Canadian citizenship applicants surging after ‘Lost Canadians’ law passed, testing Carney government’s immigration control promise

A major promise of the Carney government’s domestic agenda was to get immigration under control, with far fewer newcomers being let in over the next few years. “We are getting immigration under control,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told students at the University of Ottawa last October, and his first budget backed the rhetoric with a 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan that holds permanent resident admissions to 380,000 a year and cuts new temporary resident arrivals to 385,000 in 2026, down from surging highs after the pandemic, such as 686,090 new student and worker arrivals in 2024. Yet reporting from CBC News and the National Post reveals a surging number of citizenship applications, and the potential for many more newcomers than anticipated. Bill C-3, the so-called “Lost Canadians” law that took effect in mid-December last year, is generating a wave of citizenship claims, disproportionately from Americans, that Ottawa neither predicted nor appears equipped to process. A surge the minister said wouldn’t come The legislation responded to a court ruling that found it too restrictive to limit citizenship by descent to the first generation born abroad. Anyone who can document an unbroken line back to a Canadian ancestor, no matter how many generations removed, can now claim citizenship. Foreign nationals taking Canada up on the offer have been swift. CBC reports that 23,490 certificates were issued between mid-December and May 31, 6,100 under the new multi-generational rules and 17,390 to people with a Canadian parent, and that the C-3 total climbed nearly 50 percent in April and May alone. People born in the U.S. make up close to half of the newly recognized citizens, including 3,110 who qualified through the expanded ancestry provisions. The National Post‘s earlier reporting sketched the front end of that pipeline: 8,900 proof-of-citizenship applications arrived in January 2026, roughly 50 percent more than the 5,940 filed the previous January, with the largest share—28 percent—coming from the U.S. The growing queue tells the bigger story. Pending applications for proof of Canadian citizenship sat around 56,000 in April, reached 70,400 in May and now stand at 121,800, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) own processing estimates. The posted wait time has doubled since spring, from 12 to 25 months as of Aug. 10. That skyrocketing trajectory appears to defy what Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab told the Commons immigration committee last October, when she projected volumes “in the tens of thousands over time” and said flatly that no surge was expected. The parliamentary budget officer put the pool of potential claimants at 115,000, though the figure could be much larger: historians estimate that roughly 900,000 French Canadians left Quebec for the U.S. between 1840 and 1930, settling in the “Little Canadas” of New England’s mill towns. Strain radiating outward The pressure is not confined to the immigration department. Archivists on both sides of the border say they are drowning in genealogical requests from would-be citizens who must document their ancestry. The Association of Canadian Archivists told CBC some institutions have seen demand jump 100 to 300 percent, much of it involving handwritten, pre-Confederation records that cannot simply be searched. Quebec’s national archives fielded about 1,500 American requests in March 2026, the National Post reports, against 43 the previous March, while Nova Scotia’s archives now warns of month-long response times. Administration of the new law has wobbled, too. In June, the department suspended roughly 100 certificates it had already issued over documentation concerns, pausing other files while it reviewed them. Most have since been restored, but 17 recipients face possible revocation if they cannot produce acceptable proof within 60 days. The contradiction at the centre Technically, none of these citizenship claimants via Canadian ancestry counts against the Carney government’s immigration levels plan. Certificate holders are recognized citizens, not immigrants, so they fall outside the targets Ottawa points to as evidence of restraint. But the practical effect is similar: each certificate confers the right to a passport and to live and work in Canada, and archivists describe applicants who are explicitly planning moves out of the U.S. If a meaningful share of the 121,800 people now in line—and the larger pool behind them—relocates, the population pressures the government says it is easing will partially reassert themselves through a channel its plan does not measure. The international contrast of other developed countries curtailing citizenship claims underlines the point. Sweden and Finland have increased residency requirements, and Italy has capped citizenship by descent at two generations. Canada, alone, has widened its ancestry route without limit. The Carney government’s immigration control promise faces challenges as a surge in citizenship applications follows the implementation of Bill C-3, which allows individuals with Canadian ancestry to claim citizenship regardless of generational distance. This influx, particularly from Americans, was unexpected and has led to a backlog of applications, raising concerns about the government’s ability to manage immigration levels. While these new citizens do not count against immigration targets, their arrival may still impact population pressures in Canada. The situation highlights discrepancies between Canada’s approach to citizenship and that of other developed nations. Ask about this article — or anything in Canadian politics, economics, and public policy — powered by The Hub’s 5,000-article archive and deep area expertise. Comments (4) While I suspect the bureaucracy had no idea this would be headed our way, I am equally sure the Liberals were hoping for it. I suspect they are relying on the expectation that the kind of person interested in citizenship would be their people and that it would further juice international voting in their favour. Imagine two Americans. One who likes the current government policies and one who does not. The one who does not likely feels disconnected from the government narratives and is likely left-leaning. The one who does is invested in the outcomes and is prideful of their country and may be turned off by the idea of split loyalties. It turns out they are both third cousins descending from the same French-Canadian immigrant who left Canada a century ago. Which one do you think would be more likely to take an interest in their Canadian ancestry? Which do you think is more likely to be open to taking up citizenship in another country? And once citizenship is acquired and the rights that come with it are conferred, which party is likely to be of interest to them in elections: a conservative party they may not understand, or a party which is overtly left-leaning and reflexively anti-American? And while I’m applying the logic to Americans. It could apply to other groups as well. Poorly integrated diaspora groups have long been the Liberals bread and butter, now even more people who want to keep a toe in Canada as an insurance policy have that ability. And their habits will again favour parties that want to keep the door open for them and their families, biasing them towards the Liberals. To compound the logic, Canadian ancestry is also generally concentrated in reliably “blue” states. There are probably more people resembling cousin one than cousin two eligible for citizenship. The maximalist nature of the law with no generational limit also increases the size of the net. Residency requirements will put a mechanical limit on exactly how many become voters, but a sizable pipeline of potential new and likely Liberal-aligned voters has been established. There is a great line in the film The Hunt for Red October: “A Rusky never takes a dump without a plan, son.” The axiom can be readily adapted for our purposes: “A Liberal never writes a law without thinking of the vote, son.”