Death of former MP Andrew Telegdi and the “Lost Canadians”

2017/02/06 2 Comments

I wasn’t aware of Telegdi’s role with respect to “Lost Canadians” as most of this occurred before I assumed responsibility for citizenship policy but clear that he played a strong role in helping the main advocate, Don Chapman, and the others who had been affected.

The following letter by Marion Vermeersch is an example:

For me, it all started when my brother and I learned our family had citizenship stripped in 2004 when he (by now retired from the Canadian Navy) went to get a passport.    I soon learned that we had lots of company, as the Canadian War Brides Museum in Fredericton was flooded with calls like mine,  family members of WWII veterans and War Brides who had just learned they were no longer Canadian citizens.  The curator there, Melynda Jarratt,  put us in touch with Don Chapman and the Lost Canadians:   now we learned we were just one of 12 groups – 12 “reasons” for stripping citizenship, all of which sounded ridiculous (born out of wedlock,  born on a CF Base overseas, etc.)

By 2007, the government was studying the matter and invited several Lost Canadians regularly to testify.   It was my turn in March, 2007 to go to Ottawa – nervous and naive, but wanting to help the thousands of us out of citizenship at that time.  When I got there,  Don Chapman was waiting for me and several other Lost Canadians, and that was when I met Mr. Andrew Telegdi,  the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

Andrew was very welcoming,   helped us with procedures to ensure that our process of testifying before the Committee was heard by the members of the four political parties present.   He provided excellent leadership, courteous, orderly and patient,    His presence really helped to lessen the intimidation some of us felt in speaking before the Committee,  not all of whom seemed to be favourably disposed towards the idea of citizenship for us.

And what a nice man he was!  Andrew took time from what must have been a busy schedule to talk to us (along with Jim Karygiannis, another supportive MP) at lunch and showed us some of the Parliament Buildings,   even arranging for us to see some of the budget debate going on in the House.   It was truly empowering,  I found, to know that I was far from alone and that we had him there working to support our cause,   that here we had an MP who truly understood and cared about Canadian citizenship and social justice.

Under Andrew’s work in parliament,  we were able to see amendments made to the Citizenship Act in 2009 which restored citizenship for many.   Andrew continued to work for years afterwards as an advisor and advocate for Lost Canadians among all his other causes,  whether his party was in government or not.

This is a big loss for us as remaining Lost Canadians, especially for Don Chapman who has lost a friend as well as someone to share the load of work in fighting for our citizenship.     I hope that Andrew’s work towards democracy and justice in citizenship will be recognized and remembered,

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University class takes on case of B.C. woman stripped of citizenship [Lost Canadian]

2016/12/06 Leave a comment

Good learning exercise (unclear whether the the person in question applied for an exemption, the normal route in such cases, which on the facts presented in the article, would likely have been granted):

A group of university students in Squamish, B.C., is hoping their school work will help change the life of a woman whose Canadian citizenship was stripped under a little-known policy.

Leanne Roderick, an instructor at Quest University, wanted the 20 students in her democracy and justice class to meet someone who was really wrestling with representative democracy in Canada, so she introduced them to a local woman named Byrdie Funk.

Funk was born in Mexico to Canadian parents and moved to a small community in Manitoba when she was two months old. Though her upbringing was quintessentially Canadian, Funk learned earlier this year that her nationality had been revoked.

An unknown number of people born abroad to Canadian parents between 1977 and 1981 were stripped of their nationality because they were unaware of an obscure piece of legislation requiring them to apply to retain their citizenship before the age of 28.

The American election made immigration a popular topic of conversation, and Roderick wanted her students to see how a real person was impacted by government policy.

“To be able to sit down with someone and hear their story, a very real story, I just wanted to put a face on this big issue of citizenship in Canada,” she explained.

After Funk spoke to the class, Roderick tasked them with developing a policy brief advising government on how politicians could help so-called lost Canadians.

