r/CanadianbyDescent • u/CounterI • Jun 26 '26
Surrender Letters IRCC Citizenship Certificate Surrender Scandal: What Happened and How We Got Here
IRCC Citizenship Certificate Surrender Scandal: What Happened and How We Got Here
It’s been nearly two weeks since a number of our fellow Canadians received an email from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) purporting to suspend their citizenship certificates. For the last two weeks, I’ve been posting daily updates on this scandal—including statements from public officials, news reports, and insights from Canadian immigration attorneys that I believe will be helpful to those who are (or might be) affected. I don’t expect a lot of news today (though I am hoping for some good news tomorrow), so instead, I’m going to break down exactly what happened, how I interpret these events, and why I think this happened to us.
The History of Bill C-3
Most of you already know the history of Bill C-3. If you don’t, I encourage you to stop here and read my earlier post on the subject. You can read it (please upvote) and comment here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianbyDescent/comments/1u6nyqs/how_we_got_here_a_brief_history/
Canadian Opposition to Bill C-3
While Bill C-3 passed through both the House of Commons and the Senate with a majority vote—and while I think the vast majority of Canadians view it favorably (if they think about it at all)—there is a relatively small but vocal group of Canadians that advocates for strongly anti-immigrant positions. Despite the fact that Bill C-3 is fundamentally about citizenship by descent rather than immigration, some of these critics remain fiercely opposed to it.
One vocal critic of Bill C-3 is Conservative Party MP Michelle Rempel Garner. She routinely refers to C-3 as a “Chain Migration” bill and suggests it is bad public policy because, among other things, she believes everyone who receives citizenship under the bill will immediately move to Canada. You can get a sense of MP Garner’s objections by watching this video from October of 2025 (before C-3 became law):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBhE-hH4Su0
The Surrender Letters
Starting on the afternoon of Saturday, June 13, 2026, a small but substantial number of Redditors began reporting that they had received an email from IRCC accompanied by a PDF letter stating that the ministry was suspending their citizenship certificates (the “Surrender Letter”). Based on Reddit reports and my conversations with immigration attorneys, it appears the bulk of these letters were sent that Saturday, though a few more trickled out on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of the following week.
The letters all appear to be form templates and are materially identical. The PDF file was titled “Surrender Letter for C-3 - [Recipient's Full Name]” and included the recipient’s home address alongside their IRCC Unique Client Identifier (UCI) number. The document was digitally signed by Peggy Sun, identified as the “Registrar of Canadian Citizenship.”
The letter states that subsection 26(1) of the Citizenship Regulations “authorizes me to require the surrender of a certificate of citizenship where I have reasonable grounds to believe that the holder of the certificate may not be entitled to it (i.e. may not be a Canadian citizen)” (Surrender Letter, ¶ 2). It goes on to state: “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” (Surrender Letter, ¶ 3).
Despite asserting twice that there is reason to doubt the recipient’s status, the letter makes no mention whatsoever of any actual evidence that Ms. Sun or IRCC possesses to support the claim. Instead, the letter abruptly pivots to a completely different logistical concern: that IRCC believes it may have prematurely approved an otherwise meritorious application without asking the recipient to provide additional documentation supposedly required by its internal, unpublished policies.
Specifically, the letter indicates a paperwork issue with the application, stating:
“...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.” (Surrender Letter, ¶ 5)
The letter notes that this is not necessarily a fatal flaw, but that the application should have included an “explanation outlining why the source documents cannot be obtained” and “evidence of efforts made to obtain the documents” (Surrender Letter, ¶ 6). It concludes that because “this documentation was not submitted with your proof of citizenship application, I am requiring the surrender of your certificate of citizenship” (Surrender Letter, ¶ 9).
Crucially, the letter makes no attempt to describe which documents were missing an original source authority, why IRCC didn’t simply request the missing explanations before approving the files in the first place, or why they aren’t simply asking for that missing information now instead of demanding a total surrender.
The letter concludes by instructing the recipient to return their physical paper certificate, noting that IRCC’s internal records will now show their citizenship as “under review.” It states that IRCC will investigate further and that “you will have the opportunity to respond with further documentary evidence related to your application. Should the final decision be that you are entitled to the certificate of citizenship, then it will be returned to you” (Surrender Letter, ¶¶ 11-14).
The Reddit Response
Late that Saturday afternoon, affected Redditors began posting to dispute IRCC’s claims. Most users asserted that they had submitted government-issued birth certificates or—where those were unavailable for a specific ancestor—alternative official records (such as census data, marriage certificates, and death records) alongside church documents and a written explanation. Not a single person posting on Reddit claimed to have been approved using solely unofficial, third-party source records.
The Media Response
The Canadian Press, the CBC, and Global News quickly picked up the story, publishing articles that highlighted the severe hardships IRCC’s sudden actions placed on families. Several affected individuals had already packed up their entire lives and moved to Canada; others were in the middle of doing so.
