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

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, we are here debating a bill today that the Liberals have proposed, which would give endless chain migration, the ability to pass down citizenship ad infinitum, to anybody. We just heard a speech, for those who are tuning in, that shows why this bill is so poorly designed.

A member from the Liberal Party stood up and, over and over again in questions and answers, which will be interesting to watch back, did not know how many people this would apply to in the future. At a time in Canadian history when we are talking about what the value of Canadian citizenship should mean, that the Liberal government has proposed such a reckless bill without really thinking through the implications really speaks to the utter disarray and brokenness of a decade of Liberal failure in Canada's immigration system.

The consensus on immigration used to be universal. It used to be a non-partisan understanding that immigration was a good thing and that numbers should be set in accordance with Canada's capacity to do things like house newcomers, provide them with jobs, let them start businesses or have health care. Now we know, based on public opinion polling, most Canadians realize the truth: We are in a jobs crisis, we are in a health care crisis, and we are also in a housing crisis.

Because the Liberals have increased immigration to such unsustainable levels, they are the ones who broke the consensus on immigration. Instead of fixing those issues, instead of listening to the concerns of Canadians, they tabled an ill-thought-out bill that would enable intergenerational, without limit, chain migration without any consecutive residency requirements, any substantial presence in Canada. That is just so wrong and irresponsible.

I am going to tell members what happened with this bill. This is what I suspect happened, because Liberals have come to talk to me privately about how incompetent they think the Liberal immigration minister is. They are shocked, and rightly so, that the Prime Minister would put someone so remarkably incompetent in that role on such an important file.

Let me give proof of how incompetent the immigration minister is. She was an immigration minister for eight years in Nova Scotia, and during that period of time, audits showed massive failures in vetting and setting levels and no response to Auditor General recommendations. She even said there should be no limits on immigration into her province. She said it in a CBC interview. She said there should be no limits, no caps.

Now the Liberals have put that minister in here, and if anybody has been watching her performance in the House, it has been abysmal. She does not understand basic numbers on how many people are coming in and did not really have a grasp on how many people were leaving the country who were supposed to. Now she has tabled this bill.

This is what I think happened. We have an incompetent minister who has to deal with this issue. There was a court ruling that the government chose not to appeal and needed to address somehow. Rather than take an approach proposed by a Conservative member from the other place, which had a tight, narrowly defined solution that would have addressed the court ruling, the Liberals teamed up with a far left, now independent, member of this place to utterly gut that bill and extend Canadian citizenship, turning it almost into a low-grade frequent flyer program. It is basically like someone would need to scan once every five years to get their loyalty program. That is really what this bill is.

A competent minister would have taken all stakeholder concerns and said that for the few people to whom the lost Canadian ruling applied, we should have a tight, narrowly defined bill to address it. That is what the minister should have done. She should have listened to the stakeholder feedback and endless debate in the previous immigration committee and fixed the bill such that it could have been something that could be passed through the House.

Instead, I do not even think the minister read the bill, to be honest. I think she probably took a memorandum to cabinet with whatever the department gave to her and said, “Just table the same thing.” That is what she did. I bet if we had the ability to question her at length, she could not go through the provisions of this bill. To me, that is not responsible government, given the impact of this bill, so let us talk about what this bill would do, because it is really important for Canadians.

With what colleagues opposite in the Liberal Party have been putting up in debate today, we can tell by their answers that they do not understand what the bill does either. They are going to just blindly vote for it without thinking through the enormous, non-partisan concerns that the bill would create for the value of Canadian citizenship.

Essentially, the bill would eliminate something called the “first-generation limit”. This was a provision that was put in place by a previous, Conservative government to put restrictions on how Canadian citizenship could be automatically passed down to people who do not live in Canada anymore, for the most part. For colleagues who want a little history lesson, this was precipitated by a situation that happened roughly 15 years ago, during the conflict in Lebanon, when there were what we would refer to as “Canadians of convenience”, or people who had no substantive ties to the country who all of a sudden claimed Canadian citizenship so that the Government of Canada would be obligated to evacuate them. At that time, that initiative, in 2006, cost the Canadian taxpayer almost $100 million, plus endless other ancillary benefits. Most of these people, the vast majority, had no ties to Canada at all. Most of them left and went back almost immediately thereafter. This raised serious questions.

