Bill C-3

An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025)

This enactment amends the Citizenship Act to, among other things,
(a) ensure that citizenship by descent is conferred on all persons who were born outside Canada before the coming into force of this enactment to a parent who was a citizen;
(b) confer citizenship by descent on persons born outside Canada after the first generation, on or after the coming into force of this enactment, to a parent who is a citizen and who had a substantial connection to Canada before the person’s birth;
(c) allow citizenship to be granted under section 5.1 of that Act to all persons born outside Canada who were adopted before the coming into force of this enactment by a parent who was a citizen;
(d) allow citizenship to be granted under section 5.1 of that Act to persons born outside Canada who are adopted on or after the coming into force of this enactment by a parent who is a citizen and who had a substantial connection to Canada before the person’s adoption;
(e) restore citizenship to persons who lost their citizenship because they did not make an application to retain it under the former section 8 of that Act or because they made an application under that section that was not approved; and
(f) allow certain persons who become citizens as a result of the coming into force of this enactment to access a simplified process to renounce their citizenship.

Citizenship Act

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for his question; he is absolutely right. The NDP work collaboratively with the Bloc, and they are absolutely onside to respect the constitutional rights of all Canadians, particularly women.

We have debated this matter. In fact, this very issue went before committee for 30 hours. We debated the matter at committee at length. We already debated it in the House for not one round, but two rounds. This should be made law. There is no—

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

Resuming debate, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to begin my remarks by thanking the hon. member who preceded me. It is one thing for a member to say they have championed the bill, Bill C-3, and repairing the rights for lost Canadians, but as a leader of a different party, I want to say that the hon. member for Vancouver East is absolutely right. She has championed this and championed this and not stepped back for one minute. It has not been easy.

We have had various versions of the bill come to us. We had a court decision that made it very clear that our citizenship laws are not charter-compliant. As I have, she has worked with a citizen, Don Chapman, who has championed this, who has brought forward the concerns. He wrote a book on lost Canadians to get people to see what has happened with citizenship, which used to be seen as a right passed down from parent to child. This is not new. I learned this in conflict of laws in law school, as I am sure, Mr. Speaker, you may recall. These kinds of things are not innovative. It is just very strange and disturbing for Canadians when our citizenship laws get contaminated with innovations, and citizenship is not treated as a right. That is one piece that is missing in Bill C-3. Should we have an amendment in Bill C-3 that says citizenship is a right?

However, there have been a lot of partisan jabs across the floor, even in the brief time that we have been debating this since question period. I want to take some of them up, because this is important for Canadians to know. There is another person, not in my party, whom I want to thank and make it really clear to our friends across the way in the Conservative Party. Another champion for the bill, mentioned by my hon. colleague for Vancouver East, is a Conservative, Senator Yonah Martin. She tried really hard to fix the bill. She has Korean ancestry. She has been a champion for the Canadian Korean community in many ways, including for those who suffered through the war. She is a friend of mine too, so I will admit that. Senator Yonah Martin brought this forward as a private member's bill out of the Senate to try to fix this, and as the hon. member for Vancouver East mentioned, there was a non-partisan effort among NDP members, Conservative members, Liberal members, the Bloc and the Greens to get this thing done. We were so close.

When Bill C-71 was tabled for first reading in June 2024, we gathered in the foyer with the former minister of immigration and members of families deeply affected by the unfairness of the way our citizenship laws are currently drafted. We were almost euphoric, and we were grateful to the former minister of immigration, who took this forward, who made the difference to having Bill C-71 brought forward. We were not, as an hon. member mentioned earlier, just propping up Liberals or cheering whenever Liberals did something. Again, this was the ultimate non-partisan effort led by a Conservative senator, supported by an NDP member and supported by all of us on all sides of the House. We thought we had it solved. Unfortunately, 25 bills then died on the Order Paper on January 6.

Now, it would have been nice to see the current government pick up on a suggestion I made in a written communication to the Prime Minister to please recover those bills, especially the ones that had broad, non-partisan support and had gotten this close to the finish line. Regarding the amount of waste, I imagine that millions of hours of work went into those 25 bills, many of them so close, such as Bill C-61 on first nations water sovereignty or Bill C-33 on rail safety and ports.

Let us celebrate this: The deceased Bill C-71 is back as Bill C-3. Let us hope we can have collaboration now. The Liberals here in the House today celebrate the collaboration they had in June; I have to say, that was not collaboration. That was the Greens, the Bloc and the NDP being bulldozed, with a new person driving the bulldozer in our new Prime Minister. I would say it was not just an unpleasant experience; it was an anti-democratic experience that was deeply troubling, and it was a bulldozer driver. It was a new coalition, the Liberals and the Conservatives, driving through a very anti-democratic piece, and the process was particularly anti-democratic. I hope we will not see that again.

