\n<\/p>\n
Canadian parents of children adopted abroad say a proposed citizenship bill represents a \u201cshocking and unconscionable\u201d erosion of their children\u2019s rights by the governing Liberals.<\/p>\n
The federal government is in the midst of overhauling the Citizenship Act so Canadians born abroad can pass citizenship to further generations born abroad. The bill would also restore or grant citizenship descendants who were excluded under older citizenship laws.<\/p>\n
But Kat Lanteigne, whose adopted son was born in Zambia, said a new requirement that a Canadian child born abroad demonstrate a \u201csubstantial connection\u201d to Canada treats adopted children like immigrants. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t treat our son like the Canadian citizen that he is,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In 2009, changes were made to Canada\u2019s citizenship laws that stopped the automatic transmission of citizenship by descent to foreign-born children if both of their Canadian parents were also born in a foreign country.<\/p>\n
The rule was struck down by an Ontario court in 2023 and Mark Carney\u2019s Liberal government have proposed legislation that purports to fix elements of the law that were deemed to be unconstitutional.<\/p>\n
But Lanteigne said the proposed fix imposes a \u201cconnection test\u201d that conflates children born outside Canada with children born outside Canada but adopted by Canadians within Canada.<\/p>\n
Government officials say as many as 2,000 children could be affected by the wording of the legislation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe adopted our child from another country, but we actually adopted our child in the province of Ontario and in the country of Canada,\u201d she said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t know any other nation except for his life in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although elements of the bill have not yet been passed into law, Lanteigne says if her son were to move abroad and have children, he would, in theory, have to prove his \u201csubstantial connection\u201d to Canada in order to pass citizenship on to any children. The connection test would not apply in similar circumstances to someone born in Canada.<\/p>\n
\u201cDemanding an international adoptee, who has been adopted by Canadian families who live in Canada and granted citizenship by the Canadian government, go through a test that they really are Canadian is like asking them who their \u2018real\u2019 parents are. Not only is it deleterious and harmful to the international adoptee, it violates the international law that our country is signatory to,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s wholly unnecessary and inherently cruel.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 1993 Hague convention on inter-country adoption says: \u201cThe [adopted] child shall enjoy in the receiving state, and in any other contracting state where the adoption is recognized, rights equivalent to those resulting from adoptions having this effect in each such state.\u201d<\/p>\n
While all Canadian provinces and territories are in line with the convention, Lanteigne said Bill C-3 puts the federal government in breach.<\/p>\n
In early October, parliament\u2019s standing committee on citizenship and immigration voted down an amendment from Liberal member Nathaniel Erskine-Smith that sought to fix the issue.<\/p>\n
Erskine-Smith told lawmakers \u201cany inequality\u201d between a child born in Canada and born abroad is \u201cunconscionable\u201d.<\/p>\n
The mood was at times tense at the committee after -Smith told experts he felt \u201cabsolutely misled\u201d by their assessments of his amendments, neither of which passed. The first was withdrawn after Erskine-Smith was told the amendment logically \u201capplied to no one\u201d based on its wording and the second voted down by the committee despite the Liberals, which hold a minority of seats on the committee, all voting to support the amendment.<\/p>\n
Two conservative members on the committee raised concerns over the possibility that children adopted from abroad could be the victims of human trafficking.<\/p>\n
\u201cConflating child trafficking with the quality of our son\u2019s citizenship status is dog-whistle politics which has no place in this discussion,\u201d Lanteigne said in a letter addressed to the Tory lawmakers. \u201cMy Canadian son\u2019s citizenship rights are not fodder for partisanship or xenophobic rhetoric.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Canada, citizenship is granted to children from abroad at <\/em>the end of the adoption process \u2013 a protracted bureaucratic process that takes years.<\/p>\n Erskine-Smith and Lanteigne pointed to laws in the UK which treat children adopted internationally as if they had been born in the UK to a British citizen parent, meaning they can pass on British citizenship to any children they have.<\/p>\n \u201cOur child is a 16th-generation Acadian whose ancestors built Acadia, served at Vimy Ridge and Dieppe, and his charter rights must be protected by our legislators,\u201d said Lanteigne. \u201cThe fact that he was born in another nation should have no bearing on the quality and consideration of his citizenship status.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Canadian parents of children adopted abroad say a proposed citizenship bill represents a \u201cshocking and unconscionable\u201d erosion of their children\u2019s rights by the governing Liberals. The federal government is in the midst of overhauling the Citizenship Act so Canadians born abroad can pass citizenship to further generations born abroad. The bill would also restore or<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[7429,142,318,4530,166,2436,14782,17167,17166,630,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-28990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-adopted","9":"tag-bill","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-canadian","12":"tag-children","13":"tag-citizenship","14":"tag-cruel","15":"tag-erodes","16":"tag-inherently","17":"tag-parents","18":"tag-rights"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}