A rchive Date
[ 10-10-2025 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/selley-birthright-citizenship-is-an-outdated-concept?itm_source=index
'Birthright citizenship' is an outdated concept
Arguments against ending it are based almost entirely on lazy economics, hypotheticals, or (especially recently) knee-jerk anti-Americanism
Author: Chris Selley Published Oct 09, 2025
Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner is reviving the question of birthright citizenship in Ottawa, but with a bit of a 2025 twist.
Normally, the automatic granting of citizenship to anyone born on Canadian soil becomes controversial when “birth tourism” is in the news: Families or lone women, usually from China, travelling to Canada with the sole intent of having a Canadian baby and returning home as soon as possible.
In 2019, Business in Vancouver reported that nearly a quarter of births at Richmond Hospital, near Vancouver, were to non-resident women; Andrew Griffith, former director general of citizenship and multiculturalism, estimated 1.6 per cent of total births in Canada were to non-residents.
It is a flagrant abuse of the system that no one defends. But it should hardly surprise us: We lament that this country is fraying at the seams, but Canadian citizenship is still a heck of a gift to leave your child — and if that child can one day sponsor you to spend your retirement in Canada as well, wouldn’t that just be lovely. You could live in a suite above the garage.
This time around, though, Rempel Garner is highlighting what the government estimates to be half a million undocumented migrants currently in the country. She’s raising the implications that their Canadian-born children might have for immigration numbers that the government is currently busy trying to bring down from a remarkable and clearly unsustainable recent high.
Requiring that one parent be a citizen or permanent resident as a requirement for a child’s birthright citizenship would bring us in line with other countries, including Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom, Rempel Garner noted. She could have kept going with that list. Few countries around the world grant citizenship purely based on being born on their soil. The United States is the most famous of the few; the concept was codified in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But that amendment, and the British common-law concept of jus soli (“law in soil”) that underpins birthright citizenship in Canada, are based on completely outdated circumstances. At the time of Confederation, no one was travelling thousands of kilometres across an ocean just to have a baby. The temporary worker visa had yet to be invented. Efforts by Canada’s 13 universities to attract foreign students were, shall we say, embryonic.
The arguments against ending birthright citizenship are based almost entirely on cost-benefit analysis, hypothetical scenarios, or (especially recently) knee-jerk anti-Americanism — the 14th Amendment being something President Donald Trump would like to get rid of.
On the practical side, we are warned that birth certificates currently count as proof of citizenship; end birthright citizenship and they couldn’t be.
OK, you say: So mark, stamp or otherwise indicate on the birth certificate whether at least one parent was a citizen at the time of birth. We can then require citizenship certificates for those who were born abroad or naturalized as citizens.
Nuh uh, we are told: That could lead to discrimination based on citizenship status.
OK, you say: So make modern birth certificates that encode the data securely — a win-win situation surely. But then you have the 11 privacy commissioners crawling up your backside, and 101 grifters lining up to make a fortune screwing up the IT.
My favourite argument is that we shouldn’t worry about birth tourism because if the parents have the means to get here to have a baby, they’re probably generally the sort of immigrants we want anyway. Translation: Relax, they’re probably rich. I know well that lazy, shrugging, “it’s broke but let’s not fix it” mentality all too well from years of watching Canadian policymaking at work, and I hate it — although at the same time, I will admit it’s all to easy to imagine the government somehow screwing this up.
The Liberals say they’re not interested in changing the law — though they didn’t freak out and call everyone racist for even raising the subject, as you might expect them to. (Is it possible they can … learn?) And it’s difficult to imagine this issue ever floating to the top of the pile, even with a Conservative government in power.
But in the absence of legislative action, as with so many files, we could commit to start collecting relevant data about the birth tourism and non-resident birth phenomenon.
Statistics Canada reports that in 2024, 1,610 people gave birth in Canada who did not reside here. That’s the number usually quoted in reference to “birth tourism” — but does it include people on temporary visas, like students and temporary foreign workers? Those aren’t necessarily abuses of any system; people do shag, regardless of their immigration status, and sometimes those people do get pregnant.
When I inquired of Statistics Canada about this, I got an intensely Canadian answer. “The mother’s residency status is typically determined based on the information she provides on the birth registration form. However, the specific requirements and procedures may vary by jurisdiction,” a spokesperson explained. “Since this is self-reported, we can’t tell from the data whether someone is a temporary resident or not.”
Could we at least do better than that? Is that too much to ask — to know the scope of the problem that we’re probably not going to solve?
cselley@postmedia.com
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]]]
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