Canadian citizenship applicants surging after ‘Lost Canadians’ law passed, testing Carney government’s immigration control promise

2026/08/26 Leave a comment

The assumption that many if not most will install themselves in Canada is unknown and there is no easy way that I know of to obtain accurate data as citizen immigration is not tracked unlike immigrants and temporary residents. That being said, proof data provides a sense of the possible magnitude. Previous cohorts of “lost Canadians” revealed that relatively few sought citizenship proofs but this cohort, at least during the first year, appears to be an exception (citizenship proofs in recent years have hovered around 60,000):

…Technically, none of these citizenship claimants via Canadian ancestry counts against the Carney government’s immigration levels plan. Certificate holders are recognized citizens, not immigrants, so they fall outside the targets Ottawa points to as evidence of restraint.

But the practical effect is similar: each certificate confers the right to a passport and to live and work in Canada, and archivists describe applicants who are explicitly planning moves out of the U.S. If a meaningful share of the 121,800 people now in line—and the larger pool behind them—relocates, the population pressures the government says it is easing will partially reassert themselves through a channel its plan does not measure.

The international contrast of other developed countries curtailing citizenship claims underlines the point. Sweden and Finland have increased residency requirements, and Italy has capped citizenship by descent at two generations. Canada, alone, has widened its ancestry route without limit.

Graeme Gordon is The Hub’s Senior Editor and Podcast Producer. He has worked as a journalist contributing to a variety of publications, including CBC, National Post, Canadaland, and Toronto Sun.

Source: Canadian citizenship applicants surging after ‘Lost Canadians’ law passed, testing Carney government’s immigration control promise

Inside IRCC’s application processing system highlights some 32,000 applications finalized and about 100,000 applications pending year-to-date, essentially

31,980 finalized since 1 January 2026, pending 99,520, essentially the same number in one year that PBO, IRCC and Ministers tabled as a five-year total.

Associated Hub editorial:

…The accounting fiction at the centre deserves plain statement. Certificate holders are recognized citizens, not immigrants, so none of them count against the 380,000 permanent resident cap or the 385,000 temporary resident target the government touts as restraint. The practical effect on housing, health care, and labour markets is identical. Ottawa has capped the front door while leaving a side entrance unmeasured, unmodelled, and effectively unbounded.

Peer countries have moved in the opposite direction. Sweden and Finland have tightened residency requirements; Italy has capped citizenship by descent at two generations. Canada alone has widened its ancestry route without limit—and without so much as a credible estimate of who will walk through it.

The government should, at minimum, integrate descent-based citizenship into its levels planning and publish honest projections of uptake. If a meaningful share of the 121,800 people now in the queue—and the far larger pool behind them—relocates, the population pressures Ottawa claims to be easing will partially reassert themselves through a channel its plan refuses to see. A promise to control immigration that ignores its fastest-growing stream is not control. It is bookkeeping.

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with

Canada Gave Them Citizenship. Then Changed Its Mind

2026/08/13 Leave a comment

Alternative headline: IRCC developed an overly generous policy without thinking through the implications and impact. None of the witnesses nor officials and ministers discussed this during the various Senate and Commons hearings:

…For applicants such as Jeep, this was not an ordinary immigration pathway. They were not asking Canada to admit them as newcomers and then allow them to work toward citizenship. A successful application under Bill C-3 bestows citizenship by descent rather than through naturalization, with applicants recognized as Canadians since birth or January 1, 1947—when Canadian citizenship became a legal status—whichever was later.

That legal distinction sits awkwardly inside the politics of the moment. Ottawa has been trying to reduce temporary-resident numbers, with IRCC announcing plans to set targets for that demographic for the first time and to bring their numbers down to 5 percent of Canada’s population. At the same time, Bill C-3 opened a path for people living abroad—some with little or no recent connection to Canada—to have citizenship recognized through ancestry.

Eligible descendants did not have to first live in Canada, pass a citizenship test, show knowledge of English or French, or complete the process expected of permanent residents seeking naturalization. Some may never move here. Others, including Americans worried about conditions in the US, saw the law as something more practical: a route to safety, mobility, a respectable dual citizenship, or a possible future in Canada.

That is where the certificate suspensions became more than a paperwork problem. Canada had widened the legal doorway to citizenship. But when early applicants stepped through it, IRCC appeared unprepared for the old records, complicated family histories, and the political meaning they brought with them….

IMMIGRATION LAWYER Amandeep Hayer, who has advised several affected certificate holders, says historical citizenship cases inevitably require evidence beyond modern birth certificates. Civil registration did not begin at the same time or with the same consistency across every province. Someone trying to prove where an ancestor was born in the nineteenth century may have no birth certificate to obtain, regardless of how thoroughly they search.