The results were surprising, the instructor said, with students delivering in-depth, well-researched plans that included suggestions of private members’ bills and amendments to the Citizenship Act.

“They really are passionate. I think that age range kind of gets a bad rap sometimes, but they really do care and they really do want to be politically engaged citizens,” Roderick said.

Several students forwarded their work to MPs and cabinet ministers, encouraging them to get involved in Funk’s case.

Third-year student Ellie Fraser sent her policy brief to four MPs, but said not one responded, even with a note thanking her for writing.

Source: University class takes on case of B.C. woman stripped of citizenship | CTV 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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Arcane Law Continues To Strip Canadians Of Citizenship

2016/09/20 Leave a comment

More on the ‘Lost Canadians’ issue and the few remaining cases.

While one can always do more to communicate changes – and there were efforts to do so – it is not surprising that some people only become aware when they are confronted, through renewing a passport or moving back to Canada:

The [retention provisions of the 1977 Citizenship Act] law was drafted in the 1970s out of concern that citizenship could be passed along indefinitely to generations abroad who were less and less connected to Canada, said Audrey Macklin, a law professor at the University of Toronto.

Macklin said it wasn’t necessarily unfair, at least in theory, to require someone twice removed from being born in Canada to prove a connection to the country.

The problem, though, was rooted in the government’s inability to identify and inform those people that their citizenship would “evaporate” if they didn’t take specific steps to retain it, she said.

Lindsay Wemp, a spokeswoman with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, said in an email that the immigration minister can offer discretionary citizenship in extraordinary circumstances on a case-by-case basis.

Funk said she contacted Minister John McCallum’s office in July and has yet to receive a response.

Citizenship statuses on ‘narrow hinge’

Donald Galloway, a University of Victoria law professor, said he didn’t think the government has taken the necessary steps to let people know “the narrow hinge” their status was hanging on.

“I think it’s quite shocking to live in a country where the government creates these byzantine rules and says ‘Well, it’s up to you to know the details,'” he said.

Source: Arcane Law Continues To Strip Canadians Of Citizenship

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Time to rewrite Citizenship Act, ‘Lost Canadians’ advocate says

2016/03/08 Leave a comment

Don Chapman continues his crusade for the few remaining cases of ‘Lost Canadians.’

It appears that the main focus of his efforts is more with respect to posthumous recognition of Canadian citizenship and their descendants. There do not appear to be any hard numbers showing this is a significant issue (at least that I have seen) although there are a few anecdotes that he cites:

When it comes to immigration law, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likes to say, “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” — but one advocate says it’s actually not that simple.

The Liberal government should be taking more steps to help law-abiding people whose road to citizenship is blocked by the existing law, said Don Chapman, a longtime champion for so-called “lost Canadians.”

It’s time for the Citizenship Act to be scrapped and rewritten, Chapman said — and he believes the upcoming 150th anniversary of Confederation is the perfect time.

Those born in Canada were considered British until the definition of Canadian citizenship was established in 1947– which is where the problems began.

For instance, a baby born to a Canadian woman outside the country’s borders would not have been deemed Canadian if the mother was married to a man of a different nationality, but would be if the mother was unmarried.

In 1977, an updated law created new issues. It established the concept of dual citizenship, but did not restore Canadian citizenship for those who lost theirs when they switched under the earlier law.

The consequences of these two pieces of legislation were people who became known as “lost Canadians” — mostly those who believed themselves to be citizens, but by law were not.

The act has been amended several times. There are now 18 definitions of what makes a person a Canadian citizen with more than a dozen caveats, linked to everything from what year they were born to whether their parents were Canadian diplomats or soldiers.

Still, Chapman said he hears from people nearly every day who have suddenly learned they aren’t citizens, or can’t get the decades-old birth certificates of their now-deceased parents to prove that they are. They end up in endless battles with the government or before the courts, and need a citizenship ombudsman who could help, speeding up the system at the same time.

And yet the first thing the Liberals did with the Citizenship Act was to restore the status of a convicted terrorist, Chapman said.

