‘Birth tourists’ believed to be using Canada’s citizenship laws as back door into the West | National Post
2013/08/10 3 Comments
More information on birth tourism in Canada following the release of Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s recent consultations with Canadians on the issue, and in the context of the government considering changes to the current policy of granting citizenship automatically to people born in Canada.
While the press account still lacks hard numbers in terms of percentage of births, the range of comments and anecdotes suggests that the numbers are largely than expected, with the practice extending to more communities.
Still find it surprising, given the sophistication of some of our provincial medicare systems, that no harder data available. After all, we know the total number of births (377,636 in 2011), government medicare billing systems should be able to isolate those births paid by provincial plans, and provincial public servants should be able to provide some analysis behind the different categories of births not paid by medicare (e.g., births within the 3 month waiting period for provincial medicare coverage).
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Multicultural Meanderings 
The fact that they are unable to get hard numbers and are reduced to talking about “dozens and dozens” says to me that this phenomenon is a tempest in a teapot.
It’s a headline that is almost guaranteed to make native citizens upset and call for “something to be done.”
Personally I think the real scandal is that membership in a democratic nation is conferred in most cases via place of birth or birth to a citizen parent – things that no native can truly congratulate himself for since it was sheer dumb blind luck. We used to call an advantaged hereditary class an “aristocracy.” How in heaven’s name can such a thing be justified in a political community that calls itself “democratic”?
Agree. Pretty sad when government consultations and analysis is so weak from a methodological basis.
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