In those circumstances, a census, church register, marriage record, or another archival document may be the best evidence that survives. Hayer says the problem at the time was that IRCC’s guidance did not clearly define which alternative records would be considered valid, with the result that officers initially accepted the evidence and issued certificates, only for the department to later question whether the documentation was sufficient. He says IRCC has since provided more clarity on the matter.

But the suspensions also raise constitutional questions. Some immigration lawyers have argued that forcing certificate holders to surrender proof of citizenship without first identifying the specific problem in their file could engage mobility rights, due-process protections, and equality concerns, especially where passports were also revoked. The issue has not yet been tested in court in the context of the Bill C-3 suspensions.

For nearly two weeks after the first surrender letters became public, IRCC offered little public explanation. At a June 23 media availability, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Lena Metlege Diab said she had asked officials to look into the issue after learning of concerns with citizenship certificates issued under Bill C-3. Two days later, Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked whether the people affected deserved a timely explanation. “The simple answer is yes,” he said, “and I’ll be following up to ensure they get that.”…

The Citizenship Regulations allow the government to require surrender of a certificate when it has reason to believe the holder may not be entitled to it. The question is how IRCC reached that belief—and what the department should have done in all fairness when its own unclear instructions helped create the uncertainty. For Jeep, Maher, Tossell, and others caught in the review, integrity also means explaining how those decisions were made, why they were reversed, and—more fundamentally—whether the government will stand by the documents it issues.

Source: Canada Gave Them Citizenship. Then Changed Its Mind

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with

MP Rempel Garner: “Temporary” status is a lie. That must change.

2026/07/27 Leave a comment

Of note. Don’t understand the parent reference but do share the concern over C-3 and the shift from jus soli to jus sanguinis:

…The federal government has also shown no willingness to review Canada’s overly permissive automatic citizenship system, wherein the descendants of two non-permanents receive citizenship if they are born in Canada and can in turn can (in some cases) enable a pathway to residency for the parents, instead passing legislation that further enables endless chain migration of persons with few ties to Canada. They have levelled few consequences for profiteers like the operators of foreign student diploma mills, or unscrupulous immigration consultants who continue to scam victims. And the Liberals continue to issue hundreds of thousands of new temporary work and study permits this year alone.

And when it comes to the millions of people in Canada with no status or with expired or expiring visas, precious few have been removed, and the Liberals have given no sign that they plan to scale up capacity to enforce immigration law.

Unless immediately corrected, this continued abuse of the spirit and letter of immigration law and the resulting unfettered opening of Canada’s borders will almost certainly be judged by future historians as the core reason why Canada’s pluralism failed….

Source: “Temporary” status is a lie. That must change.

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with

Acadians treated unfairly by immigration department in citizenship U-turn, historians say

2026/07/23 Leave a comment

And nobody in IRCC foresaw any of these issues?

…In a letter from IRCC, a redacted version of which has been seen by The Globe and Mail, IRCC said having reviewed all the documents submitted, their Canadian citizenship certificate application “was approved in error” as documents submitted “were not from acceptable source authorities. It said documents from France and the U.S. ”cannot confirm Canadian citizenship.”

Maurice Basque, a historian at the Centre of Acadian studies at l’Université de Moncton, said, despite being located in France and Louisiana, the documents were original Acadian records. 

He said IRCC civil servants were showing “very poor judgment of what happened to the documents” after the expulsion of Acadians by the British. 

When the British started burning churches, priests or Acadian elders rescued many official records, he said. 

As a result, the original Grand-Pré register is in Baton Rouge, and original Acadian records from Beaubassin, a 17th-century Acadian village and trading centre in what is now Nova Scotia, are in La Rochelle in France, he said. 

“They’re not French or American documents. They’re Acadian documents that are in France and Louisiana. That is a major difference,” Mr. Basque said. 

Jeffrey MacDonald, an IRCC spokesperson, said “we are not in a position to confirm whether a particular document would be accepted or relied upon, as each proof of citizenship application is assessed on its own merits.”…

Source: Acadians treated unfairly by immigration department in citizenship U-turn, historians say

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with ,

CPC: Convicted Criminals From G7 Countries Now Eligible to Enter Canada Under Bill C-3

2026/07/20 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, the government approach on this point was correct as a criminality check of citizens by descent would most likely not be upheld by the court. But the open ended nature of C-3 that in theory extends the right of citizenship to prior the Citizenship Act of 1947 and the birth of Canada as a country in 1867, may well create operational problems for IRCC.