They did it with Bill C-6, introduced last month to revoke a provision of the existing law that allowed dual citizens to be stripped of their Canadian citizenship if convicted of terrorism or other crimes against the country.

A government spokesman said changes to the Citizenship Act in 2009 and 2015 restored or granted citizenship to the “vast majority” of lost Canadians.

And there are ways to address cases that weren’t covered, Immigration Department spokesperson Nancy Caron said in an email.

“The minister has the authority to grant citizenship on a discretionary basis to alleviate cases of special and unusual hardship,” Caron said. “Those cases are assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

Source: Time to rewrite Citizenship Act, ‘Lost Canadians’ advocate says | CTV News

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Formerly stateless Yukon man celebrates hard-fought Canadian citizenship

2015/05/25 1 Comment

Nice to see a successful resolution to a case like this:

A decision by his anarchist First Nation father and Caucasian mother not to register his birth out of fear he’d end up in a residential school started a life-long bureaucratic tussle.

With no birth certificate, he couldn’t get identification, a legitimate job or even medical care.

But a team effort of citizen advocates, a pro bono lawyer, friends and family members, brought together by media attention, altered his plight.

Finally a Canadian, McGlaughlin said he can apply for a Social Insurance Number, health-care card, driver’s licence, marriage certificate, then travel to British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest to see the spirit bear and California’s redwood forests — a dream of one of his sons.

“All my life, yeah, dogs have had more rights,” said McGlaughlin. “They (governments) enact more laws pertaining to dogs and cats than they do to help stateless people. I’ve always said I should just go buy a dog tag and wear it around my neck, and there. There’s my ID. I’m Fido.”

McGlaughlin doesn’t know where or when he was born, only that it was between Rosebud, S.D., and where his maternal grandparents lived in Guelph, Ont., around Jan. 19, 1954, the day he celebrates as his birthday.

Fearing the government, his parents home schooled him and moved around Canada, he said, adding he broke loose when he was 15 and worked “migrant jobs” on farms.

About 30 years ago, he hitchhiked to the Yukon, where he has lived ever since, supporting himself by hunting and fishing on aboriginal land.

The first in a series of heart attacks struck in 2010 and because he had no health-care card his medical bills rose to about $130,000, he said.

Michelle Quigg, a lawyer with the Access Pro Bono Society of British Columbia, which helps people of limited means, said she began to help out after reading a news story about McGlaughlin in which he mused about declaring refugee status.

She helped him apply for citizenship, citing a “special and unusual hardship.”

“The … hardship in Donovan’s case is that he has no documents, which is very unusual,” said Quigg. “I mean most of us have birth certificates and all kinds of official documentation that Donovan didn’t have.”

Formerly stateless Yukon man celebrates hard-fought Canadian citizenship | CTV News.

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Declare soldiers who died fighting in WWII Canadians – Macleans.ca

2014/11/12 Leave a comment

The last battle of the “Lost Canadians” are the deceased:

Don Chapman and Howe Lee want Canadians to know that those who died before 1947, and whose graves are marked with maple leaves, are still not officially considered citizens by the federal government.

At issue is Ottawa’s interpretation of the law, which holds that citizenship didn’t officially exist until Jan. 1, 1947, when the first Citizenship Act came into effect.

Chapman, of the group Lost Canadians, has started a petition, calling on the federal government to recognize as citizens the war dead who were killed before 1947.

…Sonia Lesage, a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, said the legal concept of Canadian citizenship has only existed since Jan. 1, 1947.

“That was not retroactive, and the act which created the concept contains no authority to grant citizenship posthumously,” she said in an email.

Lesage said recent reforms have included extending citizenship to more “lost Canadians” who were born before 1947 and to their children born outside of Canada.

…. [Green Party Leader Elizabeth] May said she has agreed to introduce the petition to Parliament when it’s ready.

“For the most part, this is a matter of respect and setting this historical record straight,” she said.