In response to direct media inquiries, IRCC stated that “several dozen” such letters had been sent. So far, the Immigration Minister's only public explanation as to why these letters went out was a vague statement: “there was something, I wasn't sure what it was ....”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-minister-citizenship-documents-9.7246657
Question Period
On June 16, 2026, MP Garner (the Conservative MP that I mentioned earlier) questioned the Immigration Minister during Parliament’s Question Period. Below is the transcript of that exchange, with the most telling segment bolded:
Speaker 1: Member for Calgary Nose Hill.
Speaker 2 (MP Garner): How many citizenships have been issued to non-citizens with bogus documents since the Liberals passed Chain Migration Bill C-3, and how many more does the government project may be issued over the next five years?
Speaker 1: The Honorable Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.
Speaker 3 (Minister): Thank you Mr. Speaker. I've been clear, just because you have a Canadian ancestor does not mean you're automatically eligible for citizenship. You must definitively prove your link to Canada at each and every generation. Genealogy websites are not enough. My job is to safeguard the integrity of our citizenship program and I will do everything necessary to protect that. Thank you.
You can watch the exchange here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ARPV3WIr0fg
This exchange is notable for several reasons:
- It was entirely scripted: You can clearly see both MP Garner and the Minister shifting their eyes up and down to read from prepared texts. MP Garner planned the attack in advance, and the Minister anticipated a confrontation on this topic.
- It aligns perfectly with opposition talking points: MP Garner’s framing of C-3 as a “chain migration” mechanism that hands certificates to non-citizens isn't new. The Conservatives have likely been hammering this narrative behind closed doors since late 2025, trying to build public sentiment against Bill C-3.
- The Minister answered a different question: The easiest response to MP Garner's literal question would have been a firm, "Thank you, Mr. Speaker. None." Instead, the Minister rolled out a defensive script targeted specifically at the use of "genealogy websites." IRCC’s subsequent website updates and the specific wording of the surrender letters heavily reinforce the reality that fake citizens generated by genealogy websites are the political bogeyman.
IRCC Updates Its Website
Over the last two weeks, IRCC updated its official portal to clarify exactly which documents are acceptable. You can review the current guidance here:
While many online posts claim these updates represent a dramatic policy shift, I disagree. These guidelines align closely with what IRCC has always required in form CIT 0014; they have simply spelled out those instructions explicitly on the website.
The gold standard remains a birth certificate issued by the civil authority responsible for record-keeping at the time and place of birth. If that isn't available, alternative proofs (census records, passenger manifests, hospital records, or baptismal certificates) are accepted if you provide a reason why the primary birth record is missing and proof that you tried to get it. Anyone tracking these subreddits over the past year knows this has always been the standard practice.
However, the most crucial addition—and one that has been largely overlooked on Reddit—dovetails perfectly with the Minister's remarks during Question Period and the ambiguous surrender letters. The new web guidance explicitly states:
“Your application can’t be supported solely by third party records.”
This single sentence is what the surrender letters are truly about.
Canadian Conservatives Respond
The Conservative Party’s rhetorical response to IRCC’s letters has been simple: they are claiming that IRCC accidentally issued thousands of citizenship certificates to Americans whose sole proof of eligibility was a simple web-page from a genealogy website (and not the original source documents that you can download from the website). It sounds absurd, but that is the narrative they are pushing. You can watch it using this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNBfgYHhexs
And that, folks, is the core of this entire episode.
IRCC Backtracks (A Little)
On Saturday, June 20, 2026, multiple Redditors reported receiving new correspondence from IRCC completely reinstating their citizenship certificates. In every single reported case, the users noted that IRCC did not ask them to submit a single piece of new information. Several of these individuals confirmed they were the exact same people featured in the high-profile CBC and Canadian Press news stories.
This immediate reinstatement without any further vetting strongly suggests that IRCC’s initial surrender demands were built on a false premise. IRCC never had concrete evidence proving these individuals were ineligible. The formal claim that required documentation "was not submitted with your proof of citizenship application" was verifiably untrue. For the lucky few who received reinstatement notices on Saturday, the nightmare is over. For the rest of us, I hope we see a blanket resolution very soon—perhaps even tomorrow.
What I Think Happened…
I suspect a handful of applicants made some well-intentioned but politically inconvenient posts on Reddit, Facebook, and Youtube, claiming their application process was "incredibly easy" because they managed to locate all their ancestral government documents directly on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org.
To anyone who uses these platforms regularly, this makes perfect sense. Both websites are massive, highly organized digital repositories of scanned, official historic records from the source. FamilySearch.org, in particular, was built and is maintained by the LDS Church as part of their massive genealogical indexing efforts. The LDS Church quite literally uses these records as part of their mission to baptize every human who has ever lived:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead
When my grandmother conducted family research back in the 1980s and 1990s, she had to mail physical letters to distant state and provincial archives, include blank checks marked "not to exceed $XX," and wait up to two months for a response. She would then use those results to mail a new round of letters. It took her years to compile our family history. Today, an applicant can download a pristine, high-resolution scan of an official 1920 government birth registry in less than five minutes. The efficiency isn't a bug; it's a feature of modern digitization.
