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

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I, too, would like to congratulate my colleague and friend who will also soon be celebrating 10 years in the House. We were elected at the same time on October 19, 2015, although he served as a member of the Quebec National Assembly before that, and I did not.

I also want to thank him for his kind words about the history I gave on this bill. I try to learn as much as I can about the history of Quebec and Canada. However, the Bloc Québécois relies on a tremendous team of researchers who help us put what we already know into words.

The problems in my riding are growing. I would say that about half of the constituency casework that I do to help the people of Joliette is related to the Department of Immigration, and it is not as though I am serving in a downtown Montreal or downtown Toronto riding. This act should have been reformed 10 years ago to simplify the process. It is a matter of dignity.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Joliette—Manawan for his excellent speech.

Earlier, a Conservative colleague said that if this bill were passed, people with no connection to Canada could end up becoming citizens. However, I believe that this is addressed in the wording of Bill C-3, which states that a substantial connection is required.

What I find a little more troubling is that she wondered whether people who apply for citizenship would deserve it. I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on this. Really, is a child born in—

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

I must interrupt in order to give the hon. member for Joliette—Manawan the opportunity to respond in less than 10 seconds.

The hon. member for Joliette—Manawan.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as I read Bill C-3, its purpose is to resolve this issue. It is not a question of being deserving or not. If the parents and grandparents were temporarily abroad at birth, it should—

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings of the House.

The House resumed from September 15 consideration of the motion that Bill C-3, An Act to amend the Citizenship Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

Mr. Speaker, today, we debate a very familiar piece of legislation to the House that has been brought back from previous parliaments. Bill C-3 may be newly introduced, but the substance of the bill is more of the same. It is the same broken car that the Liberals tried to drive through the House last year with a different coat of paint.

Let us be clear that it was originally Conservative legislation from the Senate. Bill S-245 was a private member's bill containing provisions to address lost Canadians. The Conservatives were supportive of the original substance of that bill, but thanks to the Liberal government, the bill was significantly amended, and it eventually stalled at report stage. In May 2024, the Liberal government tabled Bill C-71, which drastically went beyond the original scope of Bill S-245. Therefore, we started with Bill S-245, then we had Bill C-71 and now we are dealing with Bill C-3.

Bill C-3 has three separate pieces of information that must be understood individually. The first part is citizenship by descent. We may not agree on everything in this House, but I believe we can all agree that becoming a Canadian citizen is a privilege. However, as written, Bill C-3 undermines Canadian citizenship. In fact, Canada has important safeguards in place that protect our citizenship, like the first-generation limit.

I want to stress that we have policy like this for a reason. As my colleagues have mentioned, at the height of the 2006 conflict, Lebanese Canadians living in Lebanon looked to the Canadian government for help, and Canada answered the call, spending $94 million to successfully evacuate 15,000 Canadians to safety. Despite living in Lebanon full time prior to the conflict and having little connection to Canada, they still benefited from their Canadian citizenship and became known as Canadians of convenience. Following a ceasefire in the conflict, many Lebanese Canadians immediately returned to Lebanon. This was a wake-up call for Canada, and in 2009, the previous Conservative government responded with implementing the first-generation limit. This reasonable measure set out that only the first generation of children born abroad to Canadian citizens could automatically obtain citizenship.

Members may be shocked to learn that this safeguard for Canadian citizenship against Canadians of convenience would be eliminated by Liberal Bill C-3, as written. The Liberals seek to replace this safeguard to obtaining citizenship by descent with something called a substantial connection requirement. This extremely weak requirement simply means that parents must prove they spent 1,095 non-consecutive days physically in Canada before the birth of their child. This legislation would not even require a criminal record check.

The Liberals believe that parents spending a few weeks or months spread out over decades is enough of a substantial connection to automatically extend citizenship to multiple generations of people born outside of Canada. We still do not understand what evidence would be required as proof that parents spent just over 1,000 days in Canada at any point in their life. Through Bill C-3, the Liberal government could be opening Canadian citizenship to people with criminal records or to individuals who may not even realize they could claim Canadian citizenship in the first place.

When the previous version of this legislation was studied, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that as many as 115,000 new citizens outside of Canada could be created. According to the National Post, “The government has no idea how many people will be automatically granted citizenship if the legislation is passed.” Why would the Liberal government create a new system with a potentially limitless chain of migration? This is deeply concerning, but after 10 years of the Liberals destroying our immigration system, we cannot be surprised.

