Citizenship and Immigration committee  As the legislation is currently drafted, it does not attend to the question of dual nationality. I believe that both Mr. Waldman and I have been proceeding on the basis that an amendment will be made because that amendment was requested by the minister to apply this only to dual

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The issue of arbitrariness is very important to our criminal law. The way in which stripping people of their citizenship is arbitrary is that it is not tied to the severity of the crime. It is not tied to the degree of condemnation. It is not tied to anything about the crime. I

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is a very rough estimate, aggregating from newspaper reports, but it's going to be something in that order of magnitude.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It is since 2006. To clarify, the U.K. has succeeded in revoking citizenship, but in all of those cases the end result of that process is to keep people out of the U.K. or to deport them, not to bring them to justice. Again, to come back to your first point, I think a concern th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The protections that exist in the current Citizenship Act with respect to renunciation proceedings are very slim. The protections with regard to revocation proceedings are somewhat more robust. I think the experience of the United Kingdom is instructive in that there has been a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's very difficult to answer your question because we don't have a text of the proposed bill that would allow us to understand what the specifics will be. These are questions of enormous importance that need to find a place to be debated and democratically aired. There is a pote

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely. There's an enormous difference between the provisions that a country puts in place in terms of granting individual citizenship in the first place and the provisions that a country puts in place about stripping citizenship rights. It is perfectly within the purview of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I certainly agree that “act of war” is not well defined in international or domestic law. I think it's inappropriate to deal with any of these matters as a question of deemed renunciation. The notion of a deemed application for renunciation is the thinnest of legal fictions, whic

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you and good morning. Thank you for giving me the opportunity this morning to speak to you about Bill C-425. It seems destined to become a major attack on the principle of citizenship in Canada. Let me start with two comments that supersede all others on this matter. Fir

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Turning to my first point, arbitrary punishment, it's a fundamental principle of our criminal law that punishment be proportional and that it be deserved. Depriving dual citizens of Canadian citizenship because of suspected terrorist activities or even because of proven convictio