Tuesday, February 03, 2009

How will new Canadian citizenship regulations affect the children of existing pregnancies?

In December, Citizenship and Immigration Canada released new regulations effective April 2009 that will affect the citizenship of children born abroad to expats. If you were born outside of Canada and your child is born outside of Canada after April 2009, your child will no longer be able to automatically inherit your Canadian citizenship.

There are a lot of problems with this, especially among the academic community. Most people I know who do graduate and postdoc work have to go abroad at least temporarily - we're a small country and our academic institutions can't accomodate every researcher in every field - and given the tendency of academics to beget more academics a larger-than-statistical proportion of the PhD and postdoc students I know where born abroad. And the Globe and Mail article and chat do cover the vast majority of the issues that I see here.

But there's one thing that hasn't been mentioned and seems both urgent and important: what about children who will lose their citizenship due to this change and are currently in utero?

The change was announced in December to take effect in April. That means that some of the children who will be affected had already been conceived when it was first announced. When the announcement was made, these kids already had a midwife and a birth plan and maternity leave arrangements, all of which were made with the assumption that the kid could inherit their parent's citizenship.

So now, with only a few months' notice, the expat parents have to change all their plans to arrange for the birth to take place in Canada. They have to find housing in Canada, find a midwife on short notice, start their maternity leave earlier so they can get home before they're too far along to fly. If they're following the traditional model where the mother takes mat leave and the father keeps working, the mother will have to go home to Canada by herself and maybe even be alone for the birth because they've already done all their financial planning on the assumption that the father will be staying at his job. And if, despite all the frantically re-arranged plans, the baby arrives prematurely while still in the other country but after April 2009, it will lose its right to Canadian citizenship and, if it's born in a country that doesn't have birthright citizenship, may well end up stateless.

What's going to happen to these kids? Why hasn't anyone thought of this?

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