the CanadaVisa Team - 23 July, 2015
A recent Citizenship and Immigration Canada report recommends that the federal government retroactively restore Canadian citizenship to thousands of 'Lost Canadians'. These people have had their citizenship denied or unknowingly allowed to expire because of several obscure clauses in the 1947 Citizenship Act.
These little-known particularities of Canada's citizenship laws came to light earlier in the year when there was a large flow of Canadian passport applications; many people who had lived in Canada all their lives were told that they were not in fact Canadian citizens. Some of these people are children of Canadian parents but were born in another country or children born in Canada whose parents later became American citizens. Another significant portion of these 'Lost Canadians' are foreign-born family members of Second World War veterans, granted citizenship when they moved to Canada after the war, but were unaware of the little-known clause requiring them to reaffirm their citizenship later in life.
This past May, Citizenship and Immigration Canada Minster Diane Finley announced that a new law to help most 'Lost Canadians' to regain citizenship would be created. A new bill is expected by February 2008. The recommendation is to retroactively grant citizenship to all those born in Canada or abroad to a Canadian parent since 1947.
