Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Canada Gave Them Citizenship. Then Changed Its Mind

How Ottawa bungled its new immigration rules

Edward Jeep had been carrying his Canadian passport for barely a month when the government told him it was no longer valid.

The fifty-five-year-old Washington, DC–based US military retiree was travelling in Europe. He had flown from Cardiff to Amsterdam and entered the Schengen Area using the Canadian passport issued to him in May. While he was abroad, two messages arrived from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. The first, on June 13, said IRCC had placed the proof of citizenship issued to him under review and required him to surrender his certificate. A week later, another notice said his passport had been revoked and had to be returned within fifteen days.

Jeep’s was one of 100 similar cases that were flagged, with the number of those whose proof of citizenship was revoked remaining unclear. The suspensions came as IRCC’s proof-of-citizenship processing has been under strain. The department’s public processing-time tool recently showed a projected wait of about nineteen months, with nearly 100,000 people in line for a decision.

Jeep returned to the United States using his American passport. “Nobody has given me a conclusive answer whether there’s some database someplace that thinks I’m still in Europe,” he told me. He worried the mismatch—with him having entered the Schengen Area as a Canadian but having left an American—could create problems if Canada later issued him another passport.

Jeep had applied for and gotten citizenship under a recent law. Since 2009, Canada’s Citizenship Act had limited citizenship by descent to the first generation born abroad. A Canadian born or naturalized in Canada could pass citizenship on to a child born outside the country. But if that person, too, later had a child outside Canada, the offspring could not claim citizenship by descent. That rule became known as the first-generation limit. After an Ontario court found parts of that limit unconstitutional, Parliament passed Bill C-3, which came into force on December 15, 2025, expanding citizenship by descent to people who had previously been excluded.

Jeep decided to trace his claim through an ancestor named Margaret Brisco, who appears in the 1851 Census of Canada West as an eleven-year-old Roman Catholic girl born in what is now Ontario and living in Northumberland County. The census index estimates her birth year as 1840. At the time of his application in February, Jeep submitted a baptismal record, census records tracing the ancestor’s life in Canada, and certified documents connecting every later generation. Because the original church archives were closed for renovations, he also included a letter from the Archdiocese of Kingston confirming that the records could not be obtained directly. Based on these documents, he was issued a proof of citizenship in April, following which he obtained a Canadian passport in May.

But IRCC’s surrender notice in June said his evidence was not from “original source authorities.” It also said he had not explained why source documents were unavailable or shown his efforts to obtain them—the two things Jeep says his application had expressly addressed.

For applicants such as Jeep, this was not an ordinary immigration pathway. They were not asking Canada to admit them as newcomers and then allow them to work toward citizenship. A successful application under Bill C-3 bestows citizenship by descent rather than through naturalization, with applicants recognized as Canadians since birth or January 1, 1947—when Canadian citizenship became a legal status—whichever was later.

That legal distinction sits awkwardly inside the politics of the moment. Ottawa has been trying to reduce temporary-resident numbers, with IRCC announcing plans to set targets for that demographic for the first time and to bring their numbers down to 5 percent of Canada’s population. At the same time, Bill C-3 opened a path for people living abroad—some with little or no recent connection to Canada—to have citizenship recognized through ancestry.

Eligible descendants did not have to first live in Canada, pass a citizenship test, show knowledge of English or French, or complete the process expected of permanent residents seeking naturalization. Some may never move here. Others, including Americans worried about conditions in the US, saw the law as something more practical: a route to safety, mobility, a respectable dual citizenship, or a possible future in Canada.

That is where the certificate suspensions became more than a paperwork problem. Canada had widened the legal doorway to citizenship.........

© The Walrus