Canada’s 2026 census participation was among highest ever, says StatCan

2026/09/16 Leave a comment

Looking forward to the various datasets:

Statistics Canada says the response rate for this year’s census of the population was 98.4 per cent, one of the highest ever recorded.

The data is collected every five years and the questionnaire includes age, gender, marital status and language use.

That information is used to determine electoral maps, plan social programs and determine funding for municipal and provincial governments.

…StatCan says it’s begun the work to compile the data it collected and it will release seven batches of information beginning in February 2027.

The agency says more than 88 per cent of Canadians chose to fill out the census online, more than have ever used that option before.

Source: Canada’s 2026 census participation was among highest ever, says StatCan

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Proof-of-citizenship applications surge, estimated wait time is almost 3 years

2026/09/15 Leave a comment

So the number after less than one year is already greater than the five-year estimate by PBO and IRGC. As Kurland notes, “They dropped the ball big time:”

Both the wait times and the number of people waiting for a decision regarding their proof-of-citizenship application has surged exponentially since Bill C-3 came into effect, according to new data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

More than 136,000 people are awaiting a decision, with estimated wait times now more than 33 months. They include people eligible for citizenship under the amended rules and those who are first-generation descendants. In the case of applications from outside Canada or the United States, the estimated wait time could take an additional three or four months.

The wait time has increased by eight months from this August, when it was estimated to be 25 months. The number of applications has also increased by 14,000.

Bill C-3, which came into effect in December 2025, amended the Citizenship Act to end the first-generation limit on citizenship by descent, meaning Canadians born outside the country can also pass their citizenship to their children who are born outside the country. It also expanded eligibility to people born before Dec. 15, 2025, if they can prove they’re directly descended from a Canadian citizen, and have verifiable documents showing that the citizenship was passed down – even if that ancestor left the country years ago.

Half of applications come from U.S.

According to data provided by the IRCC in August, more than 6,100 people have obtained proof of citizenship under these new rules since late 2025.

As of May 31, 51 per cent of all approved citizenship applications under the new eligibility criteria came from people born in the U.S., according to data provided by the IRCC.

One immigration lawyer says the new numbers are “staggering” and “far beyond the capacity of IRCC” to process in a reasonable timeframe.

Kyle Hyndman, an immigration lawyer from Victoria, B.C., told CTVNews.ca on Thursday, that a “significant” number of applications are coming from the south of the border.

“Both what’s happening in the U.S. politically – and also news coverage of the Canadian citizenship situation in the U.S. – have both spurred a lot of interest,” Hyndman said.

“That’s certainly part of the surge, and that’s put all kinds of pressure on every stage in this process,” he said.

…‘A predictable uptake’

Christine Beltempo, the current chair of the Canadian Bar Association National Immigration Law Section and a lawyer with the national law firm McCarthy Tétrault, told CTVNews.ca on Friday that she’s seeing many applications coming in from other countries besides the U.S., like Mexico.

“You’re creating additional bureaucracy for some people who actually are presumably, according to the new law, Canadian citizens,” she said, referring to people from countries like Mexico, who need a visa application to enter Canada, unless they get their citizenship certificate.

Outside of the U.S., the most approved applications are from Mexico, Bolivia, the United Kingdom and its territories, China, India, Bolivia, France, Australia and Italy, according to the IRCC’s data.

Beltempo called the surge in processing times “a predictable uptake,” following the amendment to Bill C-3, which is leading to “frustration” among applicants who were looking forward to this legislative change.

“What we’re seeing is disappointment, frustration, mixed emotions and certainly people finding it very difficult to plan their lives and their futures in Canada, without having a predictable amount of time before which they can actually get their documentation,” she said.

Beltempo added that the IRCC is facing backlogs in other departments as well, which needs to be examined by the federal government. She says it’s concerning for associations like the Canadian Bar Association, in terms of access to justice and other programs.

“I think it’s important to remind the public that this change came as a result of a court finding that the previous law was unconstitutional.”

‘When you’re Canadian, you have the right to be here’

Before Bill C-3 was amended, Canadian citizenship by descent was limited to first-generation individuals, born or adopted outside the country by a Canadian citizen. That restriction was subsequently struck down in a 2023 ruling by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, which found it unconstitutional.

Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer and policy analyst from Vancouver, told CTVNews.ca Friday, that the sudden uptick in the number of applications and the increase in estimated wait times is a combination of the political tension between Canada and the U.S., in addition to the Bill C-3 amendment.

“They certainly drop the ball in failing to resource the citizenship people to process, resulting in three years and longer processing times,” Richard Kurland said. “When you’re Canadian, you have the right to be here.”

