(CANADA) — Canada brought Bill C-3 into force on December 15, 2025, scrapping the first-generation limit on citizenship by descent and reopening citizenship claims for thousands of “Lost Canadians” and their descendants, many of them in the United States.

The change amended the Citizenship Act and restored citizenship to people born abroad to a Canadian parent in the second or later generations before the law took effect. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said that day, “The Government of Canada is committed to making Canadian citizenship law fair, clear and reflective of how Canadian families live today. Bill C-3 restores citizenship to remaining ‘Lost Canadians,’ their descendants and anyone who was born abroad to a Canadian parent in the second or subsequent generations before the legislation comes into force.”

The law, previously introduced as Bill C-71, answered a long-running dispute over the reach of Canadian citizenship outside the country’s borders. It also created a new rule for future claims: children born or adopted abroad on or after December 15, 2025 can inherit citizenship only if their Canadian parent shows a “substantial connection” to Canada.

That test requires 1,095 days (three years) of physical presence in Canada before the child’s birth or adoption. The threshold now sits at the center of who qualifies automatically and who does not under the new system.

The legal reset traces back to the Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947, which included provisions that stripped citizenship from many Canadians who had moved to the United States. Some lost it automatically after becoming Americans. Others lost it because they did not “affirm” their citizenship by a required age.

Decades later, Ottawa added another barrier. Since 2009, Canadian citizenship generally could not pass beyond the first generation born abroad, leaving grandchildren and later descendants of Canadians outside the line of transmission even when a family’s tie to Canada remained direct and documented.

Bill C-3 removed that bar retroactively for people born before December 15, 2025. In practice, that meant people whose parents or grandparents had once been shut out by the old rules could apply for recognition as citizens, reviving cases that had failed under the first-generation limit.

The early wave of successful claims came heavily from south of the border. Half of the initial 4,075 successful applicants in early 2026 were born in the United States, underscoring how closely the change touched families shaped by migration between the two countries.

That number also fed broader estimates that millions of Americans with Canadian parents or grandparents may now qualify. The pool includes descendants of the “Great Hemorrhage” from Quebec, a period of heavy movement into the United States that left many families split between two citizenship systems.

Canada’s law matters in part because the United States permits dual nationality. The U.S. Department of State says “U.S. law does not require a U.S. citizen to choose between U.S. citizenship and another nationality” and that an American may naturalize abroad “without any risk to their U.S. citizenship,” according to its June 2026 Dual Nationality Information.

That policy has allowed U.S. citizens seeking Canadian recognition under Bill C-3 to pursue a second passport without giving up their American status. Many have sought citizenship certificates as a form of long-term security and as a way to preserve what some describe as international options during a volatile political period in the United States.

The rollout then hit a setback. On June 17, 2026, IRCC registrar Peggy Sun sent letters to thousands of new certificate holders, most of them in the United States, ordering them to surrender their citizenship certificates for review over documentation integrity concerns.

Sun wrote, “The purpose of this letter is to inform you that I have information in my possession that indicates that you may not be entitled to hold a Canadian certificate of citizenship. I am requiring the surrender of your certificate of citizenship [pending further evidence].” The move affected thousands of people who had recently received proof of citizenship after the law changed.

As of June 30, 2026, the suspensions had left many of those new dual citizens in limbo. IRCC has said the affected individuals are still considered citizens, but they must provide original source documents, rather than digital ancestry records, to recover their physical certificates.

The distinction matters for travel and proof of status. A citizenship certificate does not create citizenship, but it is the document many people need to show airlines, passport authorities, employers or other institutions that require formal evidence of nationality. Without it, a person recognized under the new law can still face practical obstacles.

The reach of the change extends well beyond the families already approved. Anyone born abroad before December 15, 2025 who falls within the restored line of descent stands to benefit from the end of the first-generation limit, while those with children born or adopted abroad after that date now have to satisfy the substantial connection rule.

That split gives Bill C-3 two very different effects at once. It reopened the door for descendants who had been excluded by old law, and it imposed a residency-based transmission test on future generations, tying descent after December 15, 2025 to a parent’s time physically spent in Canada.

The legislation itself appears in Parliament’s record as An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025), while IRCC outlined the new rules in a December 15, 2025 notice on Canadians born or adopted abroad. The department’s summary set out both the restoration of status for Lost Canadians and the physical-presence rule for future births and adoptions abroad.

The Canadian changes also touch U.S. legal and administrative systems in quieter ways. Americans pursuing recognition as Canadians still remain U.S. citizens under current State Department policy, and general federal guidance on nationality continues through the USCIS Policy Manual, even though citizenship by descent in this case turns on Canadian law, not a U.S. immigration filing.

Families with cross-border histories have spent years pressing Ottawa to address what they saw as arbitrary exclusions rooted in earlier statutes. The label “Lost Canadians” captured people who considered themselves Canadian by family line but found that a parent’s naturalization, a missed retention step, or the first-generation limit had cut the chain.

Now, many of those families have legal recognition but not yet administrative certainty. The new law restored status on paper for broad groups of descendants, while the certificate review launched in June forced thousands of fresh claimants, many in the United States, back into document gathering to prove a citizenship Canada had already said they hold.