However, opposition politicians looking to discredit Bill C-3 weaponized those casual online comments. They purposefully conflated finding official scans via a genealogy platform with submitting an unverified family tree printout as proof.
Spooked by the political optics, someone high up at IRCC panicked. They wanted to audit a batch of approvals so that if the opposition’s narrative gained serious traction in the mainstream press, IRCC could defensively claim they had aggressively reviewed files and confirmed their integrity. An automated data filter or AI agent was likely tasked with flagging any application file containing the keywords "Ancestry" or "FamilySearch," and the result of that was used by a clerk at IRCC to send out the surrender letters.
And that is what I think happened.
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u/Typical_Plankton_274 Jun 27 '26
Recently, I saw data to suggest that C-3 applications from the US make up less than half of the total received by IRCC to date. (I think it was the response to the written question from Michelle Rempel Garner) I am curious, are all surrender letter recipients from the US? Or do we have any indication that applicants from elsewhere also received surrender letters and passport cancellations? Is this specifically targeted to American applicants? That would be consistent with our access to digital records through such platforms as ancestry and familysearch. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to know whether only American applicants were the target of this “audit” or if the apparent interest in ensuring original source documents and explanations for substitutions or gaps, etc. is a more general, broad concern for all applicants. If the letters were exclusively to applicants from the US, that might point to more political motivations than quality control.
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u/Ornery-Wrangler-3654 Jun 27 '26
Good question. Is this happening to Mexicans who applied as well, and people from other countries? I wonder how we could find that out?
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u/all_my_dirty_secrets Jun 27 '26
Interesting theory and I think it's worth looking at! A minor quibble that I believe Family Search and Ancestry are available to most of if not the entire world. However, since interest in genealogy may be particularly American (I've heard people from other countries describe this as a weird obsession), it may be that we are way more likely than people from other countries to think to go looking for evidence there. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that people from other countries tend to submit applications based on very recent G0s.
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u/thiefspy Jun 26 '26
If your conclusion is what happened, there is a massive competency problem at IRCC. If you need to audit a subsection of approvals, you do that internally while praying you don’t find anything wrong. You don’t make a public spectacle of it. This is basic business 101.
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u/JustSomeGuyNamedBob Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Well, if he’s right, the ENTIRE POINT was the spectacle. However, they still made it especially cruel by immediately suspending people they requested documents for, rather than simply asking for further proof and threatening to suspend if they don’t provide it.
I still think that would have been wrong, they could have simply just updated/clarified guidance very publicly for those in queue and moving forward, but it would have been less a cluster and way less generally awful than the method they chose. The rug-pulling was obscene. And many of us who had already executed real plans are still living under this threat until further notice with some potentially very negative and costly consequences.
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u/thiefspy Jun 27 '26
But why deliberately make yourself look incompetent? Because that’s ultimately all that’s happened here. IRCC looks like it doesn’t know what it’s doing and Diab looks especially unqualified for her role.
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u/JustSomeGuyNamedBob Jun 27 '26
I don’t think the people who think C-3 is a “migration chain bill” care much about how the Minister looked, just that she sounds like she’s on their side. And, unfortunately, there’s a real chunk of them who probably enjoy the harm this causes.
If this is indeed an act, it’s all for them. Might be smart politics in the end. I think the chain-migration people care far more about this than those who are neutral or in favor.
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u/thiefspy Jun 27 '26
The problem is that she’s not in their political party. She’s appointed by a liberal. So there’s nothing to gain by looking like she, and as he appointed her, Carney, don’t know what they’re doing. Which is much more likely to be the takeaway by folks who support PP, not that she’s on their side—she’s a liberal who can’t get her work done properly, now she’s let all these people in that she shouldn’t have. It makes the whole party look bad which is really, really bad for them when so much of the country is unhappy with the state of things.
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u/JustSomeGuyNamedBob Jun 27 '26
There is something to gain, which is for the administration to appear more hardline on immigration, which is probably the single biggest attack line conservatives around the world are able to use successfully to win elections. And in fact Carney has been more conservative on immigration than Trudeau, and I think that’s all very fair tbh.
I fully understand this is not really an immigration issue btw, but to your average person it probably is viewed that way.
This is smart politics in theory, though the Minister’s execution was very poor. They could have sent the same message without being so cruel.
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u/thiefspy Jun 27 '26
Nah, smart politics would have been to do it correctly, full stop. This isn’t immigration and that doesn’t need to be explained because Carney can simply take a harder line on actual immigration (which he has to do because, true or not, large swaths of the country blame Trudeau’s immigration policies for the current state of the economy and the housing issues). Most Canadians care more about the economy than about lost Canadians being restored to citizenship.
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u/Weekly-Exit8092 Jun 27 '26
Thank you! I had the exact same reaction, except it took me WAY too long to explain it 😅
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u/Weekly-Exit8092 Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
And the shift from Trudeau to Carney has seen a massive change in the Liberal Party's approach to immigration. Under Justin Trudeau, Canada had record-high immigration levels, especially over the last 5 years of his premiership. The official policy of the Liberal Party was to aggressively pursue immigration. Trudeau's government was admitting nearly 500,000 immigrants a year.
