Canada tightens citizenship-by-descent rules. Here’s who could be affected

Summary

Canada has tightened its citizenship-by-descent application standards under Bill C-3 (the “Lost Canadians” law), introducing new language in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) Document Checklist (Form CIT 0014) on June 17, 2026 that bars applicants from relying solely on third-party genealogy records such as Ancestry.ca or FamilySearch printouts — a change that could affect tens of thousands of the 82,000 people currently in the processing queue. The Bill C-3 law, which received Royal Assent on November 20, 2025, and came into force on December 15, 2025, removed Canada’s first-generation limit on citizenship by descent, allowing Canadian citizens born abroad to pass citizenship to their children even when those children are also born abroad. The CIT 0014 update follows IRCC’s controversial issuance of surrender letters over the weekend of June 13-14, 2026, to “a few dozen” applicants who had already received Canadian citizenship certificates, a step that Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab has defended as necessary for documentary integrity, but which immigration lawyers have publicly contested, citing IRCC’s own checklist that explicitly permits “any other evidence” of citizenship and Federal Court precedents including Thompson v. The update formalises a standard IRCC had already been applying informally since at least mid-June, when the department ordered a number of recently approved citizenship certificates to be returned for review. The pause follows surrender letters sent to what IRCC described as “a few dozen” people who had already received citizenship certificates. As of June 10, 2026, approximately 82,000 people are waiting for citizenship certificate applications to be processed, up from 70,400 in May and 56,000 in April. How IRCC balances its tightened standards against its obligations to applicants who filed under the earlier rules is likely to shape the trajectory of the citizenship-by-descent programme going forward. Canada’s citizenship-by-descent route is closely watched by the large Indian-Canadian diaspora, many of whom have family members pursuing citizenship claims through Canadian-born or naturalised ancestors. Stricter documentary standards could particularly affect applicants relying on Indian civil registry records, which are not always centrally digitised, making certified original documents harder to source quickly. With inputs from Immigration News Canada, IRCC