Kurland said despite people having a claim to Canadian citizenship, the province they enter cannot allow them access to health care, public education or employment without the paperwork from the IRCC.

“There’s no way that the (federal) government could not know that the inventories would become bloated (and) processing times would go through the ceiling,” he said.

“They dropped the ball big time.”

Meanwhile, multiple factors are to blame for an increase in the volume of applications outside of Bill C-3, an IRCC spokesperson told CTVNews.ca in a statement on Friday.

“Complex cases often require substantial documentary evidence and additional verification, which can extend timelines,” the spokesperson wrote. 

“The current estimate should be understood in that context, rather than as a direct comparison with historical figures that were calculated using different inventories or methodologies.”

Source: Proof-of-citizenship applications surge, estimated wait time is almost 3 years

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He passed three extensive security checks in Canada. Now, a fourth has stalled his citizenship for 18 months

2026/09/04 Leave a comment

…Immigration security screening has garnered growing public attention in the last few years as the number of immigration applications skyrocketed after the pandemic, leading to an explosion of files flagged for inadmissibility and security concerns.

While critics question whether the process is rigorous enough, advocates complain that it takes too long and is holding back the lives of migrants, whether they are here for asylum, to study or work, or in the process of becoming permanent residents or citizens….

According to CSIS, the number of immigration security screening requests it receives increased from 356,200 in 2019 to a peak of 538,100 in 2024, before it dropped to 438,600 last year after Ottawa reduced immigration intakes. The border agency said its current caseload includes 69,800 applications for temporary residence, 31,300 for permanent residence and 73,400 for refugee claims.

The Immigration Department estimated that it would take 64.8 months to complete all security screenings for permanent residence and 30.3 months for temporary residence, based on output and the number of cases in the system as of the end of November.

Toronto immigration lawyer Max Berger said the stakes are high in citizenship applications because once a person becomes a citizen, it’s difficult to strip it. However, he said the screening process has been plagued by a lack of resources and transparency, causing extensive delays and leaving people in uncertainty.

He said multiple security screenings are not necessary unless new information emerges that suggests a person was involved in nefarious activities in their home country that officials weren’t aware of before….

Source: He passed three extensive security checks in Canada. Now, a fourth has stalled his citizenship for 18 months

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USA: HOW THE RIGHT COULD ACTUALLY END BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

2026/09/02 1 Comment

No doubt the administration and its supporters/enablers will continue to try:

….Administration officials were hardly coy about their plans. “We have to keep fighting,” Vice President Vance told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision.” A month later, the White House announced a second, narrower executive order purporting to restrict certain limited categories of people from birthright citizenship, such as children born to members of legally designated foreign terrorist groups.

The new order also appears largely unconstitutional, and is more a howl of frustration than a serious effort to pare back the Supreme Court’s ruling in Barbara. But it signals that MAGA’s assault on the Fourteenth Amendment is far from over. And the right already has a proven model for how to overturn a Supreme Court ruling, one more careful and systematic than a single executive order: the campaign against Roe v. Wade. The conservative movement never regarded Roe as the final word on abortion. The MAGA movement does not regard Trump v. Barbara as the final word on birthright citizenship….

Despite this history of opposition, Trump lacked any real legal foothold for his executive order—a precarious position to be in as the Supreme Court prepared to hear the case. Fortunately for Trump, a small group of right-leaning law professors busied themselves with the work of casting doubt on the question that judges in the lower courts—and, for more than 150 years, nearly every other expert—had found so clear. Some were up-front about their motivations. “My political predisposition was actually to think birthright citizenship is morally quite a complex issue and that the Trump position might be the right moral answer,” Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, explained in an interview on Moment of Truth, a podcast produced by a MAGA-aligned think tank. He co-wrote a New York Times op-ed in February 2025 and later published a law-review article. Both drew selectively from Anglo-American legal history to suggest that the words subject to the jurisdiction thereof might be read to mean “subject to America’s ‘social compact,’ ” whereby an individual gives up certain rights so that the state can guarantee others. People in the United States illegally haven’t entered into an “exchange of allegiance and protection,” Wurman argued, and therefore might not be guaranteed birthright citizenship for their children.

Scholarship proceeds through debate and contestation, but the convenient timing of this intervention and the patchiness of the historical work looked a great deal like an effort to sway the Court in Trump’s favor. Prior to Trump’s executive order, Wurman hadn’t published any academic work questioning the conventional understanding of birthright citizenship; he pressed forward with his op-ed, he said on the podcast, because he “wanted to move the Overton window.” Other scholars were appalled by his argument. Law, the CUNY professor, described the revisionist conclusions as “hogwash” that elide “mountains of scholarship on the other side.” Even fellow conservative originalists, who share Wurman’s approach to constitutional interpretation rooted in historical meaning, questioned his interpretation of subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Under common law and the public understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment at the time of the amendment’s drafting, they argued, subject to the jurisdiction thereof meant “subject to the law of”—which would include just about everyone on U.S. soil. “Aliens within the territory owe obedience to the law just like a natural-born citizen does,” the originalist law professor Keith Whittington wrote in a February 2026 paper. (Asked about his methodology, Wurman responded over email, “There is no single answer to the question of when sufficient historical data has been presented to make historical claims convincing.”)

