Mr. Speaker, I want to begin my remarks by thanking the hon. member who preceded me. It is one thing for a member to say they have championed the bill, Bill C-3, and repairing the rights for lost Canadians, but as a leader of a different party, I want to say that the hon. member for Vancouver East is absolutely right. She has championed this and championed this and not stepped back for one minute. It has not been easy.
We have had various versions of the bill come to us. We had a court decision that made it very clear that our citizenship laws are not charter-compliant. As I have, she has worked with a citizen, Don Chapman, who has championed this, who has brought forward the concerns. He wrote a book on lost Canadians to get people to see what has happened with citizenship, which used to be seen as a right passed down from parent to child. This is not new. I learned this in conflict of laws in law school, as I am sure, Mr. Speaker, you may recall. These kinds of things are not innovative. It is just very strange and disturbing for Canadians when our citizenship laws get contaminated with innovations, and citizenship is not treated as a right. That is one piece that is missing in Bill C-3. Should we have an amendment in Bill C-3 that says citizenship is a right?
However, there have been a lot of partisan jabs across the floor, even in the brief time that we have been debating this since question period. I want to take some of them up, because this is important for Canadians to know. There is another person, not in my party, whom I want to thank and make it really clear to our friends across the way in the Conservative Party. Another champion for the bill, mentioned by my hon. colleague for Vancouver East, is a Conservative, Senator Yonah Martin. She tried really hard to fix the bill. She has Korean ancestry. She has been a champion for the Canadian Korean community in many ways, including for those who suffered through the war. She is a friend of mine too, so I will admit that. Senator Yonah Martin brought this forward as a private member's bill out of the Senate to try to fix this, and as the hon. member for Vancouver East mentioned, there was a non-partisan effort among NDP members, Conservative members, Liberal members, the Bloc and the Greens to get this thing done. We were so close.
When Bill C-71 was tabled for first reading in June 2024, we gathered in the foyer with the former minister of immigration and members of families deeply affected by the unfairness of the way our citizenship laws are currently drafted. We were almost euphoric, and we were grateful to the former minister of immigration, who took this forward, who made the difference to having Bill C-71 brought forward. We were not, as an hon. member mentioned earlier, just propping up Liberals or cheering whenever Liberals did something. Again, this was the ultimate non-partisan effort led by a Conservative senator, supported by an NDP member and supported by all of us on all sides of the House. We thought we had it solved. Unfortunately, 25 bills then died on the Order Paper on January 6.
Now, it would have been nice to see the current government pick up on a suggestion I made in a written communication to the Prime Minister to please recover those bills, especially the ones that had broad, non-partisan support and had gotten this close to the finish line. Regarding the amount of waste, I imagine that millions of hours of work went into those 25 bills, many of them so close, such as Bill C-61 on first nations water sovereignty or Bill C-33 on rail safety and ports.
Let us celebrate this: The deceased Bill C-71 is back as Bill C-3. Let us hope we can have collaboration now. The Liberals here in the House today celebrate the collaboration they had in June; I have to say, that was not collaboration. That was the Greens, the Bloc and the NDP being bulldozed, with a new person driving the bulldozer in our new Prime Minister. I would say it was not just an unpleasant experience; it was an anti-democratic experience that was deeply troubling, and it was a bulldozer driver. It was a new coalition, the Liberals and the Conservatives, driving through a very anti-democratic piece, and the process was particularly anti-democratic. I hope we will not see that again.
I go back to Bill C-3.
If we are going to see this bill pass, and I hope we will see it passed expeditiously, I want to deal with some of the substantive charges that have been made in the House today in debate and put them to rest, I hope forever, so that we can return to our purpose in this place, to restore justice, to act for our constituents and to make sure we do the right thing.
This is not a partisan issue. It is about doing the right thing right now. We have a new bill before us, Bill C-3. It is almost the same as former Bill C-71, which died on the Order Paper because of the decision to prorogue Parliament on January 6.
We speak of things dying on the Order Paper; it is nice to see that every now and then we can have a resurrection. We have gotten Bill C-3 back, and it is close. I would love to have proper hearings and make sure that concerns that are being raised are dealt with by experts, with the ability for Canadians to see that we do not pass things with a gun to our head. That was Bill C-5. No committee was in in place when Bill C-5 went to second reading on Monday, June 16. No committee was yet started. On Tuesday, June 17, the committee was put in place at 3:30 in the afternoon. All amendments were due the next day, June 18, by noon, and concerns from groups like the Canadian Cancer Society could not be heard before amendments were due. We were in a hurry.
This place should be about getting things done efficiently, but not being in such a hurry that we do not do our jobs, so let us have a proper committee review of this legislation, which I think would put to bed some concerns, for instance, the idea of costs. There are Canadians who, just through peculiarities of mistakes made in the legislative process, have been denied their citizenship. We can get through this and get the actual numbers through a committee hearing process, but most of these lost Canadians live in Canada. They are not coming here as new people, just off a boat, where we wonder who they are. Most of these people have deep ties to Canada. Most of these people are already paying taxes in Canada and getting their health care in Canada. They have just been denied citizenship through the most egregious set of quite obscure and bizarre mistakes in law.
We can fix those. We can fix them now. We can fix them for good. The remaining question, I suppose, is this: Do we want to add an amendment that says citizenship is a right? Normally, I would not think we would have to say this, but when I look south of the border and hear that Donald Trump would like to take away Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship, I think maybe we ought to be concerned and make sure that we in Canada assert what is internationally understood law, that citizenship rights are rights.
People who are citizens cannot have their right to be a citizen taken away because someone in power has an obscure whim. Never mind. Citizenship should be a right. Under Bill C-3, we would be redressing the mistakes of many years and responding to the requirement of the court that we fix our citizenship laws to be charter-compliant.
With that, I know I still have about 90 seconds on the clock. I just want to make sure I plead with all of my colleagues, regardless of party, to take a step back and look at who the champions of this bill have been: a leading Conservative senator; a leading NDP member in this House; and all of us together, Green, Liberal, Conservative, Bloc and New Democrat, which is still a party in this House, by the way. Members can check the seating chart.
We are here to do the right thing and do it together.