Per my daughter, there were a couple more modern motivations: 1) The Court had found that women had been treated unfairly under British/Canadian law. When men married non-British/Canadians, they kept their citizenship, women lost theirs. And, of course, the men's descendants could claim citizenship by descent for permitted generations, but none of the women's could. And 2), there had been kids born overseas to British/Canadians who had ended up stateless as Canadian descent law interacted with the other countries' laws. As far as timing, original Court finding was in the late 2000s. The political branch messed around with alternatives for years. Got to the point the Courts were going to simply impose an answer unless the political branch came up with something acceptable. |
TY, that makes sense and seems like a huge issue and actually odd it took so long to fix! |
Probably, I don’t think there is a limit to the number of generations back you can look as long as you can prove a continuous chain of ancestry. |
The Canadian government took very good records before computers. Some go back to the 1600s , especially French immigrants. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland the French Acadians were kicked out of the country by England in the 1700s, but all of French Acadians didn't leave. There were small towns that were French speaking and schools that taught in French even in the early 1900s. The British did find their way to the small towns and banned French speaking in schools. My grandmother told me that her mother spoke French only, my grandmother was bilingual and my mother speaks English and understands French but forgets how to speak it. If you have any Canadian ancestors it is worth digging into and finding the records. No country can guarantee stability and that includes the US. |
The US had the same law only earlier in last century. Biden had a law passed that protected immigrants from getting deported if they were married to an American citizen. Think Melania Trump. There are conditions and that’s assuming Trump hasn’t done something illegal to remove it. |