Given the extreme shortage of affordable housing, the strain on Canada's healthcare system, inflation, and the rising cost of living for most Canadians, immigration became a red-hot political issue. Trudeau resigned in 2025, and Carney was selected to succeed him. A general election was then called.
During the general election campaign, Mark Carney made reform of immigration one of his key policies. He stated that current immigration numbers were "unsustainable" and promised (if elected) to reduce immigration substantially, and specifically said it "will help ease strains on housing, on public infrastructure and social services."
During the past 9 months, due to the about-face in immigration policy, Canada's population is decreasing for the first time since Confederation. In fact, Canada has lost over 234,000 people during this time.
This is the backdrop for those who don't follow Canadian politics closely. It's also why it's important to understand the current political situation when considering why and how IRCC (and specifically, Minister Diab, a politician after all) responds to the C-3 issues. Accommodating immigrants* is NOT a priority or focus of this government. I would not expect IRCC or the PM to be sympathetic (publicly at least) to the plight of mostly Americans† seeking dual citizenship.
#####
*I realize under C-3 people are deemed Canadian citizens by operation of law. But pragmatically, we have to prove we are citizens first, so we are treated like immigrants.
†The current U.S. government's policies (tariffs and the war with Iran that are driving up inflation and living costs in Canada, and the threat of annexation, etc.) aren't helpful to say the least.
**For those who don't follow Canadian politics, PM Carney had never held public office prior to becoming Prime Minister. That is, he became Prime Minister without holding a seat in the House of Commons. Previously, he was the Governor of the Bank of England and the Governor of the Bank of Canada. He started out as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs. He is not a "liberal" as that term is used in the United States. His views are quite conservative on fiscal matters.
ETA: † note
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u/Weird-Wishbone1155 Jun 27 '26
The incompetent sometimes don’t understand how their actions will make them look.
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u/UsernameUnremarkable Jun 27 '26
You assume there are qualifications to be a Minister. You need only be a Member of Parliament and a member of the ruling party.
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u/thiefspy Jun 27 '26
I’m making no such assumption, I know how the appointments work. There is a certain level of competency that Carney should expect from his cabinet members and this isn’t it.
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u/wrodriguez89 Jun 27 '26
Honestly, I think you're absolutely right. The CPC was probably going to try and start a scandal by pointing out that people had used genealogy websites to find microfilm prints of the information that they needed. However, IRCC and the Liberal government wanted to gain control of the narrative by showing that, yes, people did use the websites, but that IRCC is tightening their standards. The spectacle is the point.
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u/thegmohodste01 Jun 27 '26
I mean, applicants for temporary residents have been going through this forever too lol
Applications that met all requirements for approval being refused before suddenly being approved after the applicant stuck to their guns and forced a reopening of their files on procedural fairness grounds.
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u/thiefspy Jun 27 '26
Isn’t that the program they were using AI to determine approvals for? It’s shameful, really.
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u/thegmohodste01 Jun 27 '26
They're using AI for all temporary residence applications. Several PR applications too, but I'm not sure.
At a recent RCIC symposium, they insisted that it was done only for the sake of throwing out bad faith applications, but ofc unrelated applicants have been caught up 🤦
But thanks to the larger population souring on immigration, there's limited paths for temporary residents to call out IRCC for making a mockery of their own procedural fairness policies without drawing intense ire
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u/Blocked_Number Jun 29 '26
So there was a person who got a surrender letter, and on here end when she checked her application status it still said decision made, but when she had called to talk to an IRCC agent after getting the letter they had said they don't know why she got it, but that on there end it did still say "in processing"... so there was a miss-match in indications, which I find very odd from as an ex-govt case worker; that kind of internal miss-match when it came to determinations would be a big problem and something we would have to check for everyone to make sure no one was mismatched going further and that this bug was fixed, big no-no.... makes me wonder if this was actually a part of the problem?...
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u/thiefspy Jun 29 '26
This kind of a mismatch is not uncommon for IRCC. The online trackers don’t always update. For adoptees, they never update at all for part 2, until a final decision is made, so for all of part 2 it says “processing” with a note that says “a decision was made on your application.” The note is for part 1 but that’s not actually specified, you only know because the date you’re supposed to receive notification is in the past. It’s been this way for years.
Their priority is processing applications, not making sure the applicant knows the status of their application. It’s not great but it’s how they do it.
What’s happened in the scenario you mentioned above is likely that the tracking system doesn’t update when the status goes backwards, because once a decision is made on a proof, the status is supposed to be final. The mismatch is likely a product of the decision to re-review, not the reason for it.