Given the documentation requirements for Canadian ancestors that would anchor any claim, it may well be that relatively few apply and the reports from lawyers, archivists and others may reflect an initial demand, rather than an ongoing one:

Politically, of course, this plays well:

Today, the Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative Shadow Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, released the following statement regarding reports of non-citizens convicted of serious crimes being able to travel to Canada freely because of citizenship law changes made by the Liberals in Bill C-3:

“Should a person with a criminal record be entitled to automatic citizenship in Canada? The Liberal government seems to think so.

“Back in November, Conservatives proposed an amendment to Liberal Bill C-3 that would have barred non-citizens with criminal records from being eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship by descent. While it was initially adopted, the Liberals later gutted the amendment.

“Now today, just like Conservatives warned would happen, we are finding out that non-citizens who have been convicted of serious crimes, such as those in the United States, are eligible to apply for citizenship through Bill C-3. This is happening precisely because the Liberals gutted our amendment.

“This isn’t the only fallout of the Liberals’ misguided Bill C-3. Continually conflicting information from the Minister on who is eligible to apply is creating massive backlogs in legitimate citizenship application processing. Unfortunately, this is the direct outcome of a law that was overly expansive and doomed to fail from the start. 

“All that was needed was a very targeted law change, and the problem of lost citizenship for a very small group of people would have been fixed. No political party had a problem with fixing that precise issue, but the Liberals instead went far beyond what was required and decided to open the floodgates.

“The result? We have seen a Pandora’s box unleashed with the changes the Liberals pushed through over warnings the Opposition raised. Millions of people are discovering they are eligible for citizenship. Our citizenship laws are now some of the most overly-permissive in the whole world, with the ability to claim citizenship if a single relative, no matter how distantly back they are, was a Canadian citizen.

“This is a fundamental change affecting what it means to be Canadian. Citizens of convenience are not what this country is founded on, and it goes against everything we stand for. Bestowing citizenship on those with no connection whatsoever to Canada is a surefire way of asking for trouble, and lets those we may not want into our society, with full legal and voting powers.

“The problems created by Bill C-3 are already showing themselves. How long until a US mass murderer receives citizenship? Or those who have never paid into the system seek to access Canadian healthcare? I call upon the Liberals to support common sense amendments Conservatives proposed to Bill C-3 in order to fix the mess they made.”

Source: Convicted Criminals From G7 Countries Now Eligible to Enter Canada Under Bill C-3

Detailed brief from immigration consultant Amir Ismail (RCIC #R412319) where this has become a new line of business for many consultants and lawyers:

Bill C-3 and the Felon Question: Why American Criminals Can Now Legally Enter Canada

Bill C-3 is a genuine human rights achievement. It corrected a constitutional injustice that fractured Canadian families for decades and left hundreds of thousands of legitimate descendants without access to a status they were always entitled to hold.

It also created a real, legally airtight pathway through which individuals with serious criminal records in the United States can obtain Canadian citizenship and enter Canada without any border recourse available to CBSA.

Both of those things are true at the same time.

The political fight over this law is not over. The debate about mandatory criminal checks will return to Parliament. The volume of applications from the United States will keep climbing. And the operational strain on IRCC will intensify.

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Expatriate Voting and Citizenship 

2026/07/06 2 Comments

My analysis of expatriate votes in the 2025 election, broken down by province and country, and 13 ridings in which the percentage of expatriate votes is within one percent of the winning margin.

The impact of C-3 (citizenship by descent) is expected to be limited given Elections Canada requires expatriates to have resided in Canada in order to qualify for a special ballot, less likely in the case of second and earlier generations. But we shall see once we have full 2026 data on the overall numbers, ideally broken down by generation.

Expatriate Voting and CitizenshipDownload

Filed under C-3, Citizenship, Election 2025, elections Tagged with , ,

Bill C-3 opened citizenship claims to those with pre-Confederation ancestry

2026/06/29 Leave a comment

Good question. In the past, 1947 was the benchmark given a distinct Canadian citizenship dates from then. Chapman of course contested that legal distinction. But prior to Confederation is really stretching things and really unclear whether or not IRCC anticipated let alone planned for these old family ties:

….Confusion over the policy has sparked a wave of online claims from would-be applicants insisting they qualify through centuries-old family ties, while officials remain silent on how many applications have been filed or approved under the new rules.

Numerous online groups and forums show a significant number of individuals who claim to be Americans with historic ties to what is now Canadian soil, believing they can claim Canadian citizenship, with some claiming they’ve received citizenship despite neither of their ancestors being Canadian citizens.