I go back to Bill C-3.

If we are going to see this bill pass, and I hope we will see it passed expeditiously, I want to deal with some of the substantive charges that have been made in the House today in debate and put them to rest, I hope forever, so that we can return to our purpose in this place, to restore justice, to act for our constituents and to make sure we do the right thing.

This is not a partisan issue. It is about doing the right thing right now. We have a new bill before us, Bill C-3. It is almost the same as former Bill C-71, which died on the Order Paper because of the decision to prorogue Parliament on January 6.

We speak of things dying on the Order Paper; it is nice to see that every now and then we can have a resurrection. We have gotten Bill C-3 back, and it is close. I would love to have proper hearings and make sure that concerns that are being raised are dealt with by experts, with the ability for Canadians to see that we do not pass things with a gun to our head. That was Bill C-5. No committee was in in place when Bill C-5 went to second reading on Monday, June 16. No committee was yet started. On Tuesday, June 17, the committee was put in place at 3:30 in the afternoon. All amendments were due the next day, June 18, by noon, and concerns from groups like the Canadian Cancer Society could not be heard before amendments were due. We were in a hurry.

This place should be about getting things done efficiently, but not being in such a hurry that we do not do our jobs, so let us have a proper committee review of this legislation, which I think would put to bed some concerns, for instance, the idea of costs. There are Canadians who, just through peculiarities of mistakes made in the legislative process, have been denied their citizenship. We can get through this and get the actual numbers through a committee hearing process, but most of these lost Canadians live in Canada. They are not coming here as new people, just off a boat, where we wonder who they are. Most of these people have deep ties to Canada. Most of these people are already paying taxes in Canada and getting their health care in Canada. They have just been denied citizenship through the most egregious set of quite obscure and bizarre mistakes in law.

We can fix those. We can fix them now. We can fix them for good. The remaining question, I suppose, is this: Do we want to add an amendment that says citizenship is a right? Normally, I would not think we would have to say this, but when I look south of the border and hear that Donald Trump would like to take away Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship, I think maybe we ought to be concerned and make sure that we in Canada assert what is internationally understood law, that citizenship rights are rights.

People who are citizens cannot have their right to be a citizen taken away because someone in power has an obscure whim. Never mind. Citizenship should be a right. Under Bill C-3, we would be redressing the mistakes of many years and responding to the requirement of the court that we fix our citizenship laws to be charter-compliant.

With that, I know I still have about 90 seconds on the clock. I just want to make sure I plead with all of my colleagues, regardless of party, to take a step back and look at who the champions of this bill have been: a leading Conservative senator; a leading NDP member in this House; and all of us together, Green, Liberal, Conservative, Bloc and New Democrat, which is still a party in this House, by the way. Members can check the seating chart.

We are here to do the right thing and do it together.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is great to see you back in the House, and I want to thank my hon. colleague for her comments and the fact that she really did make some reasonable comments around what it means to be a Canadian.

I am sure that the member has heard a lot of the dialogue that has been going on, and there has been rhetoric around this bill, Bill C-3, which is intended to restore Canadian citizenship to lost Canadians and not anything else, but other colleagues have been talking about crime, trying to demonize this bill and trying to demonize immigration.

Can the member comment on why we should not frame immigration citizenship in the way that it has been framed today in the House?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my hon. colleague on her position in this place, representing the government as deputy House leader. It is wonderful to see a member who represents such an important part of Canada, young women, in Parliament.

I think it would be very, very wise for all members to reflect on our words. As members of Parliament, I urge them, all of them, regardless of party, to not listen to the boys in the backroom. They really need a lot of psychiatric help. Their main goal is power for its own sake, no matter what. This is a time for us as members of Parliament to do the right thing, and to look not for a gotcha moment but for a “do the right thing” moment.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Mr. Speaker, notwithstanding the member's speech, which conflated Bill S-245, which only deals with lost Canadians, with exactly what Bill C-3 is, which is much broader than dealing with lost Canadians, I have a hypothetical question for her.

According to my interpretation of this legislation, if a person who came to Canada from another country and got their citizenship then decided to return to the country they originally came from, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and had a child, and that child came to Canada under some pretense, got convicted of a crime for which they had to serve at least 1,095 days in a federal penitentiary and then returned to whichever country they came from once that was served, they would then be eligible to have their children automatically become Canadian citizens.

Did I hear that right?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member will have a perfect opportunity to hear from experts who have looked at citizenship law. That hypothetical was a little too much like “three people get on the empty bus, five get off, and then three more get on, so my question is, how old is the bus driver?”

To answer the hon. member's question, I would like to have sensible, thoughtful discussions in committee. If the bill needs amendment, then we should make sure the government allows us to do so.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as everyone is saying, we have spoken to this bill a number of times before.