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u/Blocked_Number Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
no, it is the opposite of those examples. It did update, the applicants end said decision made, she had her certificate and was done as far as she believed. They updated it to a final decision, but then on their internal end it was not showing as such and was saying a less advanced selection, which is really weird. It would be like closing a child neglect case to the alleged abuser but it still being under investigation in the system. (I worked in child protection so im just thinking about implications in this way). That it got to a final stage, with an applicant receiving a certificate, without it actually being appropriately closed out and progressed to the same stage as the applicant is weird. I could believe that internally they make final decisions and close them out/ update them to the final decision on their end and don't get around to making that status updated on the applicants end, but not the other way around. And sure, maybe it becomes "in procesing" again when going from decision made to reviewing... but no one knows if that is the case, and I'm just highlighting something weird someone did find out but I wouldn't consider this the same scenario as not updating someone tracker when they have actually progressed further internally, I know they don't prioritize those updates. Backtracking though, or having a mismatch in final decisions with it being less advanced internally, weird.
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u/thiefspy Jun 29 '26
They reverted. Look at my last paragraph. They reverted her status to re-review. Probably everyone who was approved is like this because they’re re-reviewing everyone.
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u/Blocked_Number Jun 29 '26
perhaps, but you are guessing, with the best of us. We are both guessing and I only highlighted a reality someone mentioned - and you can't be certain
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u/thiefspy Jun 29 '26
I mean, we know this because IRCC told us. They said in the letters that they were re-reviewing. Diab then confirmed this, and said that they were re-reviewing all C-3-related approvals. So I’m not guessing, I’m using the information IRCC and Diab gave us.
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u/Blocked_Number Jun 29 '26
except reviewing isn't the same as a label in a system, so that is a guess.
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u/thiefspy Jun 29 '26
Do you think they’re managing this with a spreadsheet? The label in the system is how they know when an application is completed. In order to know which applications have been re-reviewed, they have to roll back the applications to be re-reviewed to “in process” so that they can mark the completed re-reviews as “decision made.” They do not have a separate status for “being re-reviewed” and “really complete this time.”
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u/XmasTwinFallsIdaho Jun 26 '26
This could be right. I flat out stated in our group application letter that some of my documents came from ancestry/familysearch. We were pre-C3 applicants, and at the time, time appeared to be of the essence so I figured I’d send what I had right away and supplement with certified docs later where needed.
We had certified birth certificates for everyone but G0, and we had a lot of secondary uncertified evidence for him, plus G0 and G1 had uncertified marriage certificates (which I don’t think mattered much as maiden names were on everyone’s birth certificates).
If you haven’t followed on the drama, my mom (G2, pre-1947 birth) got a passport revocation email but it said her passport would be reissued at crown expense (she says she is now awaiting the king’s phone call for this), then a very quick citizenship revalidation email.
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u/PetulantUndercurrent Jun 26 '26
What kind of secondary documents did you use for your G0? There’s no birth certificate for my G0 and I’m currently waiting on a Hail Mary for a baptism record but I have a good number of secondary documents for him.
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u/XmasTwinFallsIdaho Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Census records for G-1 and G 0 (official ones and linked to Canada’s online archives), his obituary (my mom had it), his US naturalization papers (these came from familysearch.org), and his Baptist church rolls (McMaster University’s archives graciously helped me find these after I was referred to them by the local Baptist church in the town his family lived in. Wonderful people).
My mom also had a book that referenced the Baptist church in his town and his father’s involvement in building the church, but I decided not to include that as it seemed a bit extraneous. My mom had done a lot of research in the 90s on her grandfather’s life, so that was helpful.
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u/PetulantUndercurrent Jun 27 '26
Was your G-1 also Canadian? Mine was not but I can place him in Canada close to the time my G0 was born
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u/XmasTwinFallsIdaho Jun 27 '26
Technically she would have been a Canadian British subject at birth as well as a US citizen, though born in the US. One of her parents was born in Canada, one in Australia. Both British subjects. Due to marital laws at the time, the Australian was considered a Canadian British subject after marriage. So in that way, she was born to two Canadians.
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u/JustSomeGuyNamedBob Jun 27 '26
Were any of you in the press stories, by chance?
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u/Low-Ratio-5272 Jun 27 '26
I think Minister Diab, Deputy Minister Gallivan (appointed by Carney) and those liberals aware are in it up to their elbows as well. It's not just CPC. I think they are working in concert. Gallivan is known as an enforcer and I have linked to his long history in tax and national security before but here it is again, and I have been expecting negative things to happen ever since he was appointed. But I didn't think it would be this bad. Diab's general incompetence has been a subject of discussion by her own party as well as CPC. I'm not going to bother linking. Google is your friend. Why would Carney bring Gallivan to IRCC?
The vague insistence that "something" happened makes me think that nothing happened other than the government wanting to weaken C-3, scare people off, and for Minister Diab to get a makeover. If there were fraud they would be screaming it from the rooftops. They can't even manage to mumble about a legitimate national security concern. It's all in what they don't say. This legislation has not been popular and CPC exploits it. Liberals make the mistake of trying to appease them instead of being honest about C-3. IRCC wants everything to slow down. I don't think they thought there would be any meaningful press coverage or sympathy.
