In the last quarter of 2017, there were almost 972,000 non-permanent residents living in Canada. By the end of 2024, that number had hit more than 3.1 million.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Most of our peer nations figured out a long time ago that automatically granting citizenship to anyone born on their soil was problematic. That’s because the principle of jus soli can create citizens with zero actual ties to the country, incentivize illegal migration and other mechanisms to game the immigration system, and place a financial burden on the citizenship-bestowing nation. That can be particularly expensive for a country like Canada with universal, socialized health care and other public entitlements.
So, roughly 40 years ago in the case of Britain, and 30 years ago for France, governments tweaked their rules to require that at least one parent hold citizenship or permanent resident status. There are exceptions: provisions that bestow citizenship to the children of certain parents who have lived in the country for a prescribed period of time (children of Algerian parents in France, for example), and provisions that grant citizenship to children that would otherwise be stateless. The U.S. under Donald Trump is now attempting to do the same.
Perhaps it is for that reason that Canada’s Liberal government has recoiled at efforts to end birthright citizenship; if Mr. Trump is doing it, so the logic goes (albeit in his clumsy and likely unconstitutional way), then it is bad, and Canada should not emulate this bad man’s regressive actions. When asked Wednesday about a proposed amendment by Conservatives to a citizenship bill that would have effectively ended jus soli, Justice Minister Sean Fraser was unequivocal. “I think when you start to pick and choose who amongst Canadians gets the full benefits of citizenship, you obviously enter into a very troublesome conversation,” he said.
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Of course, changing Canada’s nationality rules wouldn’t be about choosing which Canadians get full benefits, but rather, about clearly identifying who is entitled to citizenship in the first place. Our peer nations already figured this out; it appears to be working for them just fine.
Clearly Conservatives have identified an issue that aligns with the public’s mood on immigration, so it’s no mystery why, after taking it up more than a decade ago, they have revived their concern about birthright citizenship now. But there are also material indicators that suggest we might see a wave of new Canadians with no or tenuous ties to Canada – both from the resurgence of birth tourism, which dipped temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, and because of the huge number of non-permanent residents currently living in Canada.
It’s difficult to get a complete picture of how many parents who are not citizens or permanent residents are giving birth. Using figures about women who “self-pay” for births at hospitals, Andrew Griffith at Policy Options calculated that tourism births – by which women travel to Canada specifically to give birth – increased to 5,219 in 2024, which is nearly back up to Canada’s prepandemic high. There may be some overlap in that number with the number of births by non-residents, such as temporary foreign workers and international students, since some of them will not be covered by provincial plans or direct-bill insurance from their schools.
Those who are covered, however, are outside of that calculation. An analysis of hospital deliveries from the early 2010s to 2017 found that approximately 6,000 births annually were by non-permanent residents; “more specifically, around 4,000 births were by temporary foreign workers, more than 1,000 by international students, and around 1,000 by refugee claimants and TR permit holders, annually.”
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In the last quarter of 2017, there were nearly 972,000 non-permanent residents living in Canada. By the last quarter of 2024, that number had ballooned to more than 3.1 million. If a comparable proportion of those residents have babies while in Canada, it will mean thousands more children with citizenship whose parents may or may not be entitled to stay in the country, but whose citizenship will absolutely complicate immigration decisions.
In Baker v. Canada, which involved a Jamaican woman with Canadian-born children who was ordered deported, the Supreme Court ruled (among other things) that immigration authorities must treat the best interests of the child as a primary consideration. That doesn’t mean that deportations will necessarily be stayed where an appellant has a child who is a Canadian citizen, but it will be a significant consideration – more so than if the child holds only the same citizenship as his or her parents – when deciding if individuals may stay in the country. There is a clear incentive for non-permanent residents, especially those who know they don’t have much of a path to permanent residency, to have babies while still in Canada.
This is not how our immigration system should work, and not how citizenship should be conferred. A change doesn’t have to be complicated, or even controversial. We just need to pretend Mr. Trump doesn’t exist, and follow the path laid by peer nations decades ago.