Canada’s long-overdue legislation to address the injustice faced by “Lost Canadians” finally received royal assent this week a moment worth celebrating, but hardly one that should allow us to pretend the job is done. While the new law corrects an unconstitutional rule that stripped citizenship rights from people born abroad to Canadian parents, it also creates a fresh category of unequal treatment that lawmakers chose to ignore despite clear warnings.
At its core, the legislation aims to repair a 2009 change that prevented Canadians born abroad from passing down citizenship unless their children were born in Canada. Last December, the Ontario Superior Court rightly ruled this limitation unconstitutional, forcing Parliament to act. The new bill introduces a more flexible rule: citizenship can be passed on to children born or adopted abroad beyond the first generation as long as the parent has spent a cumulative three years in Canada before the child’s birth or adoption.
On paper, that sounds like a sensible middle ground. In practice, it falls short.
The most glaring problem is the bill’s treatment of intercountry adoptees children born abroad but adopted and raised in Canada by Canadian parents. Saskatchewan Sen. David Arnot made this point forcefully. Under international law, specifically the Hague Convention, intercountry adoptees must be treated the same as domestic adoptees. Yet this law applies a “substantial connection test” to them that domestic adoptees never face.
These children already undergo one of the most rigorous immigration and vetting processes Canadians can imagine: provincial and territorial approvals, anti-trafficking checks, foreign government authorizations, and federal citizenship reviews. After all of that, their rights as Canadians should be unquestioned. Instead, when they grow up, if they happen to live abroad and have their own children abroad, they will have to satisfy a test their Canadian-born peers never have to consider. It’s a legal inequality created entirely by legislative negligence.
Immigration lawyers Sujit Choudhry and Maureen Silcoff are preparing for a potential Charter challenge on this very issue one that could have been avoided if MPs and senators had the political will to fix the inequity when it was flagged. Even attempts by MPs Nate Erskine-Smith and Jenny Kwan to clarify adoption rules were dismissed. The message this sends to intercountry adoptees is unmistakable: your citizenship is conditional, unlike everyone else’s.
And this wasn’t the only place where thoughtful amendments were shut down. Conservatives and Bloc members on the immigration committee attempted to clarify the timeframe for the substantial connection requirement, only to have their proposal reversed. A similar attempt in the Senate met the same fate. Whether one agreed with those specific amendments or not, it’s hard to ignore how dismissively Parliament handled any attempt at genuine refinement.
In the rush to meet the court’s January 20 deadline, lawmakers sacrificed nuance for speed. But rights are not something to rush through or approximate.
Canada prides itself on fairness, equality, and respect for international obligations. Yet in this legislation, Parliament chose to paper over inequities rather than fix them. The government deserves credit for addressing the unconstitutional first-generation limit, but leaving intercountry adoptees in a legally inferior position is unacceptable.
If Canada truly wants to repair its citizenship laws, it must finish the job not leave it to the courts, and not leave thousands of Canadian families wondering why their Canadian-raised children are still treated as second-class citizens.
This law may have received royal assent, but the debate is far from settled.
