Jamie Sarkonak: Bill C-3, the Liberal gateway to making Canada the 51st state |
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Jamie Sarkonak: Bill C-3, the Liberal gateway to making Canada the 51st state
Anyone with a Canadian in their family tree can now be handed citizenship
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In December, the Liberals extended Canadian citizenship to everyone in the world over the age of three months who can prove that one of their ancestors was born here, no matter how far back.
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This was the result of Bill C-3. It means that potentially millions of people with no natural democratic right to intervene in our politics will soon be able to vote in our elections. Millions who haven’t contributed a cent to our economy will become eligible for our social safety net. Among them will be organized criminals, terrorists spawned from parents who left Canada to engage in barbarism overseas, people who can’t speak English or French, scammers, drug dealers, and many more undesirables.
Jamie Sarkonak: Bill C-3, the Liberal gateway to making Canada the 51st state Back to video
And, as most of this newly enfranchised population is American, many Trumpfugees.
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Some 1,480 people became citizens via C-3 in its first month and a half of life, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. In that time, 6,280 applications have been processed. The Liberals won’t give their estimate for how high these numbers can go.
You can get a rough snapshot of who’s taking advantage of this new immigration loophole and how it works by snooping on the relevant corners of Reddit. On r/Canadiancitizenship, people help each other with applications, assuring each other that they are just as Canadian as anyone else up there, and congratulating each other on getting approved. Users worry about having insufficient documentation, only to be assured that Ancestry.com records are good enough, and that certified copies of records aren’t necessary.
For them, it’s great; for us, we have to wonder what fraud safeguards are in place at the immigration department … and what it even means to be a Canadian anymore.
One user reported that their children became citizens by way of a great-great-great-grandparent born in Ontario, who died in the United States in 1922. Another person, five generations down from someone born in New Brunswick, claimed they were approved in one week without submitting baptism or birth records for that original ancestor.
Anecdotes by people with more Canadian ancestry are more common, but it’s not unusual to see victory posts by people whose family was last in “Canada” before it became a country with that name.
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While we don’t have demographic statistics of the immigrants who are getting waved through under C-3, it does seem to be the case that some are using this new pathway to flee what they perceive as persecution in the United States. A number of users identifying as trans, or parents of trans children, have stated that their applications were processed with urgency, taking anywhere from a few weeks to 10 days. The department notes that the estimated processing time for new applications is 10 months.
People seeking to “avoid situations of potential harm or hardship” relating to race, gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, or otherwise being part of “particular groups,” can get fast processing. Which is a low bar given the “potential” part.
It’s obvious enough that the C-3 loophole will be attractive to U.S. progressives, especially those who are radical enough to want to leave their home country for Canada. The Liberals would have made that assessment when they were making the rules, too: despite their anti-American rhetoric, they’ve been more than happy to create a rule that, fully realized, would bring Canada closer to 51st-state status than President Donald Trump could ever achieve.
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Indeed, the descendants of French Canadians in the U.S. are estimated to number at least 10 million. If they were all suddenly given citizenship, they’d comprise about a quarter of the nation, as Canada only counted 33 million citizens in the last census.
And remember: C-3 considers everyone eligible to be born a citizen, thus, criminal records don’t matter. Nor does it assess whether someone will be a net-negative contributor to Canada, indeed, the immigration department offers speedy processing for those in need of health care and pension money.
The benefits only flow in one direction here: Canada’s population is at risk of being overwhelmed by foreign interests, and its people — its actual people, the ones who have always lived here — have been saddled with the responsibility of providing for unknown numbers of new civic dependents capitalizing on their family tree. The U.S. will not be submitting to Canadian interests in turn, nor will it be extending its welfare net to a significant portion of our people.
These problems don’t even end at the U.S. For example, Indian descendants of Canada’s early population of Sikh nationalists could use this route; so could the offspring of anyone in the history of Canada who ever left to join a terrorism group overseas.
There were 40,000 Canadians living in Lebanon in 2006, and who knows how many descendants; that could translate into thousands of eligible citizens today — it’s hard to know. There is, of course, a risk that there are Hezbollah members today who could take advantage of the new doors-open policy, especially since the Liberals insisted on keeping security checks out of the process.
The only flimsy guardrail the Liberals put on Bill C-3 is that anyone born to a Canadian who was born abroad after Dec. 15, 2025 has a slightly higher barrier to citizenship eligibility. Their parent has to spend 1,095 days in Canada to pass citizenship down to their kids. That’s all. It’s a joke.
Prime Minister Mark Carney boasted in February that he had “taken back control of immigration,” pointing to a reduction in new asylum applications and foreign workers. And it’s true that those taps have been turned down. But a new one has been opened, and it’s poised to flood the country in a way that is much more difficult to deal with.
Visas are easy to reduce and revoke; citizenship, less so. That’s going to change if things keep going the way they are.
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