Mr. Speaker, my speech today is not merely about Bill C-3, an act to amend the Citizenship Act. It is, like my last speech, about Canadian values, and more particularly the Canadian value that I fear this bill undermines, the value of Canadian citizenship.

I have previously described to this House that my mother came to Canada as a refugee from Yugoslavia. The freedom and opportunity that this country gave her, and by inheritance to me, are of immeasurable value. This value cannot be expressed in dollars and cents. It cannot be expressed in mere words. It can only be expressed in lifetimes.

We express our gratitude for the freedom and opportunity conferred by Canadian citizenship through a lifetime of service to Canada. Every time a Canadian builds a house, plants a tree or coaches hockey, soccer or cricket, they are serving this nation. Anytime a Canadian teacher leads a class or a Canadian nurse changes a dressing in the hospital, they are serving the nation.

When people do their job, pay their taxes, follow our laws, learn our languages, shovel their neighbour's sidewalk and vote in our elections, they are serving the nation. When police officers catch a bad guy, they serve our nation. When a social worker or minister consoles victims, they serve the nation. Most importantly, those who join the armed forces serve the nation, not just in their life but sometimes in their death, and their service is sacred. All of that service, born out of gratitude, builds Canada and builds the value of Canadian citizenship. Canada is strong and free insomuch as Canadians work to make it strong and free.

Canadian citizenship is not a trinket, a bauble or a collector's item to be put on a shelf, kept in its package or sold on eBay at a profit. It is a sacred bond between those who built Canada before us and those who will inherit it after us. If we do well, if we all work our whole lives to make Canada better, perhaps we can pass it on as strong and as free as it was passed on to us, and perhaps our children will enjoy all of the peace and prosperity that we in this House did.

When generations of Canadians build Canada, they build the value of Canadian citizenship. When newcomers come to Canada and follow our laws, pay our taxes, learn our languages and serve the community, they also build the value of Canadian citizenship. That is why I cannot for the life of me understand why, in this bill, the Liberals seek to give away Canadian citizenship to the grandchildren of people who left to go build some other place.

When I went door knocking in Kitchener, Ontario, I met so many wonderful people from all over the world who were so grateful for refugee status or permanent residency. They are working so hard to learn our language, to get an education, to make ends meet in a difficult economy and to pass their citizenship examinations. Many of them have fulfilled all the necessary requirements to become citizens but are still waiting months, even years, to have their applications processed by a broken and backwards immigration bureaucracy.

Why? Why would the Liberals privilege the grandchildren of someone who left to go build another country over the real, flesh-and-blood permanent residents who are in this country now working their hands to the bone to build this country? Do they not see that by letting these individuals abroad jump the queue, they effectively create a hereditary, caste-based, two-tier citizenship regime?

Immediately prior to the election campaign, the Prime Minister declared himself, bizarrely, a globalist elitist. I note that he seems to collect citizenships. He has three. Most Canadians have one. They have put all their eggs in the Canada basket. I could have obtained Serbian citizenship in my twenties. Even now, I believe I can obtain Dutch citizenship by marriage. However, it has never occurred to me that any other nation deserves my service and loyalty, and therefore I have never applied. All of my skin is in this game.

Perhaps the Prime Minister looks at citizenship differently than most Canadians. Perhaps after his years at Brookfield, he seeks to diversify his citizenship portfolio in case his investment in Canada does not quite pay off for him. Perhaps after having received a really cool appointment from the U.K. government, he is holding out for another one if being Prime Minister of Canada does not quite satiate his elitist ambitions.

If the Liberals succeed in passing Bill C-3 in its present form, they will give away citizenship to the grandchildren of those who left, to the children of those who have barely visited and to individuals who do not work here, pay our taxes, follow our laws, serve in our communities and learn our languages. They will give away value. They will invest less and spend more. They will create a deficit of value. Just like their gigantic, undisclosed fiscal deficit, the Liberals inflate away the value of our citizenship after having inflated away the value of our dollar.

Bill C-3 would create a terrible deficit in the public accounts of our citizenship. Canadian citizenship is supposed to confer the opportunity to have a decent job at a good wage so as to buy a nice home in a safe neighbourhood. It is also supposed to confer universal access to proper health care.

How can the government write a blank cheque for all these things to individuals abroad who have never lived here, giving away citizenship when the citizens already here cannot cash their cheques and cannot access these promises? The government's citizenship account is overdrawn. Its cheques are bouncing.

The parliamentary budget office estimated that Bill C-3 would immediately add 115,000 new citizens to Canada who live outside the country. I strongly doubt our immigration bureaucracy can even process all of these. Have the Liberals done any analysis at all to show how adding 115,000 citizens by the stroke of a pen might exacerbate our jobs crisis, our housing crisis and our health care crisis?

The Liberals are giving away tickets for a free boat ride while that boat is taking on water from a hole they have cut in the bottom. Fundamentally, they fail to understand how value is created either in the economic sense or in the citizenship sense.

I would like to make my final comments in French, my third language and Canada's first official language, in order to emphasize my point.

Contrary to Justin Trudeau's claims, Canada is not a postnational state. Canada is and always will be a union between two peoples, the French and the English, defined by its relationships and treaties with first nations. Of course, this union and these relationships have never been perfect. However, this is still a major project, one that is unique in the world, and it continues.

Those of us who, like my family, joined this project along the way come from all over the world. We are like branches grafted onto an old tree. We cannot change this tree the way Mr. Trudeau changes his clothes when he plays dress-up. We grow new leaves to give this tree new energy, and it brings us water from its deep roots. We give it value, and it gives us value in return. To say that Canada is postnational is like saying that a branch can grow without a tree or that a branch can be “post-tree”. I am of the opinion that the tree does indeed exist, that it is alive, and that it serves as our home.

That is why we are against setting up a two-tier citizenship system. If the children of people who have left want to rejoin our nation, let them do it after paying our taxes, obeying our laws and learning our languages. Why is the government introducing a bill without these basic guarantees? Why does it refuse to defend the value of our citizenship?

In its present form, I fear this bill makes cheap what should be sacred. I beg the members in the House to pass amendments to make this a better bill.

We can do this.

Matt Strauss

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