---
title: "Canada’s citizenship backlog hits 33 months and locks Canadians born abroad out of Canada"
description: "A law change lets anyone with a Canadian ancestor apply; 136,000 applications later, a baby is stuck in Jamaica"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-05T08:00:00Z
modified: 2026-10-05T14:14:05Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/canada-s-citizenship-backlog-hits-33-months-and-locks-canadi-0dcbdd
language: en
tags: ["immigration", "bureaucracy", "canada", "trump", "politics", "us", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Canada’s citizenship backlog hits 33 months and locks Canadians born abroad out of Canada

*A law change lets anyone with a Canadian ancestor apply; 136,000 applications later, a baby is stuck in Jamaica*

By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/canada-s-citizenship-backlog-hits-33-months-and-locks-canadi-0dcbdd

## In brief

- Citizenship certificate processing has hit 33 months, with 136,000 applications waiting as of Sept. 3
- Bill C-3, passed last year, lets anyone who can prove a Canadian ancestor apply for citizenship
- A Montreal father says his infant daughter is stranded in Jamaica awaiting her certificate
- IRCC rejected one child’s visitor visa, saying she is Canadian and needs a Canadian passport
- Conservative and NDP critics blame the law change and staffing cuts; Ottawa says it is hiring and training staff

Consider the position of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which administers a program with an unusual property: the people it serves are already customers — citizens, in fact — and yet the product they need is a piece of paper confirming they were customers all along. The product is the citizenship certificate, which someone born abroad to a Canadian parent can use to get a Canadian passport, and thereby to enter Canada, the country of which that person is, legally or near-legally, a citizen. The processing time for this paper, as of the department’s September 3 update, is 33 months. There are 136,000 applications in the queue.

Which produces customers like Sofianne. When Pascal Sud and Meisha Smith prepared in January for their first child, the plan was simple: Smith would give birth in her home country of Jamaica, where she had family support, and the family would return to Montreal three months later. At the time, the wait for the citizenship certificate Sofianne needed to fly to Canada was four to six weeks. More than eight months later, Sud is back at work in Montreal and Smith and Sofianne are still in Jamaica. “It’s been very frustrating,” Sud told CBC News. “I was lucky to be there for three months … but I’ve been missing every step since, and it’s been very difficult to be apart from them.” At the current rate, CBC calculates, Sofianne could be more than three before she can enter Canada.

Now here is the part with genuine architectural elegance. Faced with the 33-month queue, Sud applied for a visitor’s visa so Sofianne could travel to Canada on her Jamaican passport. IRCC refused — on the grounds that she is Canadian and must travel to Canada on a Canadian passport. So she is too Canadian to visit, but not documented enough to come home. The certificate she can’t get requires her to be a citizen; the visa she can’t get requires her not to be. The system has located the one corner case it cannot process and left a baby in it.

The flood that caused all this has a name: Bill C-3, the change to citizenship law adopted late last year for the so-called “Lost Canadians,” allowing anyone who can prove a Canadian ancestor to apply. Between Dec. 15 and July 31, 6,810 people — more than half of them Americans — obtained certificates through the new law, CBC reports, alongside 20,515 more under the pre-existing provisions for those born abroad to Canadian parents. There are good reasons to do this! There were also reasons to hire more clerks first. “We have known since the first drafts of Bill C-3 that this would cause a lot of uptake in the number of applications,” said Christine Beltempo, an immigration lawyer at McCarthy Tétrault who chairs the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration section. “That’s become a reality at this point in time. What we are a bit concerned about, though, is the exponential increase in processing times.”

Sud reads the online forums where Americans trace their Canadian ancestry to claim certificates and finds it frustrating. “They’re not people who are living in Canada and a lot of them, they’re not even planning to live in Canada,” he said. “There is no different process if you’re a Canadian living in Canada.”

Robert Woodrich’s family is in the same corner case. Born and raised in Windsor, he has lived abroad for years — Thailand, where his children were born, and now Switzerland. In February 2025 he applied for a certificate for his daughter Michelle, now three, and later his son, so they could visit their grandfather in Canada. Nearly 600 days later, with a flight booked for Oct. 7, he still doesn’t have it and may not know until the day before whether Canada will grant a special authorization for Michelle to travel on her Swiss passport. “These children are Canadian. They were Canadian the day they were born,” he said. “I just need these certificates to get the passport so they can go to Canada where they are citizens.”

Notably, one immigration lawyer, Colin Singer, told CBC that because Michelle has not yet received her certificate, she is not yet legally a Canadian citizen — and should therefore be able to travel without issue on her Swiss passport. Which means the correct answer to “is she Canadian?” apparently depends on which form you are holding. IRCC, in the other family’s case, answered yes, loudly, while declining to supply the proof.

The political responses have sorted neatly by whether one’s party passed the law. Conservative critic Michelle Rempel Garner said Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government ignored warnings when Parliament adopted Bill C-3, “gutted safeguards that could have prevented this mess and charged ahead anyways,” producing a “dumpster fire” — and noted the backlog now gums up Alberta, where driver’s licence and health card renewals newly require citizenship verification, for which a certificate can serve. “The onus really is on the immigration minister to clear this backlog that we told her was going to happen,” she said. NDP critic Jenny Kwan, reaching across the aisle to a different culprit, called the delays “simply unreasonable and unacceptable” and demanded Ottawa restore the staffing it cut at IRCC. Conservative MP Kathy Borrelli, who is helping Woodrich and four other families, called it “outrageous” and said the government “should have anticipated that the floodgates are open now.”

The government, for its part, says the surge — not all of it from Bill C-3 — explains the times. “IRCC is actively responding to increased demand by training and onboarding additional staff, improving intake processes and strengthening workload management,” a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab wrote, while “protecting the integrity of Canada’s citizenship program.” The integrity of a citizenship program that takes 33 months to confirm its own citizens is an interesting thing to protect. Eventually the department will process Sofianne’s application, concluding that she was a Canadian the whole time. As welcome-home paperwork goes, it doubles nicely as a birth notice.