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

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Brunner: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides

2026/08/11 2 Comments

One of the rare examinations of the language and approach across different citizenship guides (Nora Sobel did an earlier analysis). This analysis also covers the evolution of the guides but fails to acknowledge IMO the reality that any such guide will invariably present a somewhat sanitized version of our history, and a guide that presents an overly “black armband” of Canadian history would never be accepted by any serious political party and by the vast majority of old and new stock Canadians. The last para of their conclusion partially acknowledges that reality.

Whether the current government releases its version of Discover Canada, first announced five ministers ago, remains to be seen. My guess is not, given other priorities and a weak Minister:

In federal citizenship guides, settler colonialism is never named; the foundational structure of the Indian Act is omitted; references to reserves appear as decontextualized descriptions; and residential schools are minimized in ways that individualize harm. Treaties are absent until 1995 and, when introduced, are framed through a transactional logic that naturalizes settler title and casts Indigenous rights as historical accommodations rather than living, nation-to-nation obligations. Land is repeatedly depicted through frontier and extractive imaginaries, while Indigenous relations to land are relegated to culture or history.
…
In the context of ongoing settler colonial dispossession, education alone cannot serve as the ‘key condition for reconciliation’ (Chatterjee 2018, 3). State-produced citizenship guides in settler colonial contexts will not escape settler logics, nor can a revised narrative‘undo’ settlerism. Yet these texts still matter. They can either deepen so-called consensus and reinforce settler ignorance, or create openings for interruption.

As Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) writes, ‘settler, native, and arrivant [must] each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism. has sought to obscure’ (xxx). Within settler states, even this more modest demand – for truth rather than structural transformation – remains politically fraught. Citizenship guides operate within an apparatus designed to stabilize, rather than interrupt, settler colonial authority; yet they nonetheless constitute one of the few official sites through which prospective citizens encounter state-sanctioned narratives of belonging. At minimum, such texts could invite immigrants – differently positioned within racial hierarchies and imperial histories – to confront citizenship not as an untroubled inheritance, but as a relationship constituted through ongoing colonial conditions and responsibilities. While this falls far short of dismantling settler colonialism, it gestures toward a refusal of innocence, historical amnesia, and citizenship as a completed project.

Source: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides

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Trump’s Déjà-Vu Moment on Birthright Citizenship

2026/08/10 Leave a comment

More political posturing and material for the courts:

…Yesterday, Trump attempted to do some of the same things via new executive orders. One is intended to deny automatic citizenship to children born to people living in the United States while working for a foreign government and children of people declared to be terrorists or adversaries of the U.S. It would also deny citizenship to people born in U.S. territories if Congress passes a proposed lawallowing that, creating a new group of stateless people. The second order is intended to prevent the practice of “birth tourism,” in which people visiting the United States on tourist visas give birth to babies who are then U.S. citizens.

Legal experts and advocates say the orders are unconstitutional, and they are certain to be challenged in court. Trump’s loss at the Supreme Court seems to make these orders a long shot. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion for the Court, “children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States” satisfy the relevant conditions and thus “under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”

The language in the orders about “alien enemies” is another likely area for dispute, not because anyone is eager to welcome the children of bona fide adversaries but because this administration has made absurd claims about illegal immigration constituting an “invasion,” which makes no sense on its face and has been rejected by federal judges.

Trump’s announcement of the orders at the White House yesterday was full of fabrications, exaggerations, and lies. Trump claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment “was meant for the babies of slaves. It was—it was right after—one week or two weeks after the Civil War ended.” In fact, it passed three years later, in 1868. The presidential adviser Stephen Miller echoed the same idea, saying that the amendment “had no other meaning and purpose outside of that, and that’s been clear, obviously, since the day that it was passed.” When a politician uses the word obviously—like frankly—that’s a good sign that what follows will be neither obvious nor true. If this had been obvious since 1868, the U.S. wouldn’t have acted otherwise for more than a century, and the Supreme Court would have ruled in favor of the administration….

