Canadian children born abroad stranded as citizenship certificate wait hits 33 months

When Pascal Sud and Meisha Smith planned for their first child’s birth in Jamaica this year, the wait for the Canadian citizenship certificate their daughter needed to fly home to Montreal was four to six weeks. More than eight months later, Sud is back at work in Montreal while Smith and baby Sofianne remain in Jamaica, CBC News reported Monday. “It’s been very frustrating,” Sud said. “I was lucky to be there for three months … but I’ve been missing every step since.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s latest update, on Sept. 3, showed 136,000 proof-of-citizenship applications waiting for a decision and an estimated processing time of 33 months for anyone applying now. That estimate was 25 months in August, 12 months in May and 10 months in January, according to a tally of IRCC readings by CIC News, which counted roughly 40,400 people in the queue in December 2025. In May 2025, before the law changed, the estimate was five months, CBC reported in September.

Much of the surge follows Bill C-3, which took effect Dec. 15, 2025, after the courts struck down the old first-generation limit on citizenship by descent as unconstitutional. People born before that date who can trace an unbroken line to a Canadian ancestor, even several generations back, can now claim citizenship. Between Dec. 15 and July 31, 6,810 people obtained certificates under the new rules, more than half of them Americans, while another 20,515 got them under pre-existing provisions for children born abroad to Canadian parents. Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab told MPs in October 2025: “We anticipate volumes in the tens of thousands over time. We do not expect any surge.”

The backlog is catching ordinary Canadian families who are not part of the ancestry rush. Sud applied for a visitor visa so Sofianne could travel on her Jamaican passport, but IRCC refused, saying she is Canadian and must travel on a Canadian passport. Windsor, Ont.-born Robert Woodrich, who lives in Switzerland, applied in February 2025 for his three-year-old daughter Michelle’s certificate. Nearly 600 days later he still did not have it and might not learn until the day before an Oct. 7 flight whether she can travel on her Swiss passport. “These children are Canadian. They were Canadian the day they were born,” he said.

Taous Ait, a spokesperson for Diab, said not all of the extra applications stem from Bill C-3. “We recognize that long processing times can be challenging for applicants,” she said in a statement, adding that IRCC is “training and onboarding additional staff, improving intake processes and strengthening workload management.” CIC News noted that the department paused finalizing citizenship-by-descent files for about a month to review certificates already issued, ending that review June 30.

Opposition MPs say Ottawa was warned. Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner called the situation a “dumpster fire” and said it is also hitting Albertans, because new provincial rules for renewing driver’s licences and health cards include citizenship checks, for which a certificate can serve as proof. NDP critic Jenny Kwan urged the government to restore staffing and resources cut at IRCC, and has pointed to the last federal budget’s call for 3,300 positions to be cut by 2028-29, CBC reported in September. Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore Conservative MP Kathy Borrelli, who is helping five families, said the government “should have anticipated that the floodgates are open now.”

Lawyers expect pressure to grow. Christine Beltempo, who chairs the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration section, said lawyers are concerned about the “exponential increase in processing times.” Immigration lawyer Colin Singer has said applicants could eventually ask the Federal Court for a writ of mandamus ordering IRCC to decide a file. IRCC does offer urgent processing in limited cases, including moving a minor child born outside Canada to a Canadian parent, though qualifying does not guarantee approval, CIC News noted.

For families like Sud’s, the arithmetic is stark: at the current estimate, Sofianne could be more than three years old before her certificate arrives. Unless IRCC closes files faster than new ones arrive, the queue counted on the day an application lands will keep growing, and so will the number of Canadian children waiting outside the country.

Sources: CBC News (Oct. 5); CBC News (Sept. 10); CIC News.