Birthright citizenship means anyone born on Canadian soil is automatically a citizen of Canada.Sean kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
It gladdens the heart to see Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservative immigration critic, denounce the “anti-immigrant sentiment” that is “shamefully on the rise” in this country – because Canadians “mistakenly blame those who recently came to Canada” instead of irresponsible Liberal immigration policy.
Doubtless this disclaimer will help them to keep that distinction in mind as Ms. Rempel Garner and her party whip them into hysteria over the dire threat posed by birthright citizenship.
Jus soli, the rule that anyone born on Canadian soil is automatically a citizen of Canada (or, before 1947, a British subject), has been the law in this country since its founding. The Conservatives now propose to change that – not (thank goodness!) for me or thee, but only for a particular class of people: those who lacked the wisdom or foresight to ensure at least one of their parents was a citizen or permanent resident.
Why is this necessary? Surely a mainstream political party would not wish to make such an abrupt change to a longstanding legal tradition, except in response to some massive crisis.
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That’s certainly the tenor of Ms. Rempel Garner’s argument. There’s the “increased social tensions,” for starters, arising from “immigration levels that have outpaced housing, health care and job growth” – or as her party’s leader has put it, “temporary foreign workers [taking] the jobs of Canadian youth.” And of course there’s the problem of all those people coming to Canada with their “violent, extreme or hateful prejudices.” Not that we’re blaming the immigrants!
What does all this have to do, however, with whether or not to confer citizenship on a group of people who did not, in fact, come here, but were born here? The reason, Ms. Rempel Garner explains, is because birthright citizenship “is likely to be abused by people seeking to stay in the country after their visa expires or after a bogus asylum claim.” How likely? She cites a TikTok video. Again, not that we’re blaming the immigrants!
You see the problem. All those spongers here on expired visas and bogus asylum claims, swamping our housing and health care systems and taking our youth’s jobs, and using – or “likely” to use – their conveniently produced babies to cling to our soil. Somebody has to stop this scam, pronto. Er, not that I’m blaming the immigrants.
It all seems so easy that you would think more temporary residents would be taking advantage of it. Of the roughly 370,000 children born in Canada each year, Statistics Canada figures show the number of live births to non-resident mothers since 1991 has averaged between 300 and 400 a year: about 0.1 per cent of all births. True, since 2021 the number has increased sharply, to about 1,600 last year. That’s not entirely surprising, at a time when the number of temporary residents has ballooned to more than 3 million.
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It’s often argued StatsCan’s numbers are an undercount. Hospital discharge data maintained by the Canadian Institute for Health Information appear to show the number of births to non-residents at three to four times that number: peaking at more than 5,200 in 2024, or (gasp) 1.4 per cent of all births. But still: 3 million temporary residents, and only a measly 5,200 babies? A ticket to citizenship, if not for themselves then at least for their kids, that 99.8 per cent of them pass up?
If that suggests the problem of “birth tourism” is more rhetorical than real, there is still the principle: doesn’t it “devalue” Canadian citizenship to hand it out to the children of non-citizens? Let’s follow that line of thought. So we deny them citizenship. What happens then?
The critics are right to suggest that a good many of those 3 million “temporary” residents, perhaps as many as half, are likely to remain in Canada, more or less permanently. And yet their children born here would be denied citizenship? A permanent underclass with no legal connection to the country they’ve lived in their whole lives? Is that likely to encourage a sense of belonging, or the contrary?
There are countries that have adopted this rule, but they’re not particularly happy examples. Would anyone claim that Britain or France has a superior record when it comes to integrating immigrants? Or Germany, which, before the law was changed in 2000, denied citizenship to people who had been living there for generations? If we’re talking about “peer countries,” why talk about Old World countries, and not about most of the New World, immigrant-based countries like us, where jus soli is the norm?
I’d say this is a solution in search of a problem, but it’s more like an accelerant in search of a flame. Birthright citizenship works fine. Leave it alone.