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Deputy House leader of the Bloc Québécois

Christine Normandin

  • Member of Parliament
  • Deputy House leader of the Bloc Québécois
  • Bloc Québécois
  • Saint-Jean
  • Quebec
  • Voting Attendance: 65%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $109,900.56

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 125 - Nov/4/22
Ms. Christine Normandin (Saint-Jean, BQ)
Madam Speaker, since these are the last speeches before we go spend a week in our ridings and many members have already left the House to go be with their families and constituents, I would like to commend all those stalwart members who are sticking it out to the end. There are not very many of us, judging by the number of empty spaces there were in the parking lot this morning and by how easily I was able to find an EV charging station. There are very few of us here this Friday, but I would say that what we are lacking in numbers, we are making up for in quality. The last thing we are talking about today before leaving for our last week in our ridings before Christmas is Bill S‑245. I do not really have any kind of an inside scoop to share since my colleague from Lac‑Saint‑Jean already announced just two weeks ago that the Bloc Québécois would be supporting this bill. I like to contradict my colleague from Lac‑Saint‑Jean from time to time just to tease him, but I will limit my teasing to his clothing choices rather than a bill that has such a significant impact on some people's lives. In short, I will also be supporting Bill S‑245. I think my colleagues have already realized that the Bloc Québécois does not tend to be overly partisan. If a bill is good for Quebec, we vote for it, no matter who introduced it. If it is not good for Quebec, we vote against it. We always explain the reasons for our decision. Bill S-245 does not really fit in that framework. It is about Canadian citizenship. It affects people who may live in Quebec, our constituents, but it also affects people who may live elsewhere in Canada or even elsewhere in the world. This bill is fundamentally connected to a person's right to Canadian citizenship. While it may seem a little counterintuitive for a Bloc member to defend Canadian citizenship, the principle I am defending today in supporting Bill S‑245 is that no one should have their citizenship arbitrarily taken away just because they have reached the not particularly venerable age of 28. I would like to start by outlining the contents of this bill and its purpose, but I also want to offer two brief editorial comments about this bill's predecessor, Bill S‑230, and the immigration file in general because no bill should ever be analyzed in a vacuum without context and broader considerations. If we take too narrow a view of this bill in debate, we are likely to miss opportunities to improve not only this bill but also future bills. Now back to Bill S‑245. What is this bill all about? Bill S‑245 seeks to close a gap, a loophole in the Citizenship Act. The bill concerns a small group of Canadians who lost their Canadian citizenship or have actually become stateless due to government policy changes over time. This small group of Canadians is called “lost Canadians”, and there are about 100 to 200 of them. Here is a little background information. The federal Parliament passed its first citizenship legislation in 1947, but it was flawed from the beginning. Citizenship was not considered a guaranteed right at the time, but rather a discretionary power of Parliament. For instance, although it was set out that the children of a Canadian parent would also be Canadian, under this system, when the responsible parent took the citizenship of another country, his or her children lost their Canadian citizenship. Furthermore, the legislation provided that children born abroad would receive citizenship only if their parents registered them within two years of their birth. It also included an obligation for these children to be domiciled in Canada on their 24th birthday if they were born to a Canadian parent who was born outside Canada. This meant that many individuals, even if they lived in Canada for part of their lives, may have unknowingly lost their citizenship status. Finally, the legislation discriminated against certain children based on the circumstances of their birth. In order to have Canadian citizenship under the law, a child had to be born to married parents. The main purpose of the 1977 amendment was to simplify the citizenship regime. Once again, however, the amendments were far from perfect. Although the new legislation did away with the requirement to file an application for a child within two years of their birth and stopped discriminating between children born to a married couple and those born to a common-law couple, it continued to differentiate between children born to a Canadian parent who was born in Canada and those born to a Canadian parent who was born abroad. Under the 1977 legislation, Canadians who were second-generation or more and were born to parents who were born abroad were required to submit an application in order to keep and confirm their Canadian citizenship. The legislation required these Canadians to apply by their 28th birthday or they would automatically lose their Canadian citizenship. One of the problems was that, having repealed the requirement for parents to register their children before they turned two, the government no longer had a list it could use to inform the citizens in question that they needed to confirm their citizenship before their 28th birthday. Some of these people who were born abroad returned to Canada, grew up here, worked here, raised a family here, and paid taxes here, all while oblivious to what they needed to do before their 28th birthday in order to avoid losing their citizenship. Some criticized the government for not doing enough to publicize this requirement both here and abroad, so that citizens would be aware that their citizenship could be taken away. It is said that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that does not mean that a citizen must be familiar with all existing laws. Immigration laws are particularly impenetrable. In short, many people born while the 1947 law or the 1977 law was in force were at risk of losing their citizenship at some point in their lives without even being notified. They might only find out when they applied for a passport. They are the ones who came to be called the lost Canadians. This situation came to light largely through the efforts of Don Chapman, a former United Airlines pilot who brought their plight to the attention of the public. Don Chapman discovered that he had lost his citizenship when his father had emigrated to the United States. He demonstrated that this problem affected many Canadians, even some as well known as Roméo Dallaire, and forced the government's hand. If we think about it, these people suffered the same fate as those whose citizenship is revoked, which happens only if someone committed fraud, made a false representation or knowingly concealed information material to an immigration or citizenship application. This same extreme punishment was being meted out to people who had committed no offence whatsoever. To remedy the situation, Canada adopted a series of legislative reforms in 2005, 2009 and 2015. Those three attempts notwithstanding, some people still slipped through the cracks. Despite being reformed three times, the act still requires people born between February 15, 1977, and April 16, 1981, to reapply for citizenship before they turn 28. I am confident that this bill will pass unanimously, and at this point I would like to offer my first editorial comment on the bill's background. In the last Parliament, an identical bill, Bill S‑230, was passed unanimously in the Senate, but it did not have time to get to the House because the government called an election in the summer. When the election was called, what I told my constituents who complained about the cost of the election, which members will recall was estimated at over $600 million, is that there were even more serious but lesser-known costs associated with the election and that was the cost of all the work that was done on a whole pile of bills in the House and committee that ended up being for nothing. Unfortunately, Bill S‑245 is another glaring example of that. My second editorial comment is about the government's management of immigration in general. As we see here, many reforms were necessary to solve the problem and many citizens have been left in the dark for years. Nothing has changed, and the machine is still broken. Despite all that, the government is announcing that, because of the labour shortage, it wants to increase the number of newcomers to 500,000 a year, when it is already incapable of managing passports, when applications for permanent residency are piling up and taking forever to be processed, and when it is almost impossible to get a work permit in 12 to 13 months. When I ask businesses in my riding what would really help them with their workforce issues, the answer is not for the government to add 500,000 people to the waiting list. The answer is for the government to start managing the applications that are already in the pile more effectively. Simply put, there is no shortage of problems for the immigration department to fix, and Bill S‑245 addresses one of them. I would like to conclude by humbly inviting the government to finish the work of fixing and improving the immigration department before even considering getting involved in any new project.
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