The first-generation limit is gone: how citizenship by descent works after Bill C-3

For years the answer Jenny Bjorkquist got was the same one thousands of Canadian families got. She was born in Canada, moved abroad, and had a son overseas. Under a rule Parliament had written into the Citizenship Act in 2009 — the first-generation limit — her son was Canadian, but her son's children never could be. Citizenship stopped, permanently, one generation outside the country. Families who had lived in Canada for decades discovered that a single birth abroad had closed a door on everyone who came after them.

That rule is now gone. An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025) — Bill C-3 — received royal assent on 20 November 2025 and came into force on 15 December 2025. It did two quite different things at once: it made citizens, retroactively and automatically, of a large group of people who had no idea they qualified, and it wrote a new forward-looking test for everyone born abroad from that date on. Eight months later, the consequences of the first half are still working their way through a queue that has grown to more than 120,000 files.

How the first-generation limit fell

The law did not change because Ottawa wanted it to. On 19 December 2023, in Bjorkquist et al v. Attorney General of Canada, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice struck down paragraphs 3(3)(a) and 3(3)(b) of the Citizenship Act — the provisions that created the first-generation limit — as unjustified limits on the mobility and equality rights guaranteed by the Charter. The effect of the rule, on the court's analysis, was to create two classes of citizen and to penalise Canadians for exercising the very mobility the Charter protects.

The government chose not to appeal, conceding that the limit had produced unacceptable consequences for Canadian families. The declaration of invalidity was suspended to give Parliament time to legislate, and that suspension was extended repeatedly — seven times in all, the last running to 20 January 2026 — while IRCC ran an interim measure granting citizenship on a discretionary basis under section 5(4) to affected applicants, case by case. A first legislative attempt, Bill C-71, died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued on 6 January 2025. Bill C-3 was the second attempt, and it succeeded. The interim measure closed when the Act came into force on 15 December 2025, so the discretionary fallback no longer exists — every such file is now decided under the new statutory rules.

This matters for more than history. It means the new framework is a remedy for a finding of unconstitutionality, not a policy favour — which is a useful thing to remember if your file is refused and you are weighing a challenge under the reasonableness standard we wrote about in our piece on the Vavilov decision.

Who became a citizen on 15 December 2025

The retroactive half of Bill C-3 works by direct conferral. If you were born outside Canada before 15 December 2025 to a parent who was a Canadian citizen at the time of your birth, you are a Canadian citizen — regardless of how many generations separate you from the last ancestor born in Canada. Nobody has to approve it. There is no application to be granted, no discretion to be exercised, and no substantial-connection test to pass. The statute simply says you are, and always were, a citizen. Two limits are worth naming: the parent must have been a citizen at the time of your birth — a parent who naturalised afterwards does not qualify you — and the conferral does not reach people who formally renounced Canadian citizenship or had it revoked.

The same conferral extends to people adopted abroad before that date by a Canadian citizen parent, under section 5.1 — the direct grant route we covered in detail in our guide to adopting from abroad. It also restores citizenship to a group who lost it through the old retention rule in former section 8, where second-generation citizens born abroad from 14 February 1977 until the rule was repealed in April 2009 — in practice, those born up to 16 April 1981 — had to apply to retain their citizenship before turning 28, and overwhelmingly never knew they had to. And a further provision reaches the case where the Canadian parent died before the Act came into force: the child can still claim through a parent who, but for their death, would have been a citizen.

Two things follow from this that people consistently get wrong. First, if you fall in this group you were a citizen from birth, not from December 2025 — which affects everything from how your own children are treated to which historical documents you need. Second, being a citizen and being able to prove it are entirely different problems, and it is the second one that is currently painful.

The new rule: 1,095 days of substantial connection

For births on or after 15 December 2025, Parliament replaced the hard generational cut-off with a connection test. A child born outside Canada to a Canadian parent who was also born outside Canada is a citizen only if that parent was physically present in Canada for at least 1,095 days, cumulatively, at some point before the child's birth. Three years, in total, in any combination — not consecutive, not necessarily recent, but accrued before the birth, not after it.