It is tough to talk about conflict, but in this place we have to talk about what the obligations of the Government of Canada are to people who do not have substantive ties to Canada and then claim citizenship. To be clear to anybody watching this, I am not talking about the small number of people for whom the first-generation limit that was imposed affected. This is why a Conservative member from the other place did the job of the government for it in the last Parliament and tabled a private member's bill to close that loophole. We support those provisions. It is why a Conservative member from the other place put them forward. However, a now independent member, who lost party status in the last election, worked with the government to completely gut that bill and turn it into a chain migration bill, which is what we have here today, and that is not right.

We need to have a conversation in this country about the responsibilities of Canadian citizenship, and the minister started her speech with those words, saying there are rights and responsibilities to Canadian citizenship. However, her speech was entirely about the rights and failed on the responsibilities, and that is why the Liberal approach to immigration has been so broken.

Even on a macro level, members will remember the mantra of the last decade: Canada is a postnational state with no identity. Well, if we are a postnational state with no identity, what does Canadian citizenship mean? If we are tabling bills that would allow people with no substantial connection to Canada to, ad nauseam, forever and ever, pass on citizenship with no ties to this country, then that denigrates every person, including people who have immigrated to Canada and become citizens, started businesses here, worked as health care workers, paid taxes and become part of our Canadian pluralism. It denigrates citizenship for us all; it denigrates identity for us all. The beauty of our country, of course, is our pluralism, and it has saddened me as a Canadian to watch people across the country, Liberal, Conservative and NDP alike, lose faith in the value of immigration to Canada. Again, it is because the Liberal government has focused entirely on some sort of false, broken understanding of the rights of Canadian citizenship and has done nothing about the responsibilities.

Let us talk about the responsibilities. In the bill, there would be absolutely no requirement for somebody to live in Canada over consecutive days in order to receive Canadian citizenship. Practically, for a person living abroad, the bill would make it so that a great-great-great-great-great-grandma in the future, or somewhere in a person's ancestry chain, somewhere in their family tree, someone had Canadian citizenship, and then, sometime over their entire life period, they would only need to spend slightly over 1,000 days in Canada. It could be over 70 years, it could be over 80 years, but sometime, not consecutively, they just need to spend that amount of time in Canada, and then they would get Canadian citizenship.

We have to start talking about the rights that these people would then obtain. Practically, they would be able to get access to the Canadian health care system. Right now, Canada does not have any obligation even for countries that have tax treaties for people to file taxes when they have a citizenship situation like that. I am not talking about double taxation here. They would not have any obligation, in their responsibilities as a Canadian with citizenship, to pay for those services.

That is the way the bill is written right now. That is what it functionally means. Part of the problem in this place, sometimes, is that people have to think about what a bill would mean in 10, 15, 20 or 25 years.

Let us talk about how many people this could impact. In debate today, over and over, Conservative colleagues brought up the fact that in the last Parliament, for months, we tried to find out how many people this could impact. The now independent member, formerly NDP, lost massively in the last election because of policies like what this bill would support.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am being heckled. Members are saying, “Well, the NDP is not in government.” I do not know why the Liberals would just support their bill. It is completely strange.

Here is the thing: We do not know how many people the bill would affect. The government could not say, over a 10-, 20- or 30-year period, how many people would be able to draw health care benefits in Canada, draw on the services of our country.

We asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Again, he was kind of stonewalled in his analysis on the government, because I do not think it wants the public to know. I think the government knows how many people this could impact. Earlier my colleague said there is about four million people currently living abroad that have Canadian citizenship. We could start thinking about the exponential downstream impact the bill would have. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that at a minimum it is going to be 100,000 people over five years. That is his best guess.

Why would the Liberals propose a bill that would essentially allow mass chain migration to this country through automatic Canadian citizenship without any sort of substantive tie to the country? It really does speak to motive. Why are they doing this? They could have kept the Conservative bill with just a minimal scope, but no. They did this on purpose, and they have now done it twice. Instead of making amendments to the bill as were required, they have now done this twice.

There are two things that are missing in the bill that absolutely, 100%, need to be instantly changed. The first is that missing requirement of a substantial connection to Canada. I mentioned, in questions and answers, that the court ruling some of this applied to, which the Conservative bill and not the government tried to address, had a requirement or a definition for a substantial connection to Canada. How have the Liberals defined that? There is nothing. We heard that in the non-answer of the colleague who spoke just before. She could not really define that.