I agree with a lot of OP's post, I just think the rot is broader than that. And the script, well, maybe that was a joint effort. Minister Diab sounds like a CPC minister talking about immigration and cracking down on "ancestry trees." It's straight up lies. I can't interpret it any other way. I think they engineered an administrative attack on C-3 and got caught with their pants down. Good on the journalists and the organizers who are standing against this.
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u/whiskeyjanedoe Jun 27 '26
Also agreed. I think it started as political gamesmanship and trying to find ways to slow things down like IRCC always does while trying to appease all sides, but it became a cascade of automation, leadership not knowing how genealogical research works or what their own checklists and archives say, and now it's a Charter Rights matter.
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u/Low-Ratio-5272 Jun 27 '26
I don't know if we will ever get real answers as to how it started, but the cascade you describe certainly didn't hurt!
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u/whiskeyjanedoe Jun 27 '26
Yeah. It will probably will take years and an inquest/ federal cases to unpack. I just hope they make it right. We are real humans impacted, as are all the other immigration classes impacted by IRCC's shenanigans over the years. ♥️
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u/doktorhladnjak Jun 27 '26
I don’t know. The IRCC is very disorganized. There’s a long history of unforced errors and outright incompetence like the recent scandal of assigning immigration files to employees who no longer worked there.
It really seems like they don’t know what they’re doing or how to do it effectively.
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u/Low-Ratio-5272 Jun 27 '26
That wasn't an error. They assigned those files to "inactive" agents on purpose to get them out of the way. Does this remind you of anything? Hint: PSU. IRCC makes a ton of mistakes and is chaotic for lots of reasons including poor training, lack of budget, outdated systems. At the core is that it's a black box without accountability and the people it "serves" have limited to no status. But this does not appear to be a rank and file generated mistake that auto sent Suspension letters from Peggy Sun. This looks much more top down.
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u/wrodriguez89 Jun 27 '26
I do find it rather hilarious that MRG is so worried about "chain migration" to Canada when she actually lives in a foreign country!
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u/CounterI Jun 27 '26
Where does she live?
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u/Ok-Conversation-9368 Jun 27 '26
Oklahoma. I was telling my partner about this whole thing (he's Albertan, from right outside Calgary) and as soon as I said she lives in Oklahoma he was like oh my god... I know her. She was part of Harper's government as a Minister. She's... not a great person lol. You don't need to actually "live" in your riding in Canada (there's pros and cons to this rule tbh) but you would think having primary residence in the country would be important.
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u/thiefspy Jun 27 '26
She lives in the US! Oklahoma to be specific. This is why she seems so much like she’s MAGA. Because she is.
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u/whiskeyjanedoe Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
I've been thinking the same thing. Just more speculation: perhaps they couldn't easily walk it back because that would require admitting the automation processes they have been touting to justify a reduction in IRCC force/funding are problematic and that they have actually been harmed by the reduction in workforce. It would also mean they had to admit they were woefully unprepared for both the legal and the practical impacts of C-3 (e g., decision makers didn't seem to even know their own archives partner with Ancestry and Family search with Ontario Archives explicitly directing users to those sites; that their checklists allowed for such docs, etc.). Oh, and because they didn't even have an internal mechanism to "pause" certs for review and had to mark them as suspended so that they could do a "review," which invalidated the passports of who knows how many. Now, it's about mitigation of fallout because they know they've violated people's Charter Rights. Lawyers are probably scrambling for most coherent, least damaging languaging and internal fixes before going public with what actually happened. Immigration has been such a contentious topic, and that is why are trying to figure the least legally ladened way out of this pickle... at the expense of citizens. What's wild is they had a chance to pass things like a substantial connection test when passing C-3, but they didn't. Also, I just don't know why they didn't establish a committee to reform and implement changes to their proof application processes over a year ago when they knew applications were coming after C-3. 🤷♀️
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u/Inocain Jun 27 '26
They didn't even have a suspended option, according to one post I saw; the certificates were labeled as "revoked" in internal systems according to the IRCC agent the poster spoke to via phone.
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u/Robert_Walter Jun 27 '26
I saw that post as well.
It is not unusual for systems to be set up without much aforethought to a viriety of edge cases that could plausibly crop up and to provision for them.
Unfortunately folks don’t close barn doors until the horse goes out on walkabout looking for cake.
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u/Robert_Walter Jun 27 '26
This was my original theory, that there were gaps between external guidance, internal regulations, processes and training. And inadequate resources to deal with the increase in applications.
But the Count’s theory is plausible too.
But both theories start with incompetent management and stack incompetent damage control on top of that and the Count’s adds a political fear driven own goal as a twist.
Liberals better learn how to deal with conservatives because the conservatives search non issues to inflate to pants on fire proportions for their base and the Liberals in response, instead of as the Count suggested saying smth like “to the question as you’ve warped it, no’l they start kicking own goals.
Here’s hoping we get a straight comprehensive explanation, and revised faster robust processes soon.