Note carefully who the test does not touch. If the Canadian parent was born in Canada, it does not apply. If the Canadian parent naturalised in Canada, it does not apply. If the child was born before 15 December 2025, it does not apply. In practice the rule bites on one specific group: the second generation born abroad, where a parent who is themselves Canadian by descent is trying to pass citizenship on. There is also an exception where a parent — or, importantly, a grandparent — was serving outside Canada with the Canadian Armed Forces, the federal public administration, or the public service of a province. Crown servants are not penalised for being posted abroad, and neither are their descendants. The mirror of the same test applies to children adopted abroad on or after that date.

The practical difficulty is proof. The Act sets a day count; it does not hand you a document that records one. Nobody stamps a Canadian citizen in and out of the country, and a parent assembling 1,095 days from a decade of university terms, summer jobs and family visits is reconstructing a history from school transcripts, employment records, tax filings, lease agreements and old passports. If you have a Canadian-by-descent parent and children abroad — or plans for them — the time to build that record is now, while the documents still exist and the people who can attest to them are still around.

The certificate is the bottleneck

For anyone born outside Canada, the citizenship certificate is the only document that proves citizenship. It is what a passport office wants to see, what a provincial health plan wants to see, and what a border officer wants to see. Applying costs $75 and can be done online if you were born on or after 15 February 1977 and your Canadian parent was born in Canada on or after that date or naturalised on or after 17 April 2009; older lineages and larger family groups go by paper, which is where most multi-generational Bill C-3 claims land. You must document every generation in the chain, with certificates issued by the original authority — birth registrations, marriage records, naturalisation certificates — and certified translations for anything not in English or French.

Then you wait. And the waiting is the story of 2026. IRCC's published estimate for proof of citizenship was about 10 months in January 2026. It reached roughly 12 months in May, 19 months in July, and 25 months as of 10 August 2026. The inventory stood at about 121,800 people awaiting a decision on that date — up roughly 22 per cent in a single month. The cause is not mysterious: Bill C-3 opened eligibility to a very large diaspora, a great deal of it in the United States, and applications arrived far faster than the department could absorb them. Applicants outside Canada and the United States are seeing longer still, around 28 to 29 months, and practitioners quoted in the Canadian press expect three years by the end of 2026. IRCC, for its part, notes that published times are estimates, not guarantees.

What went wrong in June 2026

In June the queue stopped moving altogether for a period, and the reason unsettled a lot of families. A routine internal check flagged roughly 100 certificates, out of about 6,500 Bill C-3 applications processed to that point, where the department was not satisfied the supporting documentation met its standard. In mid-June IRCC sent letters asking recipients to surrender certificates they had already been issued. It paused finalising new citizenship-by-descent decisions while it reviewed what had happened, and it tightened its documentary standard to require records from original source authorities — civil registries, vital statistics offices and their equivalents — rather than secondary or open-source material.

The department began reversing those requests on 19 June, within about a week of sending them. On 30 June it reported the review complete: 33 of the flagged certificates were reinstated outright, and 67 — around one per cent of the certificates issued under the new provisions — remained under review. Processing resumed shortly afterward, but the pause had already done its damage to the queue. IRCC finalised just 3,040 proof-of-citizenship applications in June, against an average of roughly 5,800 a month from January to May. The inventory went from 82,020 at the end of May to 99,520 at the end of June, and to 121,800 by 10 August.

Two lessons are worth carrying away from that episode. The first is procedural: a certificate is evidence of citizenship, not the source of it, and the department cannot make a citizen into a non-citizen by asking for a card back. Revocation of citizenship is a separate statutory process with its own protections, and any suggestion otherwise deserves scrutiny. The second is practical: the documentary standard is now materially stricter than it was in the first months after the Act came into force. The revised document checklist is explicit that a claim cannot rest on third-party genealogy records — Ancestry, FamilySearch and the like — without original-authority documents or a written account of the efforts made to obtain them, and it enforces mundane details that sink files anyway: high-resolution colour copies, and a signature no more than 90 days old at the time of submission. If you are assembling a claim through a grandparent or great-grandparent, budget for the time and cost of ordering certified records from the issuing registry, archive or parish custodian rather than relying on database printouts or family copies.

