Trudeau extending Canadian citizenship to grandchildren and illegals

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The Trudeau government appears to be doing everything it can to diminish the value of Canadian citizenship. After announcing they would extend birthright citizenship to two generations born out of Canada, the government is now looking at extending citizenship to people who are in the country illegally.

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According to The Globe and Mail, Immigration Minister Marc Miller is preparing a proposal for cabinet to consider how to “provide a path to citizenship” for people in the country illegally. This would include failed asylum seekers who were ordered deported but didn’t leave, international students who have overstayed their visas or those who entered on tourist visas and simply never left.

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The issue has long been a lightning rod in the United States, dividing the country. Canada, by comparison, hasn’t seen the same kind of heated debate over immigration.

That could change with this proposal which will be opposed by many in Canada, including many immigrants who followed the rules to come to this country. Of course, this being the Trudeau Liberals, anyone opposed to this proposal will be painted anti-immigrant in all forms if not an outright racist by a government desperate to scratch and claw its way back from irrelevancy.

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On the issue of extending birthright citizenship, the Liberals made it sound like they had no choice, blaming a court decision last December. The truth is, it was a lower court ruling they didn’t appeal because as they stated clearly in their news release they liked it.

“The Government of Canada did not appeal the ruling because we agree that the law has unacceptable consequences for Canadians whose children were born outside the country,” the news release stated.

The court ruling was in response to a number of families who challenged a law which stated that you could only pass on citizenship to a Canadian born outside of the country by one generation. With this change, grandchildren of Canadian citizens will be extended full Canadian citizenship.

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This isn’t standard practice in the United States, Britain, France, Italy or a number of peer countries, which with rare exception cap passing on citizenship to the first generation born outside of the country.

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Yet when a number of families, some with stories similar to mine, challenged Canada’s citizenship laws, Justice Jasmine Akbarali found the law to be unconstitutional. In her ruling she found that the law violated section 6 mobility rights and section 15 equality rights.

In one of the cases, two Canadians who had moved to Switzerland to work and had a child while there, sued in the off chance that in the future their daughter also moves abroad and has a family that they could pass on citizenship. That’s deciding a case and overturning a law based on a hypothetical, something judges love doing but isn’t a serious way to determine court cases.

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In another case, a man born in the United States to a Canadian mother got married and started a family while living in Asia. He wanted to pass on the citizenship to his child, but the law didn’t allow it.

When he moved back to Canada with his family, his daughter applied for and was granted Canadian citizenship.

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Bottom line is that in all the cases before Justice Akbarali there were solutions, like applying for citizenship, that didn’t involve watering down our rules. She decided the first generation cut off was arbitrary.

But if a one generation rule is arbitrary, what’s to say a future court won’t find the second generation cut off arbitrary. Parliament must choose a cut off at some point, otherwise, why have citizenship, why have borders, why have rights and privileges open to citizens and not others.

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This was a bad court ruling and it has now been followed by a bad government policy. It extends automatic citizenship to people who have little to no connection to Canada and cheapens the value of our citizenship.

Knowing now that the Trudeau Liberals want to extend citizenship to people in the country illegally, their moves shouldn’t be surprising.

The only question left is how far will the Liberals go in terms of devaluing what it means to be Canadian?

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