Citizenship and Immigration committee  Perhaps I did not explain it clearly. It is not a safeguard in and of itself, but the manner in which the bill is....

Citizenship and Immigration committee  ...drafted, yes, it may give the impression that we no longer have an obligation to follow all the necessary steps to ensure that the best interests of the child are protected. It is not citizenship that does that, but the actual process.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The CIC; abroad, it is us. At the national level, it is the provinces.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Exactly.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is a good question. Actually, we are considering that. There are a number of possibilities. In the past, we tried applying a connection test, but we found that it was a bit too complicated to administer. Not only was it complicated for us, but it was also complicated for ap

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The main process we apply is subsection 5(4), the exception, which requires ministerial recommendation and the like. That's the main process that is actually used. We receive a number of those applications per year, and those are processed accordingly. There are some other proces

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, we actually did a bit of digging into that, because we were sort of curious ourselves. If we look at the statistics, we see that over the past two years we've had something like 90 applications. The approval rate is around 90%, so it works fairly well. The processing time

Citizenship and Immigration committee  When you get to effectively the third generation, they would not be able to pass on their citizenship to other children, unless of course they either marry a Canadian or moves back to Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That seemed to be a reasonable approach to take, yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd want to do a bit more digging into that one to...I mean--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. We actually have looked at that. We've tried to distinguish the different categories of people in those situations abroad. In terms of Canadians working abroad for international organizations, there are different categories. The first one, really, is

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Largely they would be, because again, the employer relationship remains. The secondment is an agreement between the government and the international organization. Then there's a third category, which is more of a case-by-case determination, and that's the category where people

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, please.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. My name is Andrew Griffith. I am the director general of the citizenship and multiculturalism branch, as you mentioned, and I'm accompanied by my team, Nicole Girard and Alain Laurencelle. I am p