Posted on 07/05/2018 12:40:38 PM PDT by Theoria
A B.C. father is blaming Canada's citizenship rules for keeping his kids separated from him and his home country.
Patrick Chandler was stunned to learn despite being a Canadian citizen, he wasn’t able to pass on his citizenship to his four-year-old and nine-year-old children, who were born in China while he was working there.
He attempted to bring his kids to Canada but was stopped at the last minute by Canadian officials.
“(The worker) starts stamping the documents and says at the very last second, ‘Oh wait a second. You weren’t born in Canada and neither was your daughter. We can't process this application. She’s not allowed to get Canadian citizenship.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’” he told CTV Vancouver.
It turns out Chandler’s birthplace has complicated his own bid to be reunited with his kids.
He was born in Libya to Canadian parents, and lived in Canada from the time he was two until his late teens.
Until 2009, a child of a Canadian citizen who was born abroad automatically acquired Canadian citizenship. The former federal Conservative government changed the law to allow the first child born abroad to a Canadian to keep their citizenship. However, that child’s kids aren’t entitled to Canadian citizenship.
"I was shocked. Stunned that this was a thing," Chandler said.
Chandler's daughter was born three months after that law passed. He says his daughter wasn’t able to receive Chinese citizenship due to rules regarding registering births. However, she was able to claim Irish citizenship through Chandler's father.
His son is a Chinese national.
The ordeal has left him separated from his kids and wife for the past seven months, reduced to keeping in touch by phone.
"I've been missing a lot in these last few months," he said.
Advocates for changing the law say Chandler's is a situation that Canadian expatriates should be examining.
"There's going to be a lot of people in this boat and they don't even know it," said Don Chapman, an advocate for Canadians who have lost their citizenship.
Chapman argues that a Canadian born abroad should be allowed to return to Canada for a minimum of three years – the same length of time it takes for permanent residents to gain citizenship – to be allowed to pass their citizenship on to their children.
"The problem is the will of the government," he said.
Chapman says the federal government has suggested he sponsor his children as immigrants. He's completed the paperwork but has yet to hear if his effort has been approved.
A sad tale, sadly told.
We haven’t quite advanced to the point where one’s DNA can be imprinted with an ID and citizenship data, which can be passed on to offspring. We’ll get there, eventually [/s].
Thought Canada was all for open borders? Surely, they can just bring those children into Canada without any documents. Maybe they should claim asylum - that generally works too.
as an ex-Canuck, this is old news. Canadastan doesnt operate the same way America does. We already knew this is how it’s been done. I know countless guys outside of the country who were scrutinized going back after a epriod of time. Ive said it again, if you think US border guys are aholes, Kanadian border people are worse than Soviet-era police.
You know folks, doesn’t it seem important to know your status and how the family dynamics will be affected by your time spent in foreign nations?
To learn this upon re-entry, is just idiotic.
If you didn’t care any more than this all along, don’t blame anyone but yourself for your reckless dis-concern for the laws governing such matters.
That’s what I was thinking.
Citizenship in the West has, in the last generation, become like a frequent flyer membership or credit card. A document we have, but one only care about because everyone has one and it gives us some benefits. Otherwise, we don’t care.
That attitude needs to change.
Thank mlo, seems obvious to me.
Our citizenship seems to garner us nothing.
Illegals have been given Constitutional protections even though they are not warranted.
The 14th Amendment is said to grant their children born here U. S., Citizens, when it really doesn’t. They fact is they get all the breaks. They all go in their favor.
They get breaks we can’t get for tuition. They break our laws and don’t get prosecuted or ejected.
I’ve gone so far as to laughingly suggest it might be best to renounce our citizenship and sneak in for all the perks we could get.
Weird laws....................
Seems strange, coming from Canada......................
Clearly, it garners us much less than it should. One big reason this is true, in my opinion, is that our elected officials don't generally care about American citizens - beyond lying to them well-enough to get elected. Add to this the expansive and growing ranks of government employees, who are committed to keeping the graving train and their government pensions going, and you have a formula for the issues we're facing.
They’re trying to erode birthright citizenship, and especially an anchor baby born in Canada who goes home and then passes on “Canadian” citizenship to children born in the parent’s real home country.
graving = gravy
Justin Trudeau is snatching children away from their parents
Does this mean that Ted Cruz’s daughters are not Canadian citizens?
If you're an American, you pay the taxes for their care, and then you can go bankrupt.
It's like the late Roman Empire, when Goths and other barbarians were settled with legal exemptions while the "citizens" were deemed humiliores, good only for forced labor and taxes.
Imagine that. Countries around the world are allowed to make their own citizenship laws and make people follow them. America, not so much.
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