The second part of Bill C-3, which the Conservatives do support, is the adopted children provision. Right now, provisions in the Citizenship Act state that when a Canadian citizen adopts a person born outside of Canada, the parent would need to start a lengthy process of applying for a child's permanent residence. Instead, this bill would remove an unnecessary burden on adoptive parents and treat an adopted person as if they were born here in Canada, automatically granting Canadian citizenship to the child. This is a simple and reasonable approach to achieving equal treatment for adopted children, and the Conservatives support it.

Third, we come to the restoration of citizenship to lost Canadians. As a result of compounding legislation and amendments to section 8 of the Citizenship Act, a group of people born to Canadian parents between February 15, 1977, and April 16, 1981, had to apply to reinstate their citizenship before turning 28 years old. Those who did not apply to reinstate their citizenship lost it, despite being raised in Canada, going to school here and starting their families here. The Conservatives support the provisions in Bill C-3 to correct this error.

Canadians are paying the price for the Liberals' out-of-control immigration policies. Let me be clear. Immigration is important to our country, but the government must have control over it. Right now, the Liberals have zero control over their immigration policy. Effective immigration policy should be tied to outcomes, and it should consider the supply of housing, health care and jobs. This is important not only for Canadians who are trying to buy a house, find a job and get a family doctor; it is equally important for newcomers. It is wrong to set immigrants up for failure in a country that does not have the capacity to support them. Unfortunately, the Liberals have lost complete control over immigration.

Let us examine health care, for example. Last year, the Liberals brought in nearly a half a million permanent immigrants. Meanwhile, 6.5 million Canadians do not have a family doctor. The Liberals see no problem adding hundreds of thousands of new patients to a health care system that is already overburdened. Emergency room closures are occurring on a regular basis while health care workers are burnt out from working millions of hours of overtime. Canada is currently short at least 23,000 family doctors and 60,000 registered nurses, with these numbers set to dramatically increase in the next few years. Someone does not need an economics degree to understand that the increasing demand on our health care system through unfocused immigration while the supply of capacity is collapsing is a recipe for disaster. I guarantee that our health care system is only going to get worse under the Liberal government's failed immigration policy.

The Liberals are not just driving up demand through their failed immigration policy; they have failed to build capacity too. While the government adds record demand to our health care system, it is restricting the supply of qualified health care professionals from working. According to the health minister's own department, of the 200,000 internationally trained health professionals employed in Canada, 80,000 are not working in their field. Eighty thousand internationally trained health care professionals who immigrated to Canada thinking there was a place for them to contribute to our overwhelmed health care system are being blocked from working.

I met a vascular surgeon from Brazil who has years of training and experience yet sees no path to practising in Canada. The Liberals bring doctors and nurses to Canada for their expertise but block them from working in their profession. I was in Toronto, where I met a doctor from Argentina with many years of experience. She came to Canada hoping to use her skills and experience to provide care for our people. Today, she works at Home Depot because gatekeepers and licensing bodies block her from getting certified to practise.

For 10 years, the Liberals have turned immigration into a numbers game while ignoring capacity, ignoring the needs of Canadians and ignoring the very newcomers they claim to welcome. Blocking doctors and nurses from working while adding millions of new patients to a broken health care system is insane. We cannot fix our broken health care system without fixing our broken immigration system first. The Conservatives are committing to fixing that problem. We should only invite the right people in the right numbers so that our health care system can catch up. At the same time, we must implement a national blue seal professional testing standard to ensure that foreign-trained health care workers can work in Canada. We must enable health care workers to take their skills wherever they are needed across our country.

The Conservatives know that the parts of Bill C-3 have potential, but we cannot support rushed Liberal legislation that is so poorly thought out. The Conservatives will make recommendations to improve this legislation and implement real safeguards to strengthen the citizenship we are so blessed to have.

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

Mr. Speaker, provinces need to do a better job of recognizing the skills that immigrants bring to the country, in particular in health care. That has been a chronic problem since I was first elected back in 1988. Provinces must take the lead.

The member made reference to immigration and tried to blame immigration for the capacity problem in health care today. Some of the greatest shortages among doctors in Canada today are in the province of Manitoba, and both the premier and the Minister of Immigration in Manitoba want the current immigration levels to stay. They want everyone who is in Manitoba to stay in Manitoba. They want to increase the numbers.

Does that not conflict with what the member is saying? Does he believe the home province we share is wrong on its immigration request?