What we need is a substantial connection to Canada. Precedent for this type of situation in virtually every other country around the world is something like five or 10 years in a set period of time. Earlier my colleague from the Bloc asked if it would stop somebody from leaving Canada. It is usually five or more years within seven years, and at least a chunk of that is spent in the country as an adult, over the age of 14 or over the age of 16. That point was brought up in the hours of debate, with witness after witness giving testimony in the last Parliament.

The Liberals could have harmonized that with other jurisdictions around the world, but instead they purposefully tabled a bill with that missing. I think that they did that because, again, they want to have a devaluation of the Canadian citizenship. Let us think about it; it is literally like devaluing currency. If they want to refute me on this point, this should be their response: It should be that they will entertain an amendment to have a consecutive residency requirement, as a bare minimum amendment. That is what I think. That makes sense to me.

The second thing that the bill absolutely needs amended is the fact that there is no security vetting requirement whatsoever for somebody applying for this. Let us think about what that means. If somebody looks up their ancestral food chain and finds an ancestor who held Canadian citizenship, even though that person has never been in the country, they could come, three years over some period of the course of their life, and then be granted Canadian citizenship without having been vetted for any sort of security risk whatsoever. There is an automatic get-into-Canada pass with the bill, and that is not right.

I want to talk about fairness too because there are millions and millions of positive stories. Many people who now work and serve other Canadians in this place have migrated to Canada, played by the rules and played fair through Canada's immigration system. They checked all the boxes, waited for years, had security tests and had all of these different tests. I cannot imagine how they feel looking at this bill. It is not right, and it is not fair.

Again, I want to be very clear: I think one of the things that Canadians have always been proud of, and are proud of and open to today, is the concept of immigration that functions within the context of the pluralism of Canada. That does not work under what the Liberal government has done, which is increase immigration to a level that is so unsustainable that we do not have houses, we do not have health care and we do not have jobs to adequately address everybody in the country, newcomer or not.

I think what has happened here is the Liberals have tabled the bill without amendments, partially because of an incompetent minister. However, they have also put the bill forward without amendments because they put Bill C-2 in place. They broke Canada's asylum system so badly that they had to put the immigration provisions of Bill C-2 in there. That is another debate. I will have a lot to say on that in the future.

There are people, “consultants” in loose quotations, who have made an entire industry of scamming people who want to come to Canada to build a better life. I think the Liberals are afraid to stand up to those people. I think what they try to do is talk out of both sides of their mouth on this issue. That is why the bill came in unamended.

If the Liberals had come in with a bill with a narrow scope that looked a lot like our colleague's bill from the other place, in which she had very tight definitions to address the very real needs of some of the stakeholders who are considered lost Canadians, everybody could have supported that. It would have been fast-tracked. However, the Liberals and the former NDP members stalled the bill at committee because they gutted it and then made it this endless chain migration bill.

I need to hear from the government that it is going to amend the bill so that there is a substantive presence test that includes some sort of consecutive presence, as well as, at a minimum, security vetting for people this would apply to. The government has not signalled that, and every Canadian should be asking why. Conservatives will continue to press the Liberals on this issue because we will not let Canadian citizenship be devalued by poor Liberal legislation and the poor Liberal broken immigration system.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the results of the election are that the Liberal Party is back in government, and the former leader of the opposition did not make it back into the House of Commons.

I heard a lot about the spirit in which the Conservative Party was dividing Canadians. I just listened to the member degrade and speak with ill intent toward our members who have been speaking to Canadians, speaking to the people who send them to this House.

Can the member speak to how we can work, as members of this House, to better serve Canadians, with the understanding that the Conservatives did not come into government, because of the way they were treating Canadians?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to do that. In fact, I would speak to her boss, the Prime Minister, who appointed her as the House leader when the House was not sitting and then demoted her.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my Conservative colleague for her speech and for her strong convictions on this issue. We will not always agree on all the measures to be taken or on the entirety of a bill. However, it seems to me that in the case of this bill, everyone had pretty much agreed to finish with this measure, which has already been studied several times in previous versions of similar bills from the Senate and the House.

