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 , ,

Bill 21 brings Chief Justice Richard Wagner to the decision of a lifetime [citizenship]

2026/07/20 Leave a comment

Good long read on Justice Wagner, including the discussion of the Vavilov case where I understand the issue of coherence in rulings of administrative tribunals. On the other hand, the Court completely missed the substantive citizenship issue, that foreign officials did not benefit from their children being granted Canadian citizenship if born in Canada. That they were not “official” diplomats but undercover spies, and the resulting “loophole,” failed a basic common sense test:

…The Chief Justice’s most important ruling will sound a bit boring: a 2019 judgment called Vavilov that resolved a legal debate in administrative law. This is a mostly unseen but omnipresent part of the legal system, where the courts assess government decision-making and citizens can seek review of rulings from tribunals such as the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. 

Until the Vavilov ruling, how judges reviewed such decisions was a mess. There was little coherence and a lot of wasted court time.

Chief Justice Wagner sought to solve the problem. The Supreme Court took on three similar appeals, invited interveners to join in and, unusually, solicited outside legal help. 

The central case was that of Alexander Vavilov, born in Toronto in 1994. His parents were Russian spies, the inspiration for the television show The Americans. After the FBI arrested the spies in 2010 near Boston, Mr. Vavilov applied to renew his Canadian passport. In 2014, the federal Registrar of Canadian Citizenship cancelled his certificate of citizenship.

The registrar’s reading of federal regulations, and the Citizenship Act, determined Mr. Vavilov should not have been granted Canadian citizenship at birth because his parents had been employees of a foreign government.

Mr. Vavilov won at the Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision. Chief Justice Wagner, the lead author, ruled that the registrar’s conclusion was unreasonable. The larger legal breakthrough: the judgment clarified how courts should review administrative decisions writ large. …

Source: Bill 21 brings Chief Justice Richard Wagner to the decision of a lifetime

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

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

2026/07/14 Leave a comment

Hard to imagine any government adopting such an all-embracing approach to the citizenship study guide. The current draft, never approved by over four ministers, reportedly has increased emphasis on Indigenous peoples, but is unlikely to satisfy the academic focus on settler colonialism. 

It remains to be seen whether the current minister will release the revised guide, given her poor communications skills, and whether the government may find the version overly expansive compared to its more restrained approach to Indigenous peoples and diversity in general:

..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.

The 2020 COA guide diverges most clearly in its explicit engagement with reconciliation, including interactive exercises that invite immigrants to plan tangible actions. This participatory approach positions immigrants as active agents; still, this participation remains low stakes. Most significantly, other than a brief acknowledgement of an official 2008 federal apology in the official 2009 guide, reconciliation appears only in this preparatory COA arrival guide, rather than in authoritative citizenship pedagogy tied to membership, rights, and national belonging. Reconciliation thus surfaces precisely where it does not condition citizenship itself, reinforcing its status as a moral supplement rather than a foundational political principle. Each attempt to produce a Canadian consensual history through citizenship pedagogy can be read through Cook’s (2018) account of settler ignorance, in which even recognition-oriented narratives historicize colonial violence and sustain a shared misrecognition of the present.

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

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Gaucher: The U.S. narrowly upheld birthright citizenship. What about Canada?

2026/07/14 Leave a comment

Classic case of ideology driving the research. As always, race overshadows class in these critiques. And an IRCC/StatsCan study estimated that 70 percent of non-resident self-pay deliveries were visitor visas, not temporary workers or international students, the category most likely to be birth tourists:

…At the heart of these debates is reproductive racism — the systemic control or regulation of people’s pro-creative capacities based on their race. The political reasons for restricting citizenship policy are tied directly to anti-immigrant, racist and sexist sentiments that stigmatize migrant women’s reproduction….

Source: The U.S. narrowly upheld birthright citizenship. What about Canada?

Filed under Birth Tourism, Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

French: MAGA’s Birthright Meltdown Is in Full Effect

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

…The people above — who range from a sometime trillionaire to billionaires to government officials to journalists and pundits — aren’t exceptional on the populist right. They’re emblematic of a movement that, like Trump, is constantly arguing that this country is minutes away from midnight and that only the most extreme measures can yank America back from the brink of destruction.

And to them, Exhibit A of the destruction of America is the birthright citizenship case, the ultimate symbol of national suicide.

But how could that be? The Supreme Court’s decision did nothing more than confirm a legal status quo that’s existed since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 — a ruling that’s rooted in centuries-old British and American conceptions of citizenship.

Part of the rage seems to be rooted in a sense that MAGA came oh so close to winning. Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The fact that it was 5-4 — so agonizingly close — just underscored that the legal community on the right and left has been so wrong for so many years, saying this was going to be a 9-0 ruling against President Trump.”

But that’s not quite right. Yes, there were only five unqualified votes for the constitutional status quo, but there were six total votes for birthright citizenship (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that birthright citizenship was required by statute, not the Constitution), and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent indicated that he was mainly concerned with citizenship for the children of temporary visitors.

As Gorsuch wrote about the children of unauthorized immigrants, “What matters isn’t whether a child’s parents are citizens. What matters is whether they (and, by law, their child at birth) have made this place their home and are thus ‘domiciled within the United States.’” The strong implication was that Trump’s order denying citizenship to undocumented immigrants was far too broad.

Now, by this reckoning, we can count seven justices who would retain the status quo for the children of unauthorized immigrants, at least when those families wish to stay in the United States. Birthright citizenship — at least for those people whose families live in the United States — is far more secure than MAGA seems to believe. Or wants to believe…

That’s why we believe that any person born in the United States is a citizen. The creed has helped create and sustain a culture, and then both creed and culture tell us that each person in this country is of equal worth and equal status. If the creed isn’t central to our identity, then why does the oath of office bind the president to “preserve, protect and defend” a constitution, not a country?

The Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address — these are the proclamations that define who we are. They are the core of the American creed, and without that creed, America might retain its name, but it will not retain its nature.

Source: MAGA’s Birthright Meltdown Is in Full Effect

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, 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 , ,

The [SCOTUS] Birthright Decision Was Surprisingly Close, Some Legal Scholars Say

2026/07/02 Leave a comment

Surprising, but perhaps not for this court:

On the final day of its term, the Supreme Court issued a majority opinion with a clear message: Birthright citizenship is a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.That decision on Tuesday, striking down President Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, reaffirmed decades of legal thought and practice.

But some civil rights advocates, lawyers and legal scholars were surprised that four justices — Clarence Thomas, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said that they did not see birthright citizenship as a constitutional right for certain groups.

(Justice Kavanaugh agreed with the majority’s decision to strike down Mr. Trump’s executive order, but based his reasoning on a federal statute rather than on the 14th Amendment.)

“This should have been a 9-0 decision,” said Bethany Li, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which filed an amicus brief against the president’s order.

For more than a century, there was broad consensus among most legal scholars and the courts that the 14th Amendment extended citizenship not just to the children of formerly enslaved people, but also to nearly all babies born within the United States. It was only when Mr. Trump began running for office, in 2015, that a once-fringe academic theory — that the 14th Amendment was only about slavery, and did not cover the children of temporary visitors — started to gain political and legal traction.

The momentum culminated in Mr. Trump’s executive order on his first day back in office last year to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign residents.

“A year and a half ago, people said there was no support for this view, that it was ahistorical and atextual,” said Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Trump’s executive order. “So to get four votes for the Trump administration’s position here is quite a coup.”

To be sure, the ruling was ultimately a win for proponents of birthright citizenship….

Source: The Birthright Decision Was Surprisingly Close, Some Legal Scholars Say

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship, Trump administration

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 ,

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