Halt of ‘Lost Canadians’ bill could mean citizenship for thousands born to parents with no ties to Canada

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Ottawa’s failure to pass a bill granting citizenship to Lost Canadians – children born abroad to foreign-born Canadians – could lead to thousands of people whose parents have never been here automatically qualifying as citizens.

Bill C-71 was one of 26 pieces of legislation stopped in its tracks this month by the proroguing of Parliament.

It was introduced by the federal government last year after an Ontario court ruled that it is unconstitutional to deny citizenship to children born in another country to Canadians also born outside Canada.

The bill is meant to reverse a change by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2009 that stripped children of a Canadian parent born outside Canada of their automatic right to citizenship.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer last month estimated that the bill could create around 115,000 new citizens in the next five years.

But now experts warn that the figure could be much higher. If the bill dies, thousands more children of Canadians born abroad, to those who have never been to Canada, would qualify for citizenship when the court ruling comes into effect in March, without added restrictions on who can be a citizen.

As well as restoring citizenship rights, Bill C-71 also limits who can pass on citizenship to ensure that Canadians born abroad, who have spent their entire lives outside Canada, would not be able to automatically confer the right to a Canadian passport onto their children. They would have to show, under the bill, that they were physically in Canada for at least 1,095 days (the equivalent of three years cumulatively) before their child’s birth.

Lawyer Sujit Choudhry, head of Hāki Chambers, who successfully brought the court challenge on behalf of his Lost Canadian clients, said Bill C-71 would have not only ended the second-generation cutoff but would have brought in “a substantial connection test.“

NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the death of the legislation, which she said was now likely, would mean that there are no safeguards requiring links to Canada.

“In my view, the substantial connections test outlined in the bill is a fair way to ensure that Lost Canadian families still have ties to Canada,” she said. “The failure to have this safeguard in place is on both the Liberals, who failed to take expeditious action to pass Bill C-71, and the Conservatives for putting up endless roadblocks to ensure Canada’s immigration laws are Charter compliant and that’s just shameful.”

Renée LeBlanc Proctor, spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Marc Miller, also blamed the Conservatives for obstructing the bill “which aimed to fix their own unconstitutional amendment to the Citizenship Act.”

“Conservative gamesmanship, which held the House hostage for months, sadly stalled progress on Bill C-71 since September,” she said. “Minister Miller is confident that a Liberal government would reintroduce this important bill to the House once resumed.”

However, the bill is unlikely to have enough time to complete its remaining parliamentary stages before the next election.

In December, 2023, Justice Jasmine Akbarali of the Ontario Superior Court struck down part of the Citizenship Act concerning Lost Canadians as unconstitutional. The ruling was originally due to come into effect on June 19, 2023. But the judge granted the federal government three extensions to give it more time to get Bill C-71 through.

In December, 2024, the judge “reluctantly” granted the federal government another three months to pass the legislation. It now comes into effect on March 19, 2025, unless the government applies for and is granted a further extension.

Remarking on the federal government’s lack of “legislative diligence” in December, the judge said that allowing the court ruling “to take effect without replacement legislation would cause a legislative gap that would result in an unclear and inconsistent application of citizenship law and an unknowable number of people becoming automatic Canadian citizens, some of whom may not wish to become Canadians.”

Don Chapman, a Lost Canadian advocate who has been calling for decades for the law to be changed, said the Conservatives “created an unconstitutional law and need to correct it” and should offer support for legislation restoring rights for Lost Canadians, including a test of ties to Canada.

He said a substantial connection test to acquire citizenship is “fair.”