‘No longer a citizen’: Government letter tells mom of 4 she’s not Canadian | CBC News

2018/01/18 2 Comments

IRCC has to do better in these cases, both substantively as well in their communications with those who fell between the cracks. The Mennonite Central Committee, referred to in the article, has been productive and helpful in resolving comparable cases:

Anneliese Demos thought she was a Canadian until she got a letter in the mail last Friday.

The 39-year-old Winnipeg woman has four kids, has been married for 19 years, works two full-time jobs and pays taxes every year.

“My life is here.”

She came to Canada when she was just two years old and still has the government-issued citizenship card she received when her parents moved to Steinbach, Man. from Paraguay in 1980.

“This is my home. It’s Canada. I’ve lived here all my life,” she said.
But the government has informed Anneliese she’s in fact not a Canadian citizen and has cancelled the certificate that had proved she was.

“I have determined that you are not entitled to hold a Canadian citizenship certificate,” reads a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada dated Dec. 22, 2017.

The letter from the registrar of citizenship then asks for Demos to return her citizenship certificate to the citizenship and passport division in Ottawa.

“It kind of makes you worry, like what are they going to do to me?” Demos said.

2009 law repeal wasn’t retroactive

Anneliese is a so-called “Lost Canadian” due to a law that required second-generation Canadians who were born outside Canada to re-apply for citizenship before turning 28.
The Harper government repealed the law in 2009 but didn’t make it retroactive, meaning it was too late for anyone who missed the deadline before their 28th birthday. It is an issue that has affected many Mennonites such as Anneliese.

Many people, including Anneliese, weren’t even aware of the law.

Advocate says hardship ‘so unnecessary’

Bill Janzen, ​retired ​director of the Ottawa office of the Mennonite Central Committee, said ​he’s worked on more than 200 Lost Canadian cases since retiring in 2008.

​That’s usually meant doing extensive research into a person’s past, searching for records that prove where they went to school and lived and then taking the case with a plea to Canada’s immigration minister asking citizenship be granted due to unusual or special hardship.

To do that, it’s meant looking for documentation that doesn’t always exist anymore, especially for Mennonites who went to school in one-room country schools. “It just seemed so unnecessary that one had to deal with this on an individual basis in such detail when there could have been and should have been a global solution,” Janzen said.

Anneliese’s problems began in 2012 when she tried to get a passport to travel as a celebration of beating breast cancer. Anneliese said a clerk advised her she might have an issue because of her birth year and home country.

Officials denied her passport application and sent her a proof of citizenship form to fill out. She completed it and received a certificate and letter in the mail telling her she was a Canadian citizen, and allowing her to get a passport. She thought the issue was resolved until last Friday.

“Just when you thought it was fixed then you’re like, ‘oh now you’re like no longer a citizen.'”

Anneliese said two out of her six siblings have also had the same problem. Her sister was able to get it fixed after three years but her brother is still in limbo and she said a cousin was deported for two months because of similar circumstances. “It’s stupid,” she said.

Anneliese worries she may now be deported back to Paraguay even though she hasn’t been there since she was two. “We don’t know that family from a hole in the wall.”

‘I don’t even dare try to leave the country’

Her passport is set to expire in April but she fears she wouldn’t even be able to get back in Canada if she tried to use it.

“I don’t even dare try to leave the country.”

Her husband is worried, too.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do [if Anneliese is deported], like who would drive the kids to school?” said John Demos.

Anneliese is planning on holding on to the proof of citizenship document issued in 2012 the government now wants back. “I’m tempted to keep it.”

​Janzen said he had hope the Liberal government would fix the problem but nothing changed.

“I thought we could go somewhere but we didn’t.”​

Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, holds a news conference to update Canadians on the possible impacts of recent immigration-related decisions made by President Donald Trump, in Ottawa on Sunday, January 29, 2017. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

Janzen has spent years working on this issue and said government staffers were aware of the problem — and hoped to fix it years ago — but they were too late.

​”The officials then told me that ‘we know it would be a mess and we hope to abolish this provision before anyone turns 28 under it.'”

Government aware of problem

The Liberal government is aware of people who have lost or never been able to get citizenship due to the issue and is considering making legal changes, said Jaswal Hursh, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen.

Hursh said “a small number of affected individuals remain” and the government encourages people with similar stories to come forward as they are being dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The government didn’t respond to questions about how Anneliese was able to obtain a Canadian passport if she wasn’t considered a Canadian citizen.

via ‘No longer a citizen’: Government letter tells mom of 4 she’s not Canadian | CBC News

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Government officials were aware of arcane law that stripped Canadians born abroad of citizenship

2016/10/12 Leave a comment

“Lost Canadians, the Mennonite angle:

“The Canadian government was aware and warned repeatedly years before an arcane law began stripping longtime Canadians of their citizenship, says a man who spent decades lobbying for change.

Bill Janzen, the former head of the Mennonite Central Committee’s office in Ottawa, said he and his colleagues met with the federal government throughout the 1980s and 1990s to find a fix to the so-called 28-year rule.

The provision was part of a 1977 law that automatically removed citizenship from people born abroad to Canadian parents who were also born outside the country.

“The government holds a big responsibility for this,” Janzen said. “They’ve created a mess.”

The law applies to people born between Feb. 15, 1977, and April 16, 1981, no matter how quickly after their birth they moved to Canada. It was rescinded in 2009, but the change didn’t apply retroactively.

The only way to prevent the automatic loss of citizenship was to apply to retain it before the age of 28 — a detail legal experts contend the government failed to adequately communicate to those affected.

Janzen said he has heard numerous stories of people going to citizenship officials and being told they had never heard of the law.

“They said, ’Don’t worry about it. Go home and enjoy Canada… Once a Canadian, always a Canadian,’ ” Janzen said, noting that officials often pointed out the absence of any expiry date on their citizenship cards.

“It happened again and again and again.”

Janzen has helped more than 180 people navigate the expensive and time-intensive process of regaining their citizenship over the years, So far, 160 requests have been approved.

Immigration Minister John McCallum could not be reached for comment, but a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada said in an email the government advised those affected “when possible” of the need to apply before the age of 28 to retain their citizenship.

“As we do not have data on the number of individuals who might have been impacted, we were unable to advise people systematically,” Sonia Lesage wrote, adding that the number of people who remain affected is “very small.”

Lesage said the immigration minister has discretionary authority to grant citizenship in “cases of special and unusual hardship” and she encouraged anyone who thinks they might be affected to contact the department.

…Janzen said cost is a big challenge for many of the people caught by the 28-year rule, some of whom are “desperately poor.”“If your basic legal status is not settled, it’s so paralyzing,” he said. “For some of them, they’ve known there’s a problem and they’ve not known how to solve it (so) they’ve lived under the wire secretly. That’s no way to live.”

While other cases do exist, the issue appears to have had a disproportionate impact on Canada’s Mennonite community.

James Schellenberg of the Mennonite Central Committee described many of those affected as descendants of Mennonites who, by and large, left Canada in the 1920s for Mexico, Paraguay and elsewhere in Central and South America.

Starting in 2003, two years before the first of those who were affected began turning 28, Mennonite officials put advertisements warning of the law in newspapers popular among Mennonites.

Everyone I talked to seemed very confused. They didn’t know what exactly was going on.

Some people inquired at immigration offices but officials told them not to worry, said Marvin Dueck, an Ontario-based immigration lawyer who has worked on about 50 lost-citizenship cases.

“Once a Canadian, always a Canadian. That was a common response,” Dueck said. “And once a government official says that, why should they trust the Mennonite Central Committee?”

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