Urback: The Conservatives are right: Canada should end birthright citizenship

Nice to see my work cited and discussion of current and potential numbers:

…It’s difficult to get a complete picture of how many parents who are not citizens or permanent residents are giving birth. Using figures about women who “self-pay” for births at hospitals, Andrew Griffith at Policy Options calculated that tourism births – by which women travel to Canada specifically to give birth – increased to 5,219 in 2024, which is nearly back up to Canada’s prepandemic high. There may be some overlap in that number with the number of births by non-residents, such as temporary foreign workers and international students, since some of them will not be covered by provincial plans or direct-bill insurance from their schools. 

Those who are covered, however, are outside of that calculation. An analysis of hospital deliveries from the early 2010s to 2017 found that approximately 6,000 births annually were by non-permanent residents; “more specifically, around 4,000 births were by temporary foreign workers, more than 1,000 by international students, and around 1,000 by refugee claimants and TR permit holders, annually.”

In the last quarter of 2017, there were nearly 972,000 non-permanent residents living in Canada. By the last quarter of 2024, that number had ballooned to more than 3.1 million. If a comparable proportion of those residents have babies while in Canada, it will mean thousands more children with citizenship whose parents may or may not be entitled to stay in the country, but whose citizenship will absolutely complicate immigration decisions. …

Source: The Conservatives are right: Canada should end birthright citizenship