Canada’s birthright citizenship policy makes us a nation of suckers – Jan Wong

Jan Wong in Toronto Life does some serious research beyond the purely anecdotal. Much better than the government-led consultations in 2012, which was largely anecdotal with no hard numbers (sigh … see ‘Birth tourists’ believed to be using Canada’s citizenship laws as back door into the West | National Post).

Her numbers for the main Toronto birthing hospitals for non-medicare births (which also includes immigrants within the 3-month waiting period before coverage).

Compare this with the total number of live births in Ontario: 142,462 in 2012/13 and in Toronto itself, 30,800 in 2009 (latest data I could find from the City of Toronto website).

In other words, the 4 main birthing centres in Toronto together had less than 300 births per year, or just under 1 percent of all live births. What percentage of these are from birth tourism compared to pre-medicare eligibility cases is unclear. But a fix for a less than 1 percent problem is likely to be costly (how many other government programs can boast such a low fraud or error rate?).

So much of her arguments are more blather and outrage than dispassionate, with no consideration of the additional administrative cost and burden of addressing a relatively small problem. It is no accident that C-24 revisions to the Citizenship Act did not contain any provisions regarding jus soli (birthright citizenship). Too complex and costly.

Do we really have to make a more complicated and lengthy process of giving birth and registering a child for the other 99 percent? And does she really believe that any children of birth tourists who return to Canada will not contribute to the Canadian economy?

What is Canadian citizenship worth in cold hard cash? Like a birth tourist trying to decide whether to hand over $36,200, I crunched the numbers. Canadian citizenship, I calculated, is worth about $840,000 in tangible benefits, excluding welfare payments should you end up on the dole. Assuming a current average life expectancy of 81 years, free health care alone is worth at least $485,000 ($5,988 annually, but much more if you require major surgery or a long hospital stay), according to 2013 health data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Free public education is worth $174,750, according to international tuition rates charged by the Toronto District School Board. As for university tuition, a Canadian at the University of Toronto would save $58,512 over four years, because international students pay substantially more. Finally, an average old-age pension (from age 65 to 81) totals $121,624.

And those are just the measurable assets. What about clean air and water, an untainted food supply, an absence of famine and civil war, and a charter of rights and freedoms? Another incalculable advantage comes in adulthood during the job hunt. By law, many institutions can’t even consider hiring a foreigner unless there’s not a single qualified ­Canadian or landed immigrant applying for the job.

It’s difficult not to feel like a nation of suckers. Birth tourism is a form of immigration fraud that gives pregnant women and their families a way to jump the queue, while wasting our tax dollars and raising serious security concerns—who knows what happens to some of those passports down the line? Immigration Canada concedes it has no idea of the magnitude of the problem, because Ottawa doesn’t record whether a woman is pregnant when entering Canada. When this kind of immigration fraud is detected (a rarity), the potential consequence is, of course, deportation of the parent, but the child would still remain a Canadian citizen.

Canada’s birthright citizenship policy makes us a nation of suckers torontolife.com.