A citizen who cannot board a plane

Here is the trap that catches people hardest, and it is entirely a creature of the delay. Canadian citizens are not eligible for an eTA or a visitor visa — the system will not issue one, and it does not matter that you have never held a Canadian document in your life. The general rule is that a dual citizen must fly to Canada on a valid Canadian passport, and a Canadian passport requires the certificate you are waiting 25 months for. People who assumed the new law would make travel easier have discovered the opposite: on paper they gained a citizenship, and in practice they lost their eTA.

There are three ways around it. Canadian–American dual citizens are the significant exception: a valid US passport is sufficient to fly to Canada, no Canadian passport, visa or eTA required. Everyone else can request a special authorization, which if granted permits boarding on a valid non-Canadian passport. And the land border is not subject to the same rule, so a certificate — once it arrives — is enough to enter by road.

Urgent processing also exists, and it is worth understanding what actually qualifies before spending effort on a request. IRCC lists grounds including protection from harm or hardship on grounds such as race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or gender identity; travel arising from a death or serious illness where no other nationality's passport is available; a job offer or risk of job loss; school enrolment; access to a pension, health care or a social insurance number; statelessness; renunciation of another citizenship by a fixed deadline; moving minor children born abroad to Canadian parents; and being a dual citizen of a visa-exempt country with proof of air travel to Canada within six months. A request needs an explanation letter and hard proof — a paid itinerary, an employer or school letter, medical records, a death certificate. Even then the department is explicit that it cannot guarantee delivery in time.

What to do now

The people coming through are not who many expected. When IRCC released the first demographic breakdown on 18 August 2026, it had issued more than 6,100 certificates under the new rules: 51 per cent to applicants in the United States, 20.5 per cent in Mexico, 6.1 per cent in Bolivia, 3.2 per cent in the United Kingdom and 2.2 per cent in Belize — a map of twentieth-century Canadian emigration, showing up a century later as paperwork.

If you think you might be covered, apply rather than wonder — you are not asking for a decision on your eligibility so much as taking a place in a queue that is getting longer every month, and the estimate attached to your file is set by how many applications sit ahead of it on the day you submit. Order the underlying records from the registries that issued them before you file, not after a request letter arrives. If you already applied under the 2023 interim measure, you do not need to submit again; those files are being processed under the new rules. And if you are the descendant in the middle — Canadian by descent yourself, with children abroad or planned — start documenting your Canadian days now, because after 15 December 2025 that record is the whole case.

One question comes up constantly now, and it deserves a straight answer: no, a long wait is not by itself a ground to force IRCC's hand. Mandamus — a Federal Court order compelling the department to decide — is being actively discussed for files stranded well past the service standard, and it is a real remedy, but it is demanding. The delay has to be unreasonable against the standard for that line of business, the applicant has to have done everything asked of them, and the Federal Court has already declined mandamus in a citizenship matter where it found the delay traceable to the applicant and their counsel. It is worth advice on the specific file, not a reflex.

It is also worth thinking past the certificate. Citizenship is not only a benefit; it can carry obligations and consequences in your other country of nationality, and it interacts with everything from a PR card you may currently be relying on to the status of other family members. If your file was refused, or a certificate you hold has been questioned, the routes and deadlines are set out on our refusals and remedies page — and they are short.

Our citizenship page covers the other routes to Canadian citizenship, including naturalisation by grant. If you are working out whether Bill C-3 reaches your family, which generation the 1,095-day test lands on, or how to evidence a chain that runs back three generations, send us the outline and a licensed consultant will read it personally.

General information only, current as of 20 August 2026, and based on An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025), the Citizenship Act and Regulations, IRCC guidance on canada.ca, reported IRCC processing data current to 18 August 2026, and the Ontario Superior Court's decision in Bjorkquist et al v. Attorney General of Canada, 2023 ONSC 7152. It is not legal advice. Processing times, fees and documentary standards change frequently; confirm current requirements on canada.ca or with a licensed consultant. IRCC makes all final decisions.