Thank you very much.

My name is Amandeep Hayer. I am the secretary of the Canadian Bar Association's B.C. immigration law section, and I appear today on behalf of the CBA national immigration law section.

The CBA is a national association of 37,000 members, including lawyers, judges, notaries, academics and law students. We have a 120-year-old mandate to seek improvements in the law and the administration of justice.

Thank you for having me address the committee from Surrey, B.C., which is the traditional and unceded ancestral territory of the Katzie, Semiahmoo, Kwantlen and other Coast Salish first nations.

My purpose for being here today is to, first, express our support for the bill and the goals advanced by the bill; second, suggest an amendment to the bill to clarify when citizenship will be restored to; and third, address two specific concerns the CBA section has with the state of citizenship law today.

The section supports the goals advanced by this bill. The bill allows another group of lost Canadians to reacquire the benefits of Canadian citizenship, but we note there is an omission. It does not state when citizenship will be restored to. Will it be the date the bill comes into effect, or the date citizenship was lost? These are important questions, because they will have implications for the subjects of the restoration.

If the restoration is the date the bill is approved, it could impact the legal rights they have in other countries. For example, in a country that does not permit dual citizenship, acquisition of citizenship after birth may be grounds to revoke their citizenship in that country.

Previous amendments to the act designed to restore citizenship on those Canadians who had lost it intentionally specify to what date citizenship will be restored. See subsection 3(7) as one such example. Our recommendation is that the bill be amended to clarify to what date citizenship will be restored.

The next issue is the forgotten Canadians. Citizenship law has evolved over time. As the values that underpin the social fabric of our nation have changed, citizenship law has followed suit, but echoes of former laws and values still reverberate through the current legislation. One such example is a group of Canadians related to the subject of this bill who were denied access to Canadian citizenship from the outset.

Between January 1, 1947, and February 15, 1977, a person born outside of Canada could only inherit Canadian citizenship if their parents were married and their father was a Canadian citizen or, if their parents were unmarried and their mother was a Canadian citizen.

On February 15, 1977, the current act came into effect. For those born before that date, the act continued to apply the old law under paragraph 3(1)(e). However, under subsection 5(2), a provision existed for people to be granted Canadian citizenship if they could not qualify for it under paragraph 3(1)(e) because the wrong parent was Canadian.

However, the grant had an issue. For those who qualified under section 3(1)(e), their effective date of citizenship was their date of birth, while for those who qualified under subsection 5(2), it was the date the grant was approved.

Since citizens by descent are only citizens if they were born after their parents became Canadian, there was a direct implication on their children. For those who were approved under subsection 5(2), only those children born after the date of approval would be Canadian. For those who were approved under paragraph 3(1)(e), their effective date of citizenship was their date of birth, but the children would be subject to the section 8 retention requirements that are the subject of this bill.

Since which section applied depended entirely on the gender and the marital status of the parents, we contend that it is contrary to section 15 of the charter, as the Supreme Court held in Benner v. Canada. Therefore, our recommendation is that the act be amended to deem everyone whose parents applied for Canadian citizenship under subsection 5(2) as Canadians today.

Finally, I would like to address the first-generation limit. We note that the first-generation limit has unintended hardships for people who have certain strong ties to Canada but may have be born in the second or subsequent generation. One such example might be a mother who goes into labour while shopping in the U.S. The CBA section encourages Parliament to consider these impacts and possible mitigating measures.

Thank you very much. I welcome your questions.

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