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I did say in my speech that we need immigration, without a doubt, but we cannot ignore the fact that our health care system is absolutely overburdened. We will not even allow professionals who have been trained abroad a pathway to practise in the profession that they have been trained in in other countries. That is just insane.

The Liberal government has propped up that same failing system for the last 10 years, and as the member admitted, he has done nothing about it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I take exception to that. At every opportunity I get, I advocate for recognizing the credentials that immigrants bring to Canada. The member and the Conservative Party need to realize that we cannot just say we will have a blue seal program. There is no depth whatsoever to that program. This is something we have to get the provinces to agree to and participate in.

Has the Conservative Party done any engagement with the provinces to give any legitimacy at all to their blue seal program?

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

Mr. Speaker, yes, we have had lots of engagement right across this nation.

I was in Nova Scotia during the summer. I have talked a lot to provinces across this country, and right across this country, we are hearing that there are millions of Canadians waiting for a family doctor now, 6.5 million Canadians. We have immigrants coming in, trained professionals, from other countries, and we have seen no uptake. They have no path forward. That is what the blue seal program is about.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the member for Riding Mountain for his connection with communities over the summer. I watched his social media. He managed to connect with the people.

We are dealing today with a government bill that is identical to a bill that was brought forward in the previous Parliament. The Liberals rejected amendments then, and the bill did not make it through the last Parliament, but they brought it back without change. It is like the old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

Can the member tell me what he has heard from constituents in his riding? Why does he think the Liberals are not listening to people?

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

Mr. Speaker, what I have heard across the country is that citizenship is very precious to Canadians. We cherish it very much. It is a privilege and world-renowned. Canadian passports are sought after, and people from all over the world know that.

Unfortunately, the Liberals have taken an approach where they have cheapened it. They have basically said that people can come from anywhere, live here a little while and have full access to all our programs and all the great things that make Canada the fantastic nation it is. What I am hearing from constituents and people right across this country is that we please protect our Canadian citizenship and work to make it so it is cherished and upheld by the rest of the world.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is great to be here and to talk on behalf of the great people of Dufferin—Caledon, who have re-elected me to come to the House of Commons and fight for common sense, which is often a difficult thing to do with the Liberal government.

This piece of legislation is the perfect example of why we have to fight. I want to talk a bit about how the Liberals have absolutely destroyed the consensus in Canada on immigration, botched the immigration system in so many ways and brought that incompetent approach to this particular piece of legislation. The consequences for this will be far and wide, and, ultimately, Canadians will pay the price, as they have done for all the Liberal mistakes, errors, debacles and corruption over the past 10 years.

What pains me the most in talking about the breakdown of the consensus on immigration and refugees in this country is the fact that my wife came to Canada as a refugee. She is a Kosovar Albanian. Canada had a wonderful program, Operation Parasol, to bring Kosovar Albanians fleeing the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo at that time.

To see the reports from the past 10 years on the decline of the consensus in Canada, known as a beacon of acceptance for immigration and refugees, because of Liberal incompetence is really heartbreaking. I think most Canadians are heartbroken because of this.

There are a couple of polls that address this, which are really, in my estimation, tragic. Pollara had a study in 2025 that compared views from 2002 to 2025. In 2002, immigration was viewed as a positive plus 31. In 2025, it is now down to a plus 2. That is a 29-point decline as a result of the mess that the Liberals have made with respect to the immigration system. These are catastrophic declines.

Looking at the share of people who believe that Canada is accepting too many immigrants, again, we go back to 2002 and it was 34%. We look at 2025 and it is now at 60%.

Who is responsible for that? It is not the fault of the people who have come to Canada. They came to Canada because they wanted the opportunities and better life Canada provides, just as my wife and her family did. My wife came to Canada with English as a second language. In fact, she spoke no English and went to high school; she went on to get a master's degree, and she has had a great career. That is the epitome of why people come to Canada, because of the opportunities this great country affords.

When we look at what the Liberals have done, at the mess they have made of the immigration system, it is a tragedy for all Canadians. The buck stops 100% with the people on the other side. It is their fault because they have made this absolute mess.

I could talk for three hours about the actual specifics of the mess, but I would point out that at one point, the Liberal government allowed an accused ISIS terrorist to immigrate to Canada. This person was accused of being in a video in 2015 in which they dismembered someone, and the Liberals let this person come to Canada. This is the disrepute they have brought the system into.

