Articles,Citizen and Immigration
Toronto Star: A new law will finally grant citizenship to ‘lost Canadians’. Are we ready for the consequences?
Last week, faced with a court-imposed deadline, Immigration Minister Marc Miller introduced new legislation that would automatically give citizenship to people born outside of Canada to Canadian parents, as long as the parents have lived here for a cumulative 1,095 days before the child’s birth.
The legislation, Bill C-71, will correct the arbitrary creation of a generation of ”Lost Canadians”. Under the current Citizenship Act, subject to a few notable exceptions, a person born outside of Canada would only be a Canadian citizen if their parents were either born in Canada, or naturalized in Canada. If their parents were born outside of Canada and became a Canadian citizen through their own parents, they did not qualify for Canadian citizenship by descent.