Three of my father’s grandparents were born and raised in Canada - but migrated to the US about 1900. Which seems to firmly place me in this potential pool.
But every source I read,(including that produced by the Canadian Government) is lacking details in what options that opens up.
As a US citizen, can I apply for duel citizenship?; or is this a path toward separate Canada citizenship.
As a very uncomfortable (and retired) US citizen, I would like to explote rational options.
Dual citizenship isn’t bestowed by a government. It’s s state of being. Your American citizenship exists in a separate sphere, and if you apply for Canadian citizenship, it is unaffected.
If you apply, you’re essentially asking the Canadian government to grant you citizenship based on ancestry, which should be a straightforward matter of proving descent from a Canadian citizen, paying the fees, and waiting.
Just to add, some countries forbid dual citizenship, but it’s very common to have dual citizenship between the US and Canada. Citizenship in one country is neither an obstacle to obtaining residency status or citizenship in the other, but neither is it a help. My brother held both US and Canadian passports as he was a legal citizen of both.
Trump did issue an EO forbidding dual citizenship, but that does not have the power of law. It is only his instructions to his employees. Sadly, there is the danger that Border Patrol and other agents of the Executive Branch will treat it as if it were a law. So once you do this, I wouldn’t recommend returning until this regime has ended.
Maybe I’m being dense, but the article seems to be saying an ancestor would have to be born in Canada after January 1st, 1947? Hopefully I’m not understanding that right. My wife’s maternal grandparents were born in Canada, but they emigrated to the US well before 1947.
That’s the date that Canadian citizenship began. Before that, Canadians were British subjects. As with all things, it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as all that, since Canadian citizenship was noted in their British passports. I’m an 8th-generation Canadian, but all of my ancestors were born before 1947.
This gets me nowhere with British citizenship, of course, since after 1947 everything was retconned.
I assume that techinically, you are not asking to be “granted” citizenship from Canada, you are asking the Canadian government to certify that “yes, you are a citizen”. You just didn’t have the documentation previously.
I saw something, not sure how correct, that the Canadian government will be requiring, like the USA does, that if you are a Canadian citizen you must present your Canadian passport to enter the country. (Of course, if they have no documentation on your status because you have not applied, how would they know to enforce this? The only giveaway would be place of birth.)
It’s honestly not clear. In theory, I’ve been a citizen since birth, but I also became a citizen in my 20s. I think, bureaucratically, only the latter is possible in terms of current record-keeping.
Most of my entry into Canada before becoming a citizen / having my citizenship recognised was without a passport altogether (a 20th century thing — good times).
A few hairy moments trying to prove my citizenship without a passport or birth certificate going the other way, though!
There is a doper who went through this recently. I cannot recall her username, but I do remember that IRL she dealt with US visa problems and the like.
Some of my grandchildren, all US born, have recently gone through this. Filing some forms, giving information on their parents’ Canadian citizenship (two were naturalized, the third born here) and paying some fees were it took. But they lived here long after 1947.
There is currently no limit regarding when the Canadian ancestor must have been born or naturalized. My grandmother was born in 1914 and left Canada for good (except for one brief visit in the 1970s) in 1930, and my father was born in the U.S. As long as the Canadian ancestor did not renounce citizenship to the Canadian government as an adult before the next person in the chain of descent was born, and you are able to document the Canadian origin and chain of descent to IRCC’s satisfaction, you are all set. People have gotten citizenship certificates by documenting Canadian ancestors much further back than that.
I’m about 95% sure I have Canadian ancestors, but proving it would be difficult as the documentation is missing or contradictory. My great-grandmother was born in Ontario (then Upper Canada), but that was before birth certificates were mandated by law. The church they belonged to shuttered years ago and if her baptismal certificate is in some musty archive somewhere, I don’t know where that might be. Her death certificate lists the wrong birth place, I’m pretty sure (it contradicts every other document I have). Her father was supposedly born in Quebec (then Lower Canada), but I have nothing very definitive to prove it, only census records. My grandmother, the first generation born in the U.S., is missing a birth certificate (possibly the records were destroyed in a fire). Because of a catch-22 in the privacy law, her death certificate is unavailable for another 5 years when it becomes a public record. Children, siblings, and parents of the deceased can order a death certificate now, but all those people are dead, and grandchildren apparently aren’t allowed to in that state.
It would be nice to have (certification of) Canadian citizenship, even though the chance I’d ever move up there at my age is slim. But it could be a life-changing opportunity for some of my nieces and nephews, who have expressed an interest in moving to Canada.
So far, IRCC has been pretty flexible about what records they will consider to be sufficient proof, especially if you can show why you haven’t been able to provide the usual basic records like birth certificates. You may well be able to pull it off with things like census records, especially if you have multiple sources that all say the same thing. I never would have been able to show that the person born in Winnipeg in 1914 and the person who gave birth to my father in NJ in 1940 were the same person without a combo of my grandmother’s orphanage file, my great-grandmother’s U.S. deportation file, my great-grandmother’s first husband’s death certificate, multiple census records, and her U.S. entry record because there was no clear chain of the changes in her name throughout her life. (And to the IRCC officer who finally processed my application - sorry for dumping nearly 100 pages of genealogical records on you!)