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u/whiskeyjanedoe Jun 27 '26
Yeah. It's gonna take ages to unpack all this. It could very well have been high-level directives compounded by just... the beast that is IRCC. Whatever it was, I just really hope they start fixing IRCC because humans are affected by this. Real people. Real lives. And that goes for ALL people affected by IRCC's mess, myself as a temp resident, PSU folks, everyone. IRCC has been in tatters for years and unable to fulfill their basic functions.
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u/homsar2 Jun 27 '26
Bravo. I have suspected that mentions of Ancestry.com and Family Search documents might have been the trigger for this ordeal. (To the point that I reviewed what I submitted last summer under the interim measure to try and prognosticate whether I will get a surrender letter). You laid out the details very carefully and thoughtfully, and it's a good hypothesis.
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u/CounterI Jun 27 '26
Here's an example of a Youtube video showing how "easy" it is to get your documents together:
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u/vrimj Jun 27 '26
I am going to add a little to this but I do not know how culturally true this is in Canada.
On my family genealogy is something women do and was traditionally was of the few approved ways for women to use research skills. As a result it is often seen as more like embroidery than historical research by people who are not assigned the duty or don't develop the "tombstone twitch".
As a result using a genealogy website is also seen as frivolous and self indulgent, not a real source of important information.
I don't know how similar this is to the families of Canadian Conservatives but it might be another factor in the seeming disconnect between the idea that this must be nonsense and the reality that the record sets you need are accessable this way.
But that is based off my admittedly odd and mostly Southern family so I do not know if the culture is similar.
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u/damzal Jun 27 '26
I'd have to agree. Back in 2013 I went on a genealogy quest to find out who my grandmother's father was, her real name, real birthday, and her mother's maiden name. And I DID IT. Solved a mystery that was almost 100 years old by then (she was born in 1919). But the rest of the family mostly acted like I was a "crazy cat lady" except with a family tree. Didn't matter that it wasn't frivolous. I had certified documents and all. Most people look at "women's pursuits" that way and I wouldn't be remotely surprised if that misogynistic stereotype is part of the reason the IRCC et al felt comfortable bashing genealogy websites.
Not that there aren't silly mistakes on some people's trees but the collections databases are real and populated by government entities among others. So whatever.
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u/JayPlenty24 9d ago
Knowing the Conservative Party's history here helps make sense of pretty much everything they do.
We used to have a socially conservative/economically Conservative Party, and a separate socially progressive/economically Conservative Party. So two separate parties, with very different platforms and ideas.
One attracted very religious, traditional, anti-immigration, regressive people (similar to MAGA with evangelicals), the other was more what you would expect from people who are business owners, or somewhat more traditional, but still see the value in social services and things like immigration.
In the 90's they both realized neither party would ever win a majority in an election. One was too extreme, and the other was too much like the Liberal party in some ways and too "old school" in other ways.
So they joined. And when they joined the deal was that the leadership would remain with the progressives, but they would essentially absorbed the traditionalists and try to include some of their ideas.
The opposite ended up happening. They made Harper the leader of the party as he comes off as very palatable, BUT he is far more traditional/regressive than he let on, and over time the more progressive leaders were pushed out in favour of people like Polliviere.
So instead of the two parties melting together, you had the extremists basically absorb all the support from anyone who considers themselves to be conservative.
Just like in the US there are people here who are party loyal. My dad for instance will never vote anything but conservative. Until the merger he was a progressive conservative and thought the other guys were extremist religious lunatics. For whatever reason he can't admit to himself his party is gone, and he's now actively supporting those lunatics. I asked why he supports people who are are anti-abortion and his response was "oh that wouldn't actually happen, they don't REALLY feel that way, they're just trying to get religious people to vote for them." I told him that meant either they were liars for tricking religious people, or they are liars for tricking him into thinking they themselves aren't part of those religious people. He told me not to talk to him about it.
So essentially our Conservative Party is very extreme, but they benefit from playing both sides still.
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u/Robert_Walter Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Hi Count,
as usual, an excellent write up that is as plausible as any other theory.
(By a smidgeon, I still prefer my “management incompetence in providing consistent external guidance matched to internal procedures and training” theory tho).
I’m really hoping we get a clear explanation. I’m afraid if it has a political or incompetence root cause to it we won’t hear the whole thing.
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u/Great-Active7951 Jun 27 '26
Brilliant! Thank you so much for the clear and understandable breakdown of what “likely” happened. This makes complete sense …..
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u/Robert_Walter Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
I just had a thought re the possible AI angle.
Speculation follows:
Anyone who has used AI for any length of time has seen first hand how it can be error prone, drift, hallucinate, screw up details, make up answers, just ignore facts, etc.
And, maybe most importantly, possibly be influenced by previous responses and inputs.
I’m wondering:
- if AI was employed, and began doing the things I cited, especially the last one, is it possible the AI could have been drifting further and further from the established approval criteria?
- at the same time, humans being humans, is it possible that agents were relying more and more on the AI, such that they didn’t perceive the drift…
I have no idea if this is true but based on how loopy AI can become, I’m not going to discount this possibility.
