Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice has ruled it’s unconstitutional for Canada to deny automatic citizenship to children born abroad to parents who were also born overseas but have a substantial connection to Canada — a big win for “Lost Canadians” trying to reclaim citizenship rights.
After two generations outside Canada it feels pretty reasonable to deny automatic citizenship… naturalization is a path open to everyone and is quite achievable (as spoken by a naturalized citizen).
My father was a German emigrant. He became a Canadian citizen. He joined the Canadian Armed Forces. He was stationed in Germany, where I was born.
Take note of that: I was born abroad because my father was stationed abroad at the behest of the Canadian government in whose service he was.
Because of sheer luck in timing, my son, born in China, is an automatic Canadian citizen. But my son’s children would not be because I was born abroad … and again I was born abroad because my father was following the orders of the Canadian Armed Forces while serving his adoptive country.
The world is a metric fuckload more complicated than the simplistic view you’re seeing here. Perhaps you should, you know, listen instead of speaking.
Thankfully it sounds like this ruling will correct things for my son.
That feels like a perfectly reasonable carve out though, if you were born abroad because you were active duty military or part of the diplomatic core then we should probably count you as being in Canada. America, as an example, does that - service member children born abroad are considered to be born within the country.
And yet under the law that was just declared unconstitutional, it was not carved out, screwing my son over.