Yet the revisionist scholarship found a receptive audience among the conservative justices on the Court. During oral arguments in April, most of the justices seemed skeptical of, even hostile toward, Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s case against birthright citizenship. By the time the Court handed down its ruling at the end of June, however, only five—the three liberals, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett—found the executive order to be unconstitutional. Justice Clarence Thomas drew from what he termed a “groundswell of new scholarship” in his dissent. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, dissenting in part, likewise pointed to the debate on the question to suggest that “the constitutional issue is not straightforward.” He argued that Congress would need to rewrite existing law to create exceptions to birthright citizenship for “children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”…

Source: HOW THE RIGHT COULD ACTUALLY END BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

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Canadian Immigration Tracker – Second Quarter 2026 Update

2026/09/02 Leave a comment

Latest update. Compared to the levels plan, government appears to be exceeding all major targets save for Permanent Residents:

Covid-19 Immigration Effects – Key Slides – 2026 Second QuarterDownload

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MPI: West African Countries Offer Citizenship to Descendants of Enslaved Africans

2026/09/02 Leave a comment

Of note. C-3 offers citizenship to similarly multi-generational descendants albeit in a different context:

An increasing number of West African countries are offering citizenship to the descendants of enslaved Africans. Government initiatives since 2016 have made obtaining citizenship and living on the African continent more appealing to members of the historic diaspora, many of whom are in the United States. Yet some initiatives have also been criticized for requirements that applicants submit a DNA test to prove their ancestry, and a tension has emerged between visions of these processes as drivers of development versus as restorative justice for the horrors of the slave trade.

As of this writing, at least 1,213 people had received citizenship through these policies in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Benin, and Guinea-Bissau, with the vast majority receiving Ghanaian citizenship, according to publicly available data from news outlets and civil-society organizations. There are no centralized data for citizenships granted to diaspora members, so the actual number may be higher.

The diaspora members receiving citizenship have predominately been African Americans from the United States, although people from Canada, the United Kingdom, and countries in the Caribbean have also received citizenship.1 Among these new citizens are some famous names: Music legend Stevie Wonder received citizenship in Ghana, and singer Ciara and movie director Spike Lee received citizenship in Benin, with Lee also named an ambassador to help market Benin’s citizenship initiative.2 Additional African countries without formal diaspora citizenship programs have nonetheless offered citizenship to African American celebrities, including Gabon’s offer to Hollywood star Samuel L. Jackson and Guinea’s naturalization of actors Meagan Good and Jonathan Majors.3

Although diaspora return policies target both emigrants and their descendants who have ancestral ties to the country, these new citizenship initiatives overwhelmingly focus on the latter. Several factors are driving this rise in historic diaspora citizenship, including individuals’ interest in reconnecting with their ancestral homeland, concerns about growing racism and far-right rhetoric in Western countries, and increasing attention to reparatory justice.4 In this context, African citizenship is framed as one method of addressing the injustices created by the transatlantic slave trade….

Source: West African Countries Offer Citizenship to Descendants of Enslaved Africans

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Canada’s online citizenship test – A troubling rise in pass rates: Andrew Griffith for Inside Policy

2026/08/31 Leave a comment

My latest analysis of citizenship test pass rates and government changes to make it easier for applicants to pass:

The citizenship test is not simply another administrative hurdle. It’s meant to establish that applicants understand the country they are joining, and is an important part of the journey to becoming Canadian.

Becoming a Canadian citizen is more than completing a series of forms, tests, and administrative requirements. It is a moment of shared accomplishment and belonging — one that is diminished when the journey to citizenship increasingly happens alone, behind a screen.

In its quest to reduce costs, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has increasingly shifted to online citizenship delivery, whether through online applications, citizenship ceremonies, online knowledge testing, and the proposed (but not yet implemented) online self-affirmation of the citizenship oath. In doing so, Canada risks losing something less tangible but no less important: the shared civic experience that turns legal status into a sense of belonging.

But online testing has brought another, more immediately troubling change: pass rates have risen sharply across most countries, raising questions about the integrity of the testing process…..

Source: Canada’s online citizenship test – A troubling rise in pass rates: Andrew Griffith for Inside Policy

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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.

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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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