Does my colleague not think that we have much more pressing issues to deal with besides bills that we already debated in the previous Parliament? Should we not instead focus on everything that is wrong with the immigration department and try to do everything we can to fix it?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I refuse to accept that in order to litigate and hold the government to account for its endless failures in the immigration system, the House should have to accept a bill that is so deeply flawed as this and that extremely denigrates the value of Canadian citizenship.

I agree with my Bloc colleague. I cannot wait to work with his colleague, who is the spokesperson for the immigration committee, and perhaps himself, to litigate the government on its failures. Giddy up, we are going to do it.

At the same time, I hope my Bloc colleague would work collaboratively to come up with amendments that at least both of our parties can agree on. On the consecutive residency requirement, I heard my colleague from the Bloc earlier say he was worried about people being able to travel. I am sure we can address that, but also vetting requirements.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for that very thorough and thoughtful presentation she did on the inefficiencies of Bill C-3, which the government is trying to ram through.

How is it fair to legitimate immigrants who spend their entire lives contributing to this country when the government is ready to give citizenship away to people who have never actually lived here?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is not fair. If the government was serious about addressing that point, it would have tabled a bill that had some sort of consecutive residency requirement. I do not think that is asking for much, particularly since that is international best practice.

I do think that if the government was willing to accept an amendment to that point, it would solve all the problems. It would solve my Bloc colleague's problem about wanting to get on with the show. It would show the Canadian public that the House is serious about retaining the value of Canadian citizenship and not causing problems like what we were seeing without the first-generation limit. It would show some modicum of seriousness by the government to fix the immigration system it has so clearly broken.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am curious to know and I really do want to know how we can make the House function better and work together better, because that is what Canadians want from us. They want their members of Parliament to speak to each other like members of Parliament and find ways to work together.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, they should not table junky legislation. They should go to the immigration minister and say there was literally months and months of testimony that could have been included in this bill. She just pulled it off the shelf and then expected us to take it. This is not acceptable.

I will never back down on my responsibility to hold the government to account on behalf of my constituents. I know people do not like hearing it, but that is why I am paid to be here. This is what close to 60% of the good people of Calgary Nose Hill voted for on April 28: me standing here holding the government to account.

If the Liberals want to work collaboratively, they should not table junky legislation. It is easy.

[Roman Baber, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to contribute to the discussion of this bill, and I thank the shadow minister.

I am an immigrant to Canada. We immigrated in 1995 as landed immigrants. In the year 2000, I was blessed with the gift of Canadian citizenship. I remember that day, when my entire family went to St. Clair and Yonge and we took our oath of citizenship before a judge.

This is something I find to be so incredibly valuable, such a gift to so many Canadians. Now, what we see from the Liberal government is an attempt to essentially devalue, dilute Canadian citizenship.

Would the shadow minister be so kind as to explain to folks at home how this bill actually dilutes and devalues Canadian citizenship?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, regardless of political stripe, I am so glad and blessed that I get to work with people who chose Canada and came to Canada and migrated to Canada and that we have a diversity of perspectives in the House, but the value of Canadian citizenship should not be debased with bills like this.

Did members know that the government eliminated the need for in-person citizenship ceremonies? One does not even need to go and gather with a group of people to get Canadian citizenship anymore. It is these measures that the government needs to get serious about. We are having a moment when the government needs to lead beyond whatever it is talking about in terms of economic measures and really atone for the fact that it said we were a postnational state with no identity and supported the desecration of Canadian national symbols.

We have to get our act together, and it starts by amending this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am sure the member is aware that the Ontario Superior Court made a decision that ultimately led to the legislation we have before us today.

The Conservatives like to talk tough. Pierre Poilievre is out there talking about all sorts of restrictions in terms of new immigrants even coming to Canada.

I am wondering if the member is being influenced by the far right in regard to immigration policy and citizenship policy. Can she indicate to the House to what degree the far right is now influencing immigration and citizenship policy here in the House of Commons?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, what an embarrassment that comment was. It was actually beneath any person in this place, given the severity of the confidence crisis that people are having in Canada on immigration, which has been perpetuated by the Liberal government.

Before the member's question, his colleague asked a salient question about how we can make this place work. I would ask her to ask the question of that member, who has a reputation for making inane, thoughtless, completely irrelevant statements. I wish he would have asked me about an amendment to this bill. I wish he would have asked me about something productive, but instead he debased himself, just as the Liberal government debases itself with this legislation.