The government gave Indigenous rights holders just seven days to review and respond to Bill C-5, said MP for Vancouver East Jenny Kwan in an interview with The Tyee. “That is absolutely disgusting,” she said. “It is not in any stretch of the imagination meaningful consultation.”
When June “Juna” Miller filed her taxes in spring, she expected a refund, but instead, she was declared legally dead.
A few weeks later, she attempted to log in to her CRA account. It didn’t work, and she called the agency.
“The woman on the phone said, ‘Well, you’re deceased.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? You’re speaking to me!'” Miller explained.
What followed was a month-long ordeal that cost her her pension, Social Insurance Number, and sense of stability.
“It took them five seconds to say I was dead… without even asking for a death certificate,” she said. “Now I’m being told it could take six months to prove I’m alive. That makes no sense to me.”
But with her account frozen and no payments coming in, she was suddenly without any source of income.
Her Social Insurance Number had been cancelled, making it impossible to access her bank account or even apply for temporary work to stay afloat.
Even Service Canada wasn’t much help, Miller claimed.
She recalls one interaction with an agent who questioned why she kept insisting she was alive, while another refused to proceed because her name didn’t match across various documents.
When Miller attempted to order a copy of her marriage certificate to fulfill the requirement, her request was denied because her ID had already been flagged as invalid.
Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan stepped in as well, formally raising Miller’s case with the federal government.
Miller provided Daily Hive a copy of the letter dated June 30, in which Kwan wrote directly to Minister François-Philippe Champagne, asking that CRA fix the mistake immediately, restore her pension, and ensure all missed payments were sent without delay.
Resurrection, at last
On June 30, Miller received the call she’d been waiting for.
“CRA just called and I have been resurrected,” she told Daily Hive. “They’re sending an apology letter in the mail.”
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the bill was delayed in the last session of Parliament by the Liberals' failure to act in a timely fashion and a Conservative filibuster that stalled the House of Commons' work for months.
The court has given the government yet another extension, and it would be incumbent on this Parliament to make sure that legislation is passed, Kwan said.
The previous lost Canadians citizenship bill died on the order paper when the House prorogued earlier this year. The Senate was engaged in an early study of the legislation to help it become law quickly.
The new legislation, Bill C-3, proposes giving automatic citizenship to anyone denied citizenship under the current law.
It also would establish a new framework for citizenship by descent going forward. The legislation proposes Canadian citizenship could be passed down to people born abroad, beyond the first generation, if their parents spent a cumulative three years in Canada before the child's birth or adoption.
Those were the two primary goals of the original lost Canadians bill.
Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, is bucking all of that lore after pressure from the US in the form of Donald Trump’s “concerns” about undocumented migrants and fentanyl moving across the US-Canada border. In response, the recently elected Liberal PM put forward a 127-page bill that includes, among other worrying provisions, sweeping changes to immigration policy that would make the process much more precarious for refugees and could pave the way for mass deportations.
If passed, Carney’s Strong Borders Act (or Bill C-2) would bar anyone who has been in the country for more than a year from receiving refugee hearings. That would apply retroactively to anyone who entered the country after June 2020. If they arrived on foot between official ports of entry, meanwhile, they’d have to apply for asylum within 14 days of entering Canada – a disastrous outcome for people fleeing Trump’s persecution. The bill also gives the immigration minister’s office the authority to cancel immigration documents en masse.
This bill has been widely condemned by politicians and advocacy groups such as Amnesty International and the Migrants Rights Network, who are rightly worried about just how much havoc a change like this could wreak. Jenny Wai Ching Kwan, a member of Parliament for Vancouver East, told reporters the bill would breach civil liberties and basic rights.