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 , ,

Are Immigrants Prone to Crime and Terrorism? – The Atlantic

2016/06/17 Leave a comment

The evidence and linkages between crime and social exclusion:

But in terms of both crime and terrorism, immigrants are not the problem Trump says they are.

Study after study after study bears out mostly the last part of his remarks: Immigrants largely commit crimes at a lower rate than the local-born population. Those numbers are true even of the children of immigrants. Writing in the Oxford Handbook of Crime and Criminal Justice, Sandra M. Bucerius, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, noted:

“Second-generation immigrants typically have higher crime rates than first-generation immigrants. In the US context, however, most second-generation immigrants continue to enjoy lower crime rates than the native-born population. In stark contrast, research findings in European countries indicate that some second-generation immigrant groups have crime rates that drastically exceed those of the native-born population.”

I asked Bucerius about immigrants and crime (not terrorism), and she told me that though most studies do not differentiate among different immigrant groups, researchers do know there are some “immigrant groups in every Western country that we have data on that [are] more criminally involved than the average.”

“We also know,” she said, “that those groups always experience social, economic and/or political exclusion higher than the average. This does not imply that all immigrants who are socially excluded become criminals. Yet, exclusion and discrimination seem to be a risk factor.”

Bucerius points out that that while studies point broadly toward lower crime rates among immigrants and their children, these studies do not—and often cannot—speak to differences across different ethnic or religious groups. For instance, she says, there are no studies that compare crime rates among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

“What we can say is that—in some European countries— like Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, or France, we see a disproportionate number of second-generation immigrants involved in crime who are likely Muslim,” she said. “However, for these groups in particular, we need to take the very problematic history of guest-worker integration into account, and consider the highly problematic relationship between France and Algeria [and] forced secularism.”

Bucerius spent five years studying predominantly Muslim Turkish, Moroccan, and Albanian drug dealers in Germany, and the resulting book—Unwanted: Muslim Immigrants, Dignity and Drug Dealing—examines how different policies and exclusion practices cause and foster alienation among immigrants communities. For instance, she points out, most second-generation immigrants born in German in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s are not German citizens.

“They were born and raised in a country that they could never become citizens of, and constantly live with the fear of deportation,” she said.

Source: Are Immigrants Prone to Crime and Terrorism? – The Atlantic

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Man’s immigration status wins him slightly shorter sentence

2015/08/18 Leave a comment

Makes sense when someone has spent most of their life in Canada and thus their criminality was Canadian in origin:

In a recent judgment, Justice Fergus O’Donnell credited a Vietnamese man, Hoang Vu, for the equivalent of just under six months already served and gave him a suspended sentence with three years’ probation.

Considering the crime alone, O’Donnell said, an appropriate sentence would have been six to eight months. That would have made Vu unable to challenge a possible deportation order under the newly passed Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act.

“Mr. Vu left Vietnam as an 11-year-old boy. After two years in an Indonesian refugee camp he arrived in Canada as a 13-year-old boy. He is now a 43-year-old man,” O’Donnell wrote in the decision released this month. “At this point in his life, Vietnam is a foreign country to him.”

The Star was not able to reach O’Donnell or the Crown for comment over the weekend. Vu’s lawyer said he needed to confer with his client before commenting.

Vu, who has 11 prior convictions, had pleaded guilty to a single count of assault with a weapon, a charge to which the defence recommended a sentence of under six months in prison. The Crown had recommended 15 months.

Under the Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act, non-citizens sentenced to terms six months or longer cannot appeal to the Immigration Appeal Division if a decision is made to deport them. Before the new law came into effect this year, that threshold was two years.

Experts said judges do have the right to consider a convicted person’s status when sentencing — but with only a little discretion.

Man’s immigration status wins him slightly shorter sentence | Toronto Star.

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