| Historical Information |
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| This post is about a previous Session of Parliament. Any legislation here that did not receive Royal Assent has been terminated. |
C-71 – An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2024) – makes changes to the Citizenship Act to fix gaps caused by changes made to it in 2009.
Background
So first up a bit of history here. In 2009 some changes were made to the Citizenship Act, part of which was to grant retroactive citizenship to a number of groups of “Lost Canadians”. (People who qualified for or had citizenship but weren’t aware of it and missed their chance to claim it). These amendments also introduced the “second-generation cutoff”. Basically if you’re a Canadian citizen and your children are born in another country they count as Canadian citizens. Any children they have that are born abroad are not Canadian citizens. So citizenship is only granted to the children of parents that are naturalized Canadians.
In 2023 the Supreme Court ruled that this clause was unconstitutional. The argument was that it creates a second class of Canadian citizen, one whose children won’t count as citizens unless they can get back to Canada and have them born here. This brings us back to C-71, which changes the Citizenship Act to be in line with the court’s ruling.
Changes to the Citizenship Act
The first chunk of the changes C-71 makes have to do with patching up holes created by changes made to the Citizenship Act in 2009 and restore citizenship to people who lost it because of these changes. One example here is that leading up to 2009 a second generation or later person born abroad was granted citizenship but had to apply to keep it. This had to be done before the age of 28 and required the person to live in Canada for a year before applying. When the second generation cut-off was introduced these people lost the option to keep their citizenship. People who were planning on applying (or who were in the process of spending their one year in Canada), or people who weren’t even aware this change was coming because they lived abroad, suddenly had no chance to keep their citizenship. C-71 restores citizenship to these people.
There’s a number of similar adjustments here, such as giving citizenship to people whose Canadian parent died before they were born.
Second, we get to the part that actually addresses the second-generation cutoff. The big change here is that for the second generation onwards, you count as a citizen if your Canadian parent(s) spent at least 3 years living in Canada before you were born. There’s no requirement on when they have to have spent that time in Canada, just that they’ve done so at some point in their lives.
Progress of C-71
C-71 was waiting for its Second Reading when House Session 44-1 ended. The government can choose to revive it with unanimous consent or a vote, but we’ll have to see if they decide that’s a priority when the House comes back.
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