Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll have opening statements and my colleague Clark Goodman will also have a short opening statement, and then we'll get to questions.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, honourable members, my name is Mark Davidson and I am the director of legislation and program policy in CIC's citizenship branch. As you can imagine, I have followed the work of this committee closely over the past several months as you have been exploring issues of c

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, may I make a brief statement?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, we would certainly be prepared to be sworn in. I'd just point out that to have witnesses sworn in is not a regular event, and indeed this committee has not previously sworn in witnesses on this matter. I think it's also important to remind members that our role as ci

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I indicated, Mr. Chair, if it's the will of this committee, we will of course be sworn in, but it's important to understand that as civil servants, we are responsible to the minister and we have also sworn oaths as civil servants. If the committee understands that situation, w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We were, Mr. Chair.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have Rose Anne Poirier, from our Sydney office, and perhaps she'd like to answer the question.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, presumably Mr. Telegdi is referring to an order in council that came into effect in the mid-1940s. This matter is before the Federal Court of Appeal in the Taylor case. So because it's before the court, I would find it difficult to answer that question.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Benner case you're referring to was a case that was a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997. We certainly have been implementing that decision since that date.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Benner decision, yes; it dealt with a certain group of individuals who were covered under the 1977 act. And yes, we certainly implemented and took into consideration the Supreme Court's ruling in that case.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Benner decision, Mr. Chair, turned on a group of individuals under paragraph 5(2)(b) of the act, which dealt with individuals in a particular group who had access to a grant of citizenship for a temporary period of time. These are individuals who were born outside Canada betw

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, Professor Edmonston is a noted demographer at the University of Victoria, and we welcome his analysis of this demographic issue. As he said in his brief to you and as he said in his testimony to you a while back, he had done some analysis based on a number of data sour

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Governor in Council mechanism is indeed subsection 5(4) of the Citizenship Act, this special grant of citizenship that I referred to in my opening statement. When the minister was here in February, I think she indicated that at that stage the Governor in Council had made a po

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are a number of steps that are taken, and actually I'll ask Rose Anne Poirier from Sydney to start describing those steps, and then turn to our colleagues from case management to pick up the file from there.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, perhaps I'll answer that, if that's okay. Yes, we are certainly trying to ensure that individuals are aware. We've asked individuals to come forward if they have concerns about their citizenship. As Clark has indicated, the vast majority of individuals who have phoned