Incorrect. It does make a person automatically a citizen from birth, hence the reason they only need to apply for PROOF of citizenship whereas those eligible for citizenship (such as a PR meeting the requirements) must apply for a GRANT of citizenship. They may not desire to assert their Canadian citizenship but it doesn't change the fact that they are a citizen.
Yes you are correct, it does legally make one a citizen in Canada's eyes. But what I'm saying is that there are some grey areas when it comes to recognition of Canadian citizenship and where it's enforced. For all intents and purposes, if one is unaware of or never bothers to recognize their citizenship, they can effectively live their entire life as a non-citizen.
Typically citizenship would be enforced in PR apps. When IRCC sees someone's parent was born in Canada so that person is a citizen by decent, they should be ineligible to apply for PR in any form.
In another scenario, some countries do not allow dual citizenship. So if a child is born in one of these countries to a Canadian parent and other parent is citizen of that country, the child would initially be a citizen also of that country. If someone in this case wanted to travel to Canada, they would not be able to get a Canadian passport since that could cause their birth citizenship to be revoked. So when applying for eTA, they would not be able to state they are Canadian citizens. I highly doubt IRCC/CBSA would accuse someone of misrepresentation in this case, and I'm sure there are many cases of this where people simply don't know they're Canadian since they didn't know 1 parent, or don't understand citizenship rules. I suspect that they would be fine applying for eTAs their entire life to travel to Canada (though would be curious if there were any cases of people getting in trouble for this).
If someone was born to a Canadian parent outside Canada, I suppose they would need to legally renounce their Canadian citizenship through a formal process even though they never applied for proof or recognition of that status in the first place, to be declared officially NOT Canadian.
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