Today it is my turn, as a Ukrainian Canadian, as president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress - British Columbia Provincial Council, to stand before you and defend the Citizenship of all naturalized Canadians from the flaws of this document, from vagaries embodied in Sections 16, 17, and 18 of this proposed Bill C-18.

Canadian Citizenship is something that is taken for granted by most Canadians. Few of us realize the value placed on Canadian Citizenship, until we face the prospect of losing it. It is sadly ironical that the prospect of losing it can be experienced only by those that are Canadians by choice rather than by those who are Canadian by accident of birth. One cannot begin to appreciate the full value of Canadian Citizenship until one sees the ferocity with which those, that are faced with its' revocation, defend their Citizenship. Consuming their life's earnings, their homes and the savings and goodwill of friends and family, they pay a high price indeed for that, which most Canadians take for granted.

Because the value of a commodity is determined by the price someone is willing to pay for it, the victims of some of the sloppiest jurisprudence of any democratic country, have elevated the worth of Canadian Citizenship to lofty levels indeed. I can only hope that this government, that this country of ours, can live up to this high evaluation

And today we have before us the proposed Citizenship of Canada Act, this Bill C-18. We have a badly flawed document, written in a fit of post 9-11 xenophobia, that in the future would terrorize Canadians long after the risk of alien assault is forgotten. This Bill provides naturalized Canadians with no shield against political whimsy or foreign fabrication. By chopping down the protection of legal rules of evidence, by allowing anonymous allegation, by accepting innuendo from those that have donned the mantle of self-righteousness, it has clear-cut the thicket of legal protection that has grown over the centuries in western jurisprudence. And in this legal wasteland, devoid of old growth wisdom, this Bill uproots that last shrub of protection, the right of appeal.

There is no capital punishment in Canada. There is but one way left to legally reduce by one the World's population of Canadians, and that is through revocation of Citizenship. To this country's shame, both the current law dealing with such revocation and its' proposed replacement, Bill C-18 suspend the strictest standards of legal evidence and replace it with that gambler's cop out, the idea of "a balance of probability". Judging by the number of us that play Lotto 649 I say our sense of balance of probability is a defective instrument indeed!

This clear-cut of legal protection has created a playground for foreign squabbles, alien allegation, innuendo, half-truths and calumny, all blown by winds of political expediency and whimsy. The victims of the resultant public witch-hunts face a no-win proposition, - to drown in legal debts, while betting on an outcome based on balance of probability. Thus Canadian Citizenship is reduced to the value of a poker chip in a gamblers' den.