“These people were Canadian. And these soldiers, these people who gave their lives for this country, were Canadian citizens at the time and should be recognized as such, despite the weirdness of our laws.”

Declare soldiers who died fighting in WWII Canadians – Macleans.ca.

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‘Lost Canadians’ advocate: Committees won’t hear us on citizenship bill

2014/06/07 Leave a comment

More on Lost Canadians, Don Chapman, and the decision by the Government at CIMM not to hear his and Melynda Jarrett’s testimony (C-24 Citizenship Act Hearing – 14 May):

Chapman applauds two provisions in the legislation: guaranteed citizenship for children of Canadian government or military workers living abroad, and the recognition of citizenship for people born out of wedlock before 1947 that were alive in 1947. However, he said there are still gaps in the bill that will affect many Lost Canadians.

“It doesn’t include the people who died before 1947,” said Chapman. “They’re refusing to answer the question, ‘Were our war dead Canadian citizens?’”

Second, Chapman said there will still be problems for some second-generation Canadians born abroad. And he said that there are some 40 to 50 Canadians who have not been granted citizenship through Section 5.4 of the Citizenship Act, a special provision that grants citizenship on a case-by-case basis.

Chapman said someone has to appear before parliamentarians to make the case for Lost Canadians in bill C-24. After the kerfuffle at the Commons committee last month, Chapman contacted the Senate committee to explain why he should testify.

At the Senate, only Melynda Jarrett will give testimony and Don Chapman will be submitting a brief.

‘Lost Canadians’ advocate: Committees won’t hear us on citizenship bill (pay wall)

 

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Citizenship – Varia

2014/03/12 Leave a comment

Catching up on citizenship issues while I was away.

Good piece by Nicholas Yeoung of the Star sharing some anecdotal reactions to the proposed changes to the Citizenship Act:

http://read.thestar.com/?origref=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FcyqfDhUNZj#!/article/53147e0bec0691be4e000037

More on the British revocation provisions regarding those convicted of or suspect of terrorist activities. In contrast to the proposed approach by the Canadian government, the UK Minister has the authority, not the courts, and the UK does not intend to respect the international convention on statelessness:

How a British Citizen Was Stripped of His Citizenship, Then Sent to a Manhattan Prison | The Nation

Some op-eds on perceived remaining issues related to changes in the government’s approach to citizenship, starting with the first generation limit and a somewhat plaintive complaint about the impact on his daughter, born, living and growing up in the USA, who will not be able to pass on her Canadian citizenship to her children. Part of the risk of expatriate life, and if it is that important to her family, there are a number of paths available (but none are cost-free, ranging from the family spending time in Canada, to the daughter marrying a Canadian or giving birth in Canada).

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/my-daughters-second-class-citizenship/article17124132/

A more serious issue is to what extent is the government required to provide consular assistance, given the increased range of situations Canadians find themselves:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/if-canadian-citizenship-becomes-more-exclusive-it-must-become-more-meaningful/article17133298/

No surprise that an ATIP request shows that the proposed shorter waiting time for people serving in the Canadian military is more symbolic than real, with only a minimal number of potential applicants:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/globe-politics-insider/tories-citizenship-fast-track-for-soldiers-would-have-little-effect-figures-show/article17348121/

The usual monthly update on citizenship processing stats, showing improvement given Budget 2013 money. The test is whether the government will continue to publish these stats should the trend turn, or commit to service standards and quarterly reports, rather than press releases when it serves their interest.

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2014/2014-02-28.asp

And pity the abandoned Chinese millionaires:

http://feedly.com/e/uTyR2SKo

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Longtime resident seeking citizenship hits bureaucratic wall

2013/10/15 Leave a comment

Another illustration of just how broken the citizenship program is. Common sense should have prevailed. And why officials don’t think things through and require people to go public. After all, when once they do, the bureaucracy has to move in any case.

Longtime resident seeking citizenship hits bureaucratic wall – British Columbia – CBC News.

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