You Might Randomly be a Canadian Citizen Now
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
If you’ve been looking around at the state of American decline lately and wondering about how you might escape the madness, you suddenly and very randomly might have a pretty good option. If you’re anywhere else in the world and looking at the frozen north as a bastion of liberty and justice now that the U.S. has plunged itself into darkness and is no longer the go-to destination in a lot of people’s minds, then yeah, you too could be a Canadian citizen now, so it’s definitely worth checking into that. Let’s go over the details and find out how to figure this out so you can verify things before you just go riding a moose up to their maple-flavored doorstep. And don’t lick the doorstep, I don’t think they like that.
Canadian lawmakers pased a new bill at the end of 2025. It was called Bill C-3: An Act to amend the Citizenship Act. Originally introduced on June 5th 2025, it was passed and went into effect on December 15th 2025. Bill C-3 is concerned with something called citizenship by descent. About fifty major countries have a form of citizenship by descent, and very basically it just means that your citizenship is based on your family tree and your family ties to a particular nation.
Before Bill C-3, Canadian citizenship by descent was limited to just one generation for people born abroad. So parents who were Canadian citizens but lived somewhere else would have kids who were recognized as Canadian citizens, but the kids of their kids would not be Canadian citizens. In 2023, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice decided that this violated the Canadian constitution. There’s no limit apparently written anywhere for citizenship by descent inside their constitution. For many, this is now seen to remedy the issue with so-called “lost Canadians,” or generations of people who could have been Canadian citizens but weren’t because of the way citizenship was treated before the bill passed. About 20,000 lost Canadians were targeted directly through legislation in the years 2019 and 2025. But the descendant issue is geared up to be a very big push to recover all the additional lost Canadians.
Have you lost any Canadians lately? If you’ve lost your Canadians, call the law offices of Doodles & Doodles, experts in international law. Probably just bird law. All I know is, I’m here to help you figure out if you’re a secret, hidden Canadian who’s actually lost their inner Canada.
How can you figure out if this means that you’re suddenly a Canadian citizen now? It’s pretty simple. It boils down to 1.), whether or not you have any Canadian ancestry, and 2.), how long ago that was.
If you have a parent who’s a Canadian citizen, then you’re already a Canadian citizen. If you have a grandparent who’s a Canadian citizen, just one grandparent, out of eight possible grandparents, like if 7 out of 8 of your grandparents are American, or Japanese, or Columbian, or Antarctican, but then that last single grandparent is or was Canadian? Then according to the new rules set forth by Bill C-3, congratulations, you are now automatically a Canadian citizen.
Unfortunately, if any of you find yourselves suddenly married to a newly minted Canadian citizen, that doesn’t automatically grant you citizenship, too. Yeah, sadly this is true, in case you were hoping to get your own introductory maple syrup sampler in the mail soon like somebody I know. Sad. But spouses can be sponsored by their husbands or wives who are now Canadian citizens, and then can eventually go on to become citizens themselves, but that’s a whole other process than the one we’re talking about now.
So all these newfound Newfoundlanders, haha you see what I did there? You’re probably not even from Newfoundland if you’re Canadian, there’s like three people there and a bassett hound. But all you need to do if your grandparent was Canadian is reach out and get your official documents because you’re now a citizen. You won’t be applying for citizenship or applying for a visa or for naturalization or anything like that, you’re simply applying for proof of citizenship, because the law has made this an automatic status for you. The language of the bill makes it very clear that this makes citizenship automatic and retroactive. You just need the documents.
There’s also no deadline. So if you’re worried about running out and putting your beaver stamped postcard addressed to Canada in the mailbox, you don’t have to rush. Canadian citizenship is now just a recognized right for the new people it applies to, and there’s no cutoff time for it, so you can apply whenever you want, right now, or twenty years from now.
But the other thing about this new citizenship bill is that it doesn’t limit itself to just one or two generations. If you have a great-grandparent who was Canadian, that might also mean that you are now, too. What the bill does is that it makes people citizens who were born abroad at a time when citizenship status was more restrictive. So theoretically you could be a Canadian citizen if you have Canadian ancestry at some point in the past. It also doesn’t matter if anyone along that line ever applied for citizenship themselves or not. It’ll make it harder to apply maybe, because you’ll have to do a lot of detective work on your own to dig up documents that prove the status of the original Canadian ancestor, but it’s not like, you know, you’re trying to dig up the first common human ancestor or anything like that. Probably a little easier than that.
It’s important to note that the rules going forward are going to be a little different. This whole situation applies retroactively, so to people born before the bill took effect on December 15th 2025. For everyone born after that, the rule is that you have to establish a strong link between the person and the country of Canada. Practically what that looks like is that if you were born to a Canadian parent outside of the country of Canada, then your parent would need to have spent 1,095 days inside Canada before you were born in order for you to be eligible for Canadian citizenship. Just something to keep in mind.
If the retroactive rules apply to you though, start getting your documents together if you think you may be Canadian. You’ll need to apply to get your citizenship certificate and a Canadian passport too if you want to travel up north beyond the wall. You can apply for these documents online or on paper. Applying online is a pretty straightforward process, but if you’re someone who’s tracing ancestry back a bit then I’m seeing some advice that says you might want to submit a paper application because you’re going to need some added documents and context thrown in that might require physical proof of those items and their existence. I guess the worst they could do is delay your online application a bit and ask for further documentation. But why risk it?
Right now the website is saying it takes about 11 months in processing time, and it’ll cost you a $75 fee to get the certificate of citizenship and be a real official Canadian. I don’t think they send you the maple syrup sampler directly after that, or even a single poutin fry, but like, after you get your passport you can head up there and grab some of that on your own.
If you’re escaping the United States because everyone here has lost their minds, or you’re a global citizen or someone who loves to travel, or you like moose a whole lot, then make sure to check your lineage and see if your situation makes you eligible for citizenship in Canada, or even just magically bequeaths the status upon you. And then, let me know, because I might be hanging out up there myself for a bit in the future because of reasons. If you want to help out anyone who needs to go through the sponsorship process because they aren’t automatically Canadian, and you know how that process works, then let me know in the comments. Also please hit that like button and the subscribe button next to it because I’m slowly creeping up in subscribers and someday I’d like to have something to show Canada when I want them to let me be one of them.
Until next time when we’re all Canadian, remember to do some f*cking good in your own little sphere of the world.
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