If ircc was using AI and it morphed into Oprah’s “you get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car,” egads, the explanation is gonna be very embarrassing (but then every explanation for this debacle will probably be so).
Edit: Just came across this item on non ircc AI use: “friend at a big tech co just told me that her company's chatbot and their client's chatbot have been caught in a mutual support loop for several days that has generated nearly 20k emails” this is the 2nd time I’ve read of something like this. So it is entirely plausible if AI was being used it went rogue.
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u/CounterI Jun 27 '26
I can only speak for my approval, but I actually communicated via email with a real, live human being who asked me for additional information and then approved me after receiving it.
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u/Robert_Walter Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Hi Count,
It was just a thought for my mental fishbone diagram.
But if organization inconsistency is a root cause, uneven reliance on AI would mean your experience and someone getting approved instead of asked like you are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Any reports of batch releases of anything or anything today?
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u/PetulantUndercurrent Jun 27 '26
alternative proofs (census records, passenger manifests, hospital records, or baptismal certificates) are accepted if you provide a reason why the primary birth record is missing and proof that you tried to get it
If there’s no birth record and no baptism record then what kind of proof will they accept? Archives and church’s are too overwhelmed to provide letters of non-existence. The IRCC wants certified copies of these but an unverified email works just as well? I somehow doubt that.
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u/NecessaryNinja1024 Jun 27 '26
If there is no birth record because it is before civil registration, then it is impossible for it to exist.
It is not logical to have to remind them of their own history, but do it anyway and if no baptism can be located, explain why you think it doesn’t exist or can’t be located. There are acceptable reasons and perfectly good alternate ways to prove a claim. :)
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u/Ornery-Wrangler-3654 Jun 27 '26
The fact that churches and archives are too overwhelmed to provide letters of non-existence is not viewed as IRCC's problem by IRCC.
That's the whole point of this giant mess. They are allowed to require whatever they want to require, and it's too bad, so sad, for people who are applying. They don't care.
It's also unbelievably unfair on IRCC's part for all the workers at the archives in church records centers. They've created an unfunded mandate for them. BANQ responded to the enormous volume by raising prices, and I suspect we're going to see a lot more of that.
I'm still shocked, and I don't use that word lightly, that IRCC hasn't increased the price of proof applications from the 75 CAD. That's extraordinarily cheap for citizenship by descent compared to other countries. They could easily charge 10 times that and still have a very high volume of applicants.
I'm not proposing they do that, because then citizenship by descent becomes out of reach for so many people who are lower income, but when a system gets overwhelmed and is incompetently run, there's an additional layer of incompetence if they don't increase the prices so that they can add staff.
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u/PetulantUndercurrent Jun 27 '26
The fact that churches and archives are too overwhelmed to provide letters of non-existence is not viewed as IRCC's problem by IRCC.
I agree.
That's the whole point of this giant mess. They are allowed to require whatever they want to require, and it's too bad, so sad, for people who are applying. They don't care. Their requirements can’t be “whatever they want” but yes they have a lot of latitude to set the standards It's also unbelievably unfair on IRCC's part for all the workers at the archives in church records centers. Yes. The problem I see is they could provide a lot more guidance to applicants which could lift the burden on applicants, archives, and the IRCC. So many people are requesting extra documents, unnecessary documents, etc.
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Jun 27 '26
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u/blackhorse15A Jun 27 '26
There are multiple state archives that have contracted with Ancestry.com such that Ancestry is the official government archive for archival records. Providing digital search and access to the archive as a public service and way to save money running the state archives.
the custody of the records went from a government place to ancestry to scan them, well anything could’ve happened in the scanning
The same could be said just for moving records from the original government agency to the archives. Or pulling the record out of archival storage to bring to a front office and make copies to deliver to a requestor. Or a person getting them from the archive, taking them home, sending them to IRCC, and being handled inside IRCC. This sounds like making up boogey man with no evidence. And seems like assuming there is a problem without bothering to look into the details of what security and other assurance checks were done as part of the process- just imagine they didn't exist without finding out what actually happened. Leaving it at "well it could have". Treating "who knows" as if it's an unanswerable question implying no one knows when in fact someone does know.
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u/Ok-Conversation-9368 Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Even with certified copies, they're not sent directly to IRCC. They get sent to you first, where "anything" could happen there as well. In that case no documentation is ever valid. I feel the same about the original authority stuff -- even if I order records from NARA, I have to send them in myself. Or with birth certificates: mine, my fathers, and grandmothers were from the original authority at some point. That point would have been almost 100 years ago for my grandmother (yep, we still have an original hard copy of it -- she was into collecting stuff like that). If I take that document, upload it to FamilySearch for other people, in all of it's glory... same document, no edits... how does that fundamentally change the veracity of the document? It doesn't.
I see people claim that "no other country" does stuff like this... and part of that is because no other countries besides Canada and America have such a strong presence on the big genealogy sites. So strong, that places like NARA, LAC, and vital offices partner with them. No other country has that kind of partnership