Halt of ‘Lost Canadians’ bill could mean citizenship for thousands born to parents with no ties to Canada

The current government needs to seek an extension (and allow enough time for a new government to pass needed legislation) and Judge Akbarali needs to acknowledge the political reality behind an extension and thus not enable such a vacuum.

The expected Conservative government should reintroduce the C-71 residency test approach but, crucially, require the residency be met within five years:

Ottawa’s failure to pass a bill granting citizenship to Lost Canadians – children born abroad to foreign-born Canadians – could lead to thousands of people whose parents have never been here automatically qualifying as citizens.

Bill C-71 was one of 26 pieces of legislation stopped in its tracks this month by the proroguing of Parliament.

It was introduced by the federal government last year after an Ontario court ruled that it is unconstitutional to deny citizenship to children born in another country to Canadians also born outside Canada.

The bill is meant to reverse a change by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2009 that stripped children of a Canadian parent born outside Canada of their automatic right to citizenship.

But now experts warn that the figure could be much higher. If the bill dies, thousands more children of Canadians born abroad, to those who have never been to Canada, would qualify for citizenship when the court ruling comes into effect in March, without added restrictions on who can be a citizen.

As well as restoring citizenship rights, Bill C-71 also limits who can pass on citizenship to ensure that Canadians born abroad, who have spent their entire lives outside Canada, would not be able to automatically confer the right to a Canadian passport onto their children. They would have to show, under the bill, that they were physically in Canada for at least 1,095 days (the equivalent of three years cumulatively) before their child’s birth.

Lawyer Sujit Choudhry, head of Hāki Chambers, who successfully brought the court challenge on behalf of his Lost Canadian clients, said Bill C-71 would have not only ended the second-generation cutoff but would have brought in “a substantial connection test.“

NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the death of the legislation, which she said was now likely, would mean that there are no safeguards requiring links to Canada….

Source: Halt of ‘Lost Canadians’ bill could mean citizenship for thousands born to parents with no ties to Canada