Source: Trump’s Déjà-Vu Moment on Birthright Citizenship

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship, Trump administration

Rempel Garner: Integration must be immigration’s first principle.

2026/08/07 Leave a comment

Always interesting to see how the Conservatives are engaging on immigration and citizenship. Needless to say, they favour the citizenship guide which has remained unchanged since the Harper years (5 Liberal immigration ministers and counting):

…The Liberals’ lowering of language knowledge standards signalled that a common language is not necessary for national unity or to fully participate in Canadian society. The Liberals’ prioritization of business groups that profit from large numbers of low-skilled temporary foreign workers signals that it’s okay for Canada to develop a caste system of labour. Their tolerance of violent foreign ideology has led to increases in acts of hate perpetrated on Canadian soil, particularly towards the Jewish community. Their abysmal screening processes have allowed agents of terrorist regimes to enter Canada and normalize and spread violent foreign ideology and gang activity within Canada’s borders. The Liberals’ recent Bill C-3, which allows Canadian citizenship to be passed down ad infinitum to people with no significant connection to Canada, erodes the value of Canadian citizenship. Their attempt to erase Canada’s national symbols says there was no national identity for newcomers to integrate into to begin with. And their decision to bring in too many people too quickly for jobs, housing, healthcare and other social supports to keep pace has led to scarcity and its negative competitive consequences.

But the most damaging part of a decade of Liberal destruction of the true first principle of Canada’s immigration system is the impact on people who came to Canada and upheld their end of the deal. These folks comprise the vast, overwhelming majority of immigrants to our country. When the Liberals allow others to get away with breaking the rules, they risk entire communities getting tarred with the same brush.

This is why Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent false claim that “they have taken back control of immigration” is so dangerous. The lived experience of many Canadians says otherwise. On any given morning there is another major story of the system failing (today was no different). 

And integration metrics still do not drive immigration policy.

The good news is that this state of affairs is reversible, which is why Canada’s Conservatives have spent the past year proposing major legislative and policy changes. Rules must be enforced, and the safeguards that once ensured Canada’s immigration system prioritized building the Canadian people and our national identity must be restored. Expect more to come in the fall.

Immigration policy that forgets its first duty – to build and strengthen the Canadian people – will eventually unmake the country it claims to serve.

That cannot be allowed to come to pass.

Source: Integration must be immigration’s first principle.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

ICYMI: Trump Immigration Policies Make It Harder To Get And Keep Citizenship

2026/08/03 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Trump administration is implementing policies to make U.S. citizenship harder to acquire and easier to revoke. The Department of Justice has prioritized denaturalization, aiming for 100-200 cases monthly, a major increase. USCIS has made the civics test more difficult, proposed significant fee hikes up to 80% and eliminated hardship waivers. Naturalization denial rates have more than doubled, and application processing has plummeted by 75%, leading to a growing backlog despite fewer applications. Critics argue these measures are designed to discourage naturalization and restrict immigration.

Source: Trump Immigration Policies Make It Harder To Get And Keep Citizenship

Filed under Citizenship, Trump administration

Deadline passes for Trump to ask Supreme Court to reconsider birthright citizenship ruling

2026/07/30 Leave a comment

Telling:

The deadline passed Tuesday for the Trump administration to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its rejection of the president’s birthright citizenship restrictions, with no new filing on the docket.

President Donald Trump vowed to seek a rehearing shortly after the opinion handed him a loss on a signature issue, but by Tuesday the 25-day window had elapsed with no new activity. 

A petition would face long odds: The court has not agreed to rehear an argued case in more than 50 years. 

The high court’s 6-3 decision in June struck down Trump’s executive order that would have denied automatic citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. 

The Republican president’s restrictions on birthright citizenship had been blocked by several lower courts before reaching the justices, and they did not take effect anywhere in the U.S….

Source: Deadline passes for Trump to ask Supreme Court to reconsider birthright citizenship ruling

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship, Trump administration 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.

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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 , ,

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