Here we are again, spending another day studying this bill even though our position on it has not changed. We took a position last year, and if the House had not been prorogued and an election called, the bill would have been passed already.

Instead of doing what we are doing now and going over the same ground again, should we not completely overhaul the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to come up with measures and provisions that are more closely aligned with the reality of Quebec and Canada in 2025?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague and friend, the member for Rivière-du-Nord.

He is right. We definitely have bigger issues to contend with when it comes to immigration. That being said, we still have to deal with Bill C-3. He is also right to say that if former prime minister Justin Trudeau had not decided to prorogue the House, this bill would already be law in Canada. It has been almost a year.

All the same, we need to do the work, but I agree with my friend.

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again in the House of Commons, for the first time this fall session after a couple of interventions as a newly elected member in the spring. It is such an honour to be here to represent the great people of southwestern Manitoba and the Wheat City of Brandon.

Bill C-3 is an important topic. Our Manitoba Conservative caucus just completed a couple of days of caucus retreat to make sure we were hearing from different stakeholders, industry groups, etc., from the province, to make sure we are on top of issues coming back to Parliament today. We certainly heard a lot about immigration. It is top of mind for a lot of Manitobans right now. Manitoba has always been an interesting context within the framework of the overall immigration system across the country.

I recognize some comments from members opposite about immigration and that this is a citizenship bill, which is a separate conversation. However, if this bill ends up being passed in its current form, there would be a significant number of new Canadians as a result who would be eligible to be Canadian citizens and to receive all the rights and privileges that that entitles them to, which in effect still affects the number of Canadian citizens.

We are in a time when we are talking, in the broader immigration context, about the fact that all of our social services, particularly our health care system and, without question, our housing system, have not been able to compete and keep up with the number of people coming into Canada and becoming new citizens of this country. The members opposite seem to want to completely differentiate this conversation and say that it has no impact whatsoever, the context of who would be impacted by this bill. Certainly we on this side and the vast majority of common-sense Canadians understand that the two are related and that these two topics have to go hand in hand when we are talking about whether Canada is prepared to welcome these potential Canadian citizens, if they get their citizenship, back into the country and what the impact of that would be.

The member opposite also talked a lot about our colleague in the Senate, Senator Martin's Bill S-245. My colleague from Ponoka—Didsbury covered that quite well, in that that bill very specifically dealt with lost Canadians, which is certainly a challenging situation, and we supported it as Conservatives. I was not here, of course, being a newly elected member, but it is certainly something we supported. It is unfortunate that Senator Martin's bill was stalled and delayed by the Liberals and their allies in the previous Parliament. It should be law by now; it should be in effect. Unfortunately, Bill C-3 and its predecessor, Bill C-71, are dramatically expanded in the terms of their scope. We as Conservatives have some serious questions as well as some amendments to propose about exactly what we feel could improve this piece of legislation.

To be clear, we very much support the provisions that came from Bill S-245 by Senator Martin supporting section 8, lost Canadians. This is something that, as the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands mentioned, was a compounding of bad legislation that should have been addressed a long time ago.

We also support the equal treatment of adopted children. In a previous role, I worked for the Minister of Families in Manitoba. For those who do not have the context on that, Manitoba has one of the largest CFS systems in the country, a very tragic legacy of the treatment of children there. Too often, in both federal and provincial law, adopted children and adoptive families are forgotten about or left behind in the framework that we proceed under in supporting young families and children in this country. We certainly support that update to ensure that they are treated equally, as they should be, as true families.

However, there are lots of concerns. The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands used Rosie O'Donnell and the idea of her citizenship getting revoked by Donald Trump as an example, but Rosie O'Donnell was born in the United States, so that is not a good example in terms of the discussion we are having today. We are talking about people who were not born in Canada and their children who were not born in Canada.

On this discussion about the reasonable connection to the country of Canada, 1,095 days, or three years, and non-consecutive, on face value, to the majority of my constituents anyway, sounds like a long period of time. Let us look at that a little more at length. Someone who is the child of a foreign-born Canadian citizen and whose grandparents were born in Canada may have had summer breaks here as a baby, as a toddler, a couple of times in high school and a couple of times in their twenties, but then at 50, 60 or 70 decide they want to go through this process that the bill before us seeks to put in place to become a Canadian citizen. They may not have spent time in the country for decades, because there is no time frame imposed for when the 1,095 days have to be taken. Exactly when is that going to impact the systems that seniors who are Canadian citizens, quite rightly, come to rely on?