Sergio Karas, an immigration lawyer and staunch critic of Bill C-3, an act amending the Citizenship Act that is now law, says the Liberals have completely “botched” the bill, failed to listen to warnings, and is calling for the immigration minister, Lena Diab, to resign.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not respond to Juno News’ requests to clarify whether those with ancestral ties to Canada before confederation can receive automatic citizenship, nor did they provide data on how many new applications were received since Bill C-3 received Royal Assent.

Source: EXCLUSIVE: Bill C-3 opened citizenship claims to those with pre-Confederation ancestry

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Ottawa reverses orders to surrender some ‘lost Canadian’ citizenship certificates

2026/06/24 Leave a comment

Sigh…. Suspect that the lack of discussion at CIMM and SOCI over third and earlier generation impact may reflect a lack of policy analysis over this potential:

Just one week after some “lost Canadians” were told to surrender their new citizenship certificates, a few received letters over the weekend confirming their citizenship claims are valid once again.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spokesperson said Monday the department is now reviewing the roughly 4,100 citizenship by descent claims made under an amendment to the law that offers a path to citizenship for those with Canadian ancestors.

Citizenship certificates will not be suspended unless the review turns up a problem with a document already issued, the spokesperson said.

A statement the department issued last week said it is temporarily pausing the finalization of citizenship certificates related to the citizenship by descent amendment passed as Bill C-3.

That amendment allows people born before Dec. 15, 2025 to claim Canadian citizenship if they can prove a direct line to a Canadian ancestor generation-by-generation.

Many of those making citizenship claims under this new rule are Americans.

The department has said it sent letters earlier this month to “a few dozen” people who received citizenship under the citizenship by descent law demanding they surrender their proof of citizenship pending further review….

Source: Ottawa reverses orders to surrender some ‘lost Canadian’ citizenship certificates

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Are Your Ancestors Canadian? Here’s What to Know About Becoming a Citizen.

2026/06/22 Leave a comment

More on C-3 implications and interest, this time in NYT. But not convinced that many will move compared to those who want it for security. Not clear whether we will have accurate data re moves however:

…There are about 63,200 citizenship applications for review ahead of the one submitted by Abbey Campbell, who started a TikTok account from her home in the Hudson Valley region of New York, to document her process and educate others on immigration rules.

“What surprised me was how many people were looking for information, and how I wasn’t the only one that felt overwhelmed,” she said. “A lot of people just didn’t know where to start.”

Information crowdsourcing efforts have appeared on social media as applicants search for relatives, share tips about parish records and exchange notes about timelines. There is an extensive Google spreadsheet, hosted on Reddit, with data from hundreds of applicants who have shared their information about their timeline for a response.

Ms. Campbell has continued to make weekly videos and answer questions from the community of potential Canadians, a space that has come to represent hope and excitement, she said. The estimated wait for her application is 11 months.

“A lot of people are planning to move there as soon as they get their citizenship,” Ms. Campbell said. “It’s a gift.”

Source: Are Your Ancestors Canadian? Here’s What to Know About Becoming a Citizen.

Filed under C-3, Citizenship

Immigration department suddenly suspends citizenship of scores of ‘Lost Canadians’

2026/06/18 Leave a comment

Further coverage with predictable comments by Chapman. Most of the coverage to date raises few concerns regarding the limited connection to Canada that most applicants have. Will continue to monitor numbers as they emerge:

…Don Chapman, who campaigned for decades for Lost Canadians to receive their citizenship, said for people with Canadian ancestors stretching back hundreds of years birth certificates were not always available, and other official documents such as census records have been accepted by IRCC. 

One Lost Canadian, he said, had an ancestor born in a part of Quebec that did not issue birth certificates. But it did have baptismal records. However, as her ancestors were Jewish they were not baptized. She relied on other official records, including the official census, to prove her ancestors was Canadian. 

“To revoke citizenship by e-mail and without a judicial review is horrifying. It also sets precedence in that no Canadian will ever be secure until citizenship is a right versus a legislated privilege,” he said. 

“I want everyone who was given citizenship to be reinstated, with assurances that they keep it. If not, I expect court challenges where the government should pay all expenses and damages.”

“After decades of being unconstitutionally denied their citizenship, Lost Canadians need to be welcomed home, not shunned,” he added. 

In its statement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said that “trained officers review all the evidence before them before approving a citizenship certificate.”

The fresh review “is to determine, through an individualized process, whether the certificate was properly issued based on the evidence required by law,” the statement added. 

“This is a necessary and important safeguard, and all affected individuals will have an opportunity to provide additional documentary evidence in support of their case. If the review confirms that the individual is entitled to the certificate, it will be returned.”

Source: Immigration department suddenly suspends citizenship of scores of ‘Lost Canadians’

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with

← Older posts