(CANADA) — Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has begun requiring hundreds of people to surrender citizenship certificates issued under Bill C-3, after many applicants relied on genealogy website records that the department now says do not meet its proof standard.

Letters dated from June 13, 2026 tell recipients that the department is reviewing whether they were entitled to hold those certificates. The action affects people who obtained citizenship under Canada’s expanded Lost Canadians law, which took effect in December 2025.

Peggy Sun, Registrar of Canadian Citizenship, signed the notices. “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,” one letter says.

Another passage sets out the department’s evidence standard. “The documentation submitted in support of your proof of citizenship application is not from the original source authorities responsible for creating or maintaining historical records, such as civil registries, vital statistics agencies, or other authorized government bodies.”

Recipients are then ordered to return the documents already issued to them. “As this documentation was not submitted with your proof of citizenship application, I am requiring the surrender of your certificate of citizenship.”

The review centers on people who claimed citizenship by descent beyond the first generation under Bill C-3. The law retroactively expanded citizenship rights to descendants of Canadians who had been excluded by the first-generation limit, resolving a long-running dispute over the status of so-called Lost Canadians.

Many applicants used printouts or digital records from sites such as Ancestry.com or FamilySearch as primary evidence of lineage. IRCC has taken the position that those services can aid family research but do not count as official source records for legal proof of citizenship.

That distinction now sits at the center of the department’s review. People who were approved with those materials are being told to surrender their certificates and provide records from original source authorities, including long-form birth certificates from provincial archives.

IRCC issued 4,075 certificates under these provisions in the first three months of the new law, from December 2025 through March 2026. Of those recipients, 1,955 were born in the United States.

The figures show why the review reaches far beyond a small administrative dispute. A large share of the early beneficiaries of Canada’s new citizenship rules were U.S.-born descendants who had used the law to establish a formal tie to Canada.

Some had already used their certificates to obtain Canadian passports, secure a Social Insurance Number, or start plans to relocate to Canada. The letters describe the process as a review rather than a formal revocation, but recipients cannot rely on the certificates while the department re-examines their cases.

Notices cite Subsection 26(1) of the Citizenship Regulations, which allows the registrar to require surrender of a certificate if there is reason to believe the holder is not entitled to it. That places the current action inside an existing regulatory power, even as the cases involve certificates issued only months ago.

The timing has drawn attention because Bill C-3 was presented as a broad fix for people left outside Canadian citizenship by older rules. It took effect in December 2025 and extended citizenship by descent beyond the first generation, applying retroactively to families previously shut out.

Under that expansion, descendants who had spent years tracing family lines gained a route to recognition. Some assembled applications from family trees, church records, census entries, and database results found through commercial and nonprofit genealogy services.

IRCC’s current position makes a sharper distinction between family-history evidence and legal proof. A record hosted on a genealogy platform may reflect an archival source, but the department is demanding documents from the authority that originally created or maintains the record.

That creates a practical hurdle for applicants whose family links run through older provincial or local archives. Long-form birth certificates and other civil records can take time to locate, request, and certify, especially when the events at issue occurred generations ago.

The department has framed the matter as an entitlement review, not a cancellation proceeding after misconduct or fraud findings. Even so, the immediate effect is the same for recipients who had already treated the certificates as confirmation of Canadian citizenship.

Canada’s move has also carried a cross-border element because so many of the affected people were born in the United States. Neither the U.S. Department of Homeland Security nor USCIS had issued a statement on the matter as of June 16, 2026.

IRCC’s newsroom remains the primary official channel tied to the issue. The notices themselves, signed by Sun, provide the clearest account of the government’s position and the department’s reasons for demanding surrender.

Recipients now face a documentary test different from the one many believed they had already passed. Their next step is to replace genealogy-site evidence with records from the original source authorities if they want to keep the citizenship certificates Canada has told them to return.