Citizenship and Immigration committee  When you call something illegal, you have to be very specific about what you are referring to. You get into illegality on two fronts. The first involves the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. In those cases, a conditional removal order has been issued to claimants. All refug

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Even aside from the reasons with respect to the recognition of the United States as a safe third country, I think there are some very good practical reasons for suspending the agreement so that people can just come to the ports of entry, where the resources are, and make claims i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I agree with most of what you said, so yes, I would....

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sorry, is that section 33 of the convention?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In my experience with the criminal law, we very clearly implement section 133 in terms of not proceeding with prosecutions. Generally speaking, we don't see prosecutions unless there are cases of outright fraud or other situations in which people might be prosecuted. In the sense

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for inviting me to appear once again before the committee. I am a lawyer who specializes in the arena where criminal law, national security, immigration, and refugee status intersect. For more than a decade, I have routinely handled legal issues involving the arrival o

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would say yes. They should be treated equally before the law. Just to come back to Mr. Fogel's example of a marriage, I would say that a more apt example is one of having a child. Renouncing a child is something that is very rare. Marriages break down a lot, unfortunately. Th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of the positions taken by the other organizations, I'm not sure what the positions are that you're suggesting.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can say there are several lawsuits that have been—and our office has been involved in at least one case—challenging the current provisions, in that taking away citizenship without a hearing is a problem. It's a problem of procedural fairness. It's a problem with respect to taki

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sorry, just to be clear, my criticism is not around the knowledge test itself. My criticism is around the knowledge test being done in English or French. To give you an example from my own schooling, I did school in French. I learned my math and science in French. It took me yea

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You could do the knowledge test with the assistance of an interpreter, so you would be testing knowledge separately from language. You test the knowledge of Canada, but you do it through an interpreter. You might know the history of Canada inside out, but if you can't do it in E

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In some circumstances what you're dealing with is that there's no statute of limitation on misrepresentation. The example Mr. Fogel gave of a misrepresentation in 1954 is a very serious misrepresentation. There's no doubt that in those circumstances it may well be appropriate to

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's correct. My position is not that there shouldn't be revocation in these circumstances but that there should be a more rigorous process and that people shouldn't be put in a more precarious situation when they become citizens. In the example that I gave of the engineer wit

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that's a different stage in the process. At that point, we're talking about the acquisition or the grant of citizenship or the bars to the grant of citizenship. In my view, the problem with that is that there already is a mechanism in the act for dealing with that. A perm

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That would be my recommendation.