In 2024, I did an OPQ, and I asked how many people were processing applications in CIC and how many applications were actually coming in. Then we could do some simple math. I know math is not great for the Liberals; they think that an affordable housing program is 4,000 houses for $13 billion, so math is not their strong suit. However, when we actually broke down the number of people who were processing the applications and the number of applications coming in, because the Liberals had set the levels so high, it worked out that someone assessing an immigration application had 30 minutes per application. One can imagine how someone such as the person I just described ended up in Canada. When we increase the volumes of people to such high levels and have no security screening, we end up with the challenges we have.

Now the Liberals have brought forward a piece of legislation on citizenship. I will say, I am a proud Canadian. I know my wife is a proud Canadian, and her whole family are proud Canadians as well.

The Liberals have created a very weak substantial connection test. What does that mean?

Most people who are listening will not understand what that means, so I am going to explain it. It means that, according to the Liberals, if a person wants to have Canadian citizenship extended to them and their children for generations, they have to spend 1,095 nonconsecutive days in Canada.

They have not even said what the proof for that is. Somebody can say they spent 1,095 days in Canada over the last 25 years, and their children, their children's children and so on will all get Canadian citizenship. This is weakening Canadian citizenship.

The Liberals do not even know the numbers of people this would affect, how many people this citizenship is going to be extended to. Also, there would be no security checks. We just talked about how the lack of security checks let an alleged ISIS terrorist into Canada, someone who was on a video in 2015 dismembering someone, but they do not think security checks would be an important part of extending citizenship to people who have no real connection to Canada.

Maybe they spent 1,095 days in Canada at some point over their lifetime, maybe not, because we do not know how they are going to prove it, and they do not have to have a security check. The Liberals are going to try to say that this is all very normal, that they are solving a problem. It is not normal. This approach is not normal in the developed world. The United States, Britain, France and Italy all cap citizenship to the first generation born abroad.

This is important because there is value in Canadian citizenship, and they are going to extend this to all kinds of people who have very little connection to Canada. We actually do not have the numbers on how far that will extend. We have maybe some estimates, but even the government does not know.

This, of course, does not surprise me, because the Liberals come up with things on the back of a napkin and never know what the consequence is going to be. It was much like this when I was the shadow minister for the environment, and I asked the deputy minister at the time what the actual build-out of the cost of the charging network all across Canada would be when we get to the 100% zero-emission vehicle mandate.

They looked at me and said they have not calculated that to the end point. They are going to mandate that no one gets to drive a gas-powered vehicle, that all vehicles have to be zero-emission vehicles, but they do not know what the cost of the charging network is going to be. That is how Liberals have run this country for the last 10 years, which is why we are in the mess we are in on a whole host of levels.

I just had a town hall in the town of Bolton a couple of weeks ago, and immigration was absolutely on the agenda. When I talk about the statistics of the decline in support for immigration, I can say that I felt it in person at that meeting. People are saying the numbers are too high.

I did not get the opportunity to do so, but if I had talked about this particular piece of legislation, I know what the good people of Dufferin—Caledon would have said. They would have said it is ridiculous. Many of the people in that town hall are immigrants; they came to this country because they wanted the opportunity Canada provides. They would have been outraged by the decision to do this.

What has been the consequence of the mess the Liberals have made of immigration in Canada? We can look at the jobs market. The big topic of discussion at my town hall was that my constituents' sons and daughters cannot get jobs. This is one of the reasons we have said we are eliminating the temporary foreign worker program: Far too many people have come into this country and taken jobs away from Canadians. The TFW program is a part of that problem.

The Liberal mess on immigration is going to take a very long time to fix. When we look at this, we see another absolute mess happening that the Liberals did not need to make. They could have fixed this problem very simply, but they did not. They chose a weak test; with 1,095 days at any point in someone's life, they get Canadian citizenship and they can then pass it on to their children.

This is a terrible piece of legislation. Conservatives fought it in the last Parliament. We will fight it in this Parliament, and we will seek to make amendments to bring some common sense to this terrible piece of legislation.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for outlining the issues that we on this side of the House have with this piece of legislation. I know he has mentioned his wife and his wife's family, who came to Canada and have embraced becoming Canadian citizens.

I wonder if he could comment on what the impact is of reducing the requirement to obtain citizenship on those individuals who are coming to Canada, who are going through the process, who are perhaps even fleeing persecution. What impact does that have on those individuals who have gone through a very lengthy process?