In 2007, the UN's Refugees magazine listed Canada as one of the top offending countries for making its own people stateless. In 2009, the Conservatives promised to fix the issue of lost Canadian citizenship with Bill C-37. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Worse still, the Conservatives created a new group of lost Canadians.
Currently, a large group of Canadians are deemed to be second-class citizens due to the Conservative government's first-generation cut-off rule, introduced by the Harper administration in 2009. Bill C-37 ended the extension of citizenship to second-generation Canadians born abroad, causing undue hardship for many families. Some families are even separated, and some individuals are left stateless.
I spoke with Patrick Chandler, a Canadian citizen who spent most of his life in Canada but was born abroad. As an adult, he worked overseas, married someone from another country, and had children. He was later offered a job in British Columbia, but when he moved back to Canada, he had to leave his wife and children behind because he could not pass on his citizenship to his children. He had to go through an arduous process to reunite with them a year later.
Many families are being impacted in this way, and it is unjust. Canadians should not be put in such situations, yet many are suffering through them.
Since being assigned as the NDP Immigration, Refugee, and Citizenship Critic, I have been advocating to resolve the issue of Lost Canadians, including tabling a Private Member’s Bill in 2016.
NDP MP Jenny Kwan is looking to team up with the governing Liberals to scrap proposed restrictions to birthright citizenship for “lost Canadians.”
The New Democrat recently filed notice for several motions that, if passed, would delete amendments made by the House immigration committee to Bill C-3, also known as the ‘Lost Canadians’ bill, which would restore citizenship to people born in a foreign country to Canadian parents who were also born outside Canada.
Earlier this month, Conservative and Bloc Québécois committee members passed amendments that would require people eligible for birthright citizenship under the proposed law to fulfill residency and security requirements — similar to prospective immigrants.
The changes would force ‘lost Canadians’ to spend at least three cumulative years in Canada over a five-year span and demonstrate an adequate knowledge of either English or French to become eligible for citizenship.
“To say that I was disappointed is an understatement,” said Kwan in an interview with iPolitics. “To me, it is absolutely disgraceful… [so] I’m looking to restore the bill to its original form.”
“What [the Conservatives and Bloc] did conflates the rights of immigrants, who have to earn citizenship, to ‘lost Canadians,’ who actually have a birthright to pass on their citizenship to their children. To conflate those two things, I think it’s sneaky and I think it’s unCanadian.”
