The immigration department says it has temporarily paused the finalization of some new citizenship by descent applications after “a few dozen” people were told their issued citizenship certificates must be surrendered pending a review.
A statement issued late Wednesday says “the department is reviewing how this occurred” and is taking steps to ensure applications are assessed fairly and lawfully.
The statement says people who received citizenship certificates and came to Canada are still able to work while this review takes place.
The department says it is in the process of notifying affected people that they can’t use Canadian passports while their citizenship claims are reviewed.
A change to the law that took effect on Dec. 15, 2025 allowed people born before that date to claim Canadian citizenship if they could prove generation by generation that they have a direct Canadian ancestor.
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That meant the passing down of citizenship ended after the first generation if a citizen born in Canada passed it onto their child born or adopted outside the country. The first-generation limit created so-called “Lost Canadians” who had family connections to the country but could not themselves become citizens. An unknown number of people who were approved for citizenship certificates received letters over the weekend saying they need to surrender their citizenship certificates while IRCC reviews their application.
The department also quietly updated its online document guide Wednesday for people claiming citizenship by descent through the law passed under Bill C-3.
Meanwhile, an immigration lawyer is pushing back on Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s claim that genealogical records — including those from third-party ancestry sites — are not sufficient evidence for a citizenship-by-descent claim.
Government practices and the department’s own document checklist do not state that records from sites like Ancestry.ca cannot be used as evidence for a claim.
The certificate surrender letters said that recipients either did not include original documents in the application or did not provide evidence to demonstrate attempts to access those original records.
Diab said “genealogy websites are not enough” during question period Tuesday, saying that people need to definitively prove Canadian lineage in each generation to get citizenship by descent.
Cedric Marin, an Ottawa immigration lawyer, said it’s shocking Diab would single out records from genealogical sites and points out government archives in Quebec and Ontario direct clients to partnered websites, including Ancestry.ca, for a wide variety of documents from the early 20th century and earlier.
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“So a lot of these archives are putting their full collection, including the government, on Ancestry to be publicly accessible. So I think those letters were in part because maybe the source was missing,” Marin said.
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Genealogist Kendra Gaede said people using resources like Ancestry.ca for a claim still need to cite the original source of the document, such as a provincial archive, in order to follow the standards of tracking lineage.
“So it’s not that Ancestry is bad and that we shouldn’t be using it. It’s just that it’s another tool and used improperly, it’s not providing data the way that we should be representing it, like as a primary source of information,” Gaede explained.
Diab was asked about provincial archives directing people to sites like Ancestry and Family Search on Wednesday and said people must use authenticated documents.
“So for Canadian citizenship, we’ve been very clear from the beginning. Each applicant must link their ancestry generation to generation through verified, authenticated documents. So the genealogy records are certainly not sufficient whatsoever. Thanks,” Diab said.
The minister did not take followup questions.
Marin said he is not sure exactly what Diab means by “genealogy records,” but Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s own document checklist says they only require colour copies of documents for lineage evidence.
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That checklist was modified on Wednesday, and it now says a certified baptismal record can be used in lieu of a birth certificate. Previously, the guidance was that a baptismal record could be used without the need for it to be certified. There is a list of valid documents for ancestors that may not have birth certificates if they were born before those were commonly issued.
A birth certificate is one of the preferred documents but other evidence can be used including census, baptismal and hospital records if a Canadian ancestor predates modern birth certificates.
Nearly 4,100 people have received proof of Canadian citizenship under the recent change, according to Immigration Department data.
IRCC…
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