If we have thousands of people or tens of thousands, which is estimated, who are going through this process later in life, they may not have paid tax. Somebody across the way was saying that, “Oh, all these people who would be impacted by the bill are almost all paying taxes in Canada already.” Well, I am not sure why that would be the case if they are not citizens of this country now and they have never lived here. Members opposite cannot provide any evidence as to how many have paid into the OAS or GIS systems or into the health care system. In fact, their own department cannot tell us how many people the bill would make eligible for Canadian citizenship. In fact, IRCC officials were questioned on that the last time the bill, in its previous form, was up for debate, and the officials could not answer that question at committee. They have no idea how many people may now be eligible, if the bill passes, to claim Canadian citizenship after having never lived here or having spent only, at the minimum, 1,095 days here over the course of their entire lives.

I am not sure how the government can claim that it has been planning this out for years and has known about this for decades. Members opposite are very aggressive about how terrible this has been and that they needed to address it. It is coming 10 years into their mandate. They have no numbers to back up how many people this may impact, what the impact on our health care system may be and what the impact on OAS and other income supports may be. Why have they not done any planning?

Canadians, particularly young Canadians, are frustrated with immigration and the fact that they cannot find an affordable home, or that when they are expecting a child they cannot get into an emergency room to get the health care they need. These are issues that are top of mind for the young Canadians and the rural Canadians who sent me here to represent them as their voice. They do not believe in a Liberal government that has failed to plan time and time again and that has brought hundreds of thousands of people into Canada without the proper planning, without that expectation, and without criminal record checks or language tests in place. My constituents, and I think many constituents of colleagues across the country, expect better planning by the Liberals.

The Conservative team is going to put forward recommendations to improve the bill, so that there are real standards for these folks to be able to prove a commitment. The member for Provencher said earlier that we believe that Canadian citizenship requires an investment in Canada. If a person has not lived here their entire life and has no intention of living here, we do not believe that is a stringent enough requirement in order to qualify for Canadian citizenship.

That is the Conservative Party's position, and we look forward to further debate with members opposite on this legislation as it moves forward.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I will acknowledge right at the beginning that, at the end of the day, there is no doubt that members of the Conservative Party of Canada have amendments to make changes to the legislation. Hopefully, we will see it go to committee sooner as opposed to later. Conservatives seem to give the impression that they want to delay the passage to committee, which is unfortunate.

Having said that, my concern is with some of the wording that is being used, which is trying to give the impression, for example, that our health care issues and problems are because of immigrants and the numbers. The member, like me, is from the province of Manitoba, and whether it is the Premier of Manitoba, the Minister of Immigration or other ministers, they are saying that not only do they want to retain the people who are there today, but they want more, and they are also responsible for health care.

Can the member provide his thoughts in terms of what he believes the numbers are like in the province of Manitoba today?

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, we are coming at this from two sides of the issue. The member seems to think we are blaming immigrants solely as being responsible for our delayed health care. That is certainly not the case, but I think he would agree that when we increase population by half a million people per year for several years, some of those hundreds of thousands of people per year are going to need health care, and all of those people are going to need housing.

The member says that increased immigration levels are having no impact on our health care delays, and it is only Canadian citizens who are having an impact on our health care lag times. Yes, health care wait times in Manitoba are out of control; they are totally unsustainable. The Health Sciences Centre—Manitoba's Hospital has been listed by the union as a grey zone for nurses to work in.

I think the member is being a bit disingenuous when he says increased immigration levels are having no impact on our health care system.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, one of the questions that was asked to the government in the prior Parliament was how many people this bill might affect. That was when it was in its previous form, as Bill C-71, and the Liberals did not have an answer. They had no clue, basically. They could not make an estimate, which then leads to obvious questions. The member spoke about health care, but it also raises questions about other expenses we might incur.

Speaking on behalf of the taxpayers of Canada, what does the member think about that? Should there be at least numbers of people, so that there can be estimates of costs and impacts on Canada from this issue?

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I think any reasonable person would believe the government should have at least an estimate of how many people are going to be impacted by a policy before it introduces it into law, passes it into law and proposes to implement it for Canadian citizens and the general public.

The fact is that it has not done that now, and, as many other members have mentioned, the Liberals have been on this and have been ready to introduce this legislation for 16, 19 years. They have tried to impose it two different times. They were on recess for half this year. Parliament is at the lowest record of sitting, I think, in Canadian history since the Depression.

Hopefully, they have done that homework. Maybe one of them will get up today and deliver that number for us.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, welcome to the hon. member for Brandon—Souris.

There is one thing I probably should have mentioned in my speech, and it hit me as the member was speaking. In this conversation, we are leaving out what will happen if we do not pass Bill C-3 expeditiously. If it is not passed by November 20, the bar on first generation citizenship that was brought in in 2009, which has been found to be unconstitutional, will just be automatic; they will all get citizenship if we do not do this as the court has required.

We have had extensions from the court, but it is not going to give this Parliament another extension, so we will not even have, as parliamentarians, the ability to create the kind of guidance that is in Bill C-3.