all members in all parties. As happens from time to time in this country when there are changes in government, I suspect that Liberal members in opposition would have the same feelings that I do if public servants told them they had to have their remarks reviewed and vetted in advance.
These are the kinds of things we see from the government around citizenship ceremonies: a push to virtual and to more executive control of what is said, and I think that is unacceptable.
Citizenship ceremonies are profound and important moments because they are the moments at which people are entering into the Canadian family. I sent in ChatGPT-generated remarks for review by officials at a citizenship ceremony this summer. I did not deliver those remarks. I delivered different remarks in which I emphasized the importance of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, indeed freedom as an essential part of the core of Canadian identity, and I was very pleased by some of the feedback I received from new citizens who were welcomed into the Canadian family on that day.
We were talking about citizenship, but now let us talk about rights. A right is something that is due in virtue of justice. Justice obliges that certain things be given to certain people in particular situations. A right is what is due, generally speaking, to a person in virtue of justice. When we talk about human rights, we are talking about rights that are due to all people in virtue of their humanity. There is a certain category of rights there, and then there are other rights that are not due to all humans, but that are due in particular contexts. For instance, a worker has a right to wages in virtue of justice, because they have done work and are therefore entitled to receive their wages.
There are certain rights that flow from citizenship, rights that are due in virtue of justice to an individual who has made the commitments associated with being a citizen. The right to vote in a Canadian election is not something due to all human beings because they are human beings; rather, it is a right due to all citizens because they are citizens. A right flows from justice, but justice provides for certain entitlements in certain contexts, which may not exist in other contexts. Therefore citizenship entails certain rights that come from the moral commitment that is citizenship.
This is the sort of philosophical framework I bring to the discussion of the bill, so let us talk about what the provisions of the bill are. There are a number of provisions that Conservatives agree with. I may have a chance to touch on the ones we agree with, but I will not spend a lot of time on those because I think it makes more sense to spend time talking about the areas that are contentious. The point of contention in the bill, and the reason we are concerned about the bill, is that the bill would change the rules for how citizenship is passed on through multiple generations to people who are living outside the country.
Right now the rule is that if my wife and I are abroad at a time when we have another child, let us say in two and a half years we have a seventh child, hypothetically, which is not implausible, that child would be a Canadian citizen. However, if that child is then abroad when they have a child, that next generation, not my child in this hypothetical, but my grandchild, would not be a citizen. The principle behind the present legal reality is that if a family relocates and lives outside of Canada generation after generation, and is engaging with that particular community, then over time there is necessarily a kind of diminishment of connection to Canada.
We are not talking about someone who has gone to work for a couple of years and then come back. We are talking about generation after generation. Again, it is not the children of a Canadian born abroad; it is when the child of a Canadian born abroad then has a child also born abroad. That is the present law.
The Liberals are proposing, with Bill C-71, to change that law to allow, without limit, Canadian citizenship to be passed to generation after generation. It would mean that if one of my children moved out of the country, married someone there and had children, and their children had children, for an unlimited number of generations, provided that they visited Canada at certain points in their life, they could retain that citizenship.
It seems unreasonable, to me and to us in the Conservative Party, that people should be retaining Canadian citizenship for dozens of generations living away from this place. It does not seem obvious to me that someone who is not living here, whose family has not lived here in generations, should have access to the rights that flow from citizenship, because their lives involve engagement with and moral commitments to communities that are elsewhere.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with a person making that choice, for whatever reasons, to live somewhere, but at some point they recognize the reality that they are not connected to this place in the same way as someone who is living here, working here, paying taxes here and volunteering in a community here.
Many Canadian citizens choose to live abroad for periods of time, of course, but it is reasonable to establish some kind of parameters around how long a series of generations would be abroad before we might say, okay, it seems like there has been an opting out of being Canadian and an opting into being somewhere else.
Conservatives are opposed to this proposal from the government for a dramatic expansion of citizenship, such that citizenship would be passed on by those living outside of Canada for an infinite number of generations.
In defence of this bill, the member for Winnipeg North talked about how these are people who believe that they are Canadians. Of course we understand that the way the law works is that people are not Canadians just because they believe they are Canadians. There are certain criteria that we establish in a democratic way.
What we are proposing on this side of the House is that it is reasonable to establish those parameters in the way they presently are defined and not to further expand them in this unpredictable way. The government cannot answer how many people are affected by this.
I do want to briefly touch on the absurd nonsense from the member for Timmins—James Bay, which is rarely worth dignifying with a response. However, it is important to point out that citizenship is important. It is not something that everybody is entitled to. We should agree that it is legitimate for a people to democratically set parameters around what it means to be a citizen.
The member for Timmins—James Bay would have us believe that even trying to have that conversation about what those parameters are is necessarily bigoted. I would say that that kind of rhetoric is very dangerous. It delegitimizes legitimate and serious conversations about immigration. We can have legitimate, serious, substantive conversations about immigration and citizenship that recognize resource challenges, that recognize the need for reasonable parameters and that also recognize universal human dignity.
We need to have those conversations. If legitimate conversations about immigration are shut down by this constant and malicious, unsubstantiated charge of bigotry, then we are not going to be able to talk about what reasonable, just and fair rules are. That kind of extremism from the NDP really undermines our ability to have substantive, thoughtful conversations that advance the common good.
