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Tahir Qureshi
Tahir Qureshi is a senior sub-editor at India.com, whose primary duties are writing news related to different beats like National. World, Business, and viral. He also breaks stories and then follows t ... Read More
New Delhi: Canada is making major changes to its citizenship law. These changes will be made to the Citizenship Act under Canada’s C-3 Act. Specifically, it aims to ease the process of granting citizenship based on descent. This move by the Canadian government will benefit thousands of families of Indian origin. Indians constitute a significant portion of the population living in Canada, so Indian families could be the biggest beneficiaries of this change.
The Canadian government has not yet announced the date of implementation of this law. However, it has been approved and will soon become a reality. This change will eliminate the second-generation cut-off. Under current rules, children born outside Canada to Canadian citizens are barred from citizenship. The new change eliminates this problem.
The Canadian immigration agency, IRCC, states that the first-generation limit for Canadian citizenship by descent was introduced in 2009. This means that a child born or adopted outside Canada is not a Canadian citizen by descent if their Canadian parents were also born outside Canada. On December 19, 2023, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that key parts of the Citizenship Act related to this limitation were unconstitutional.
The Canadian government did not appeal this decision, believing that this was unfair to the children of Canadians born outside the country. The Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association (CILA) supported Bill C-3 in a submission to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Citizenship. The second-generation cutoff created second-class citizenship for Canadians born abroad. Many women had to come to Canada just to give birth.
CILA says Bill C-3 finally removes this unconstitutional barrier. Bill C-3 restores citizenship to those who lost it under the old rules. It further establishes a substantial connection test, which allows Canadian parents born abroad to pass citizenship to their children born outside Canada.
CILA states that this test is similar to regulations in the United States, Britain, and Australia. IRCC has stated that the reform aims to improve the rules while maintaining the value of Canadian citizenship. Canada’s Immigration Minister, Lena Metlej-Diab, says that Bill C-3 will address long-standing flaws in our citizenship laws and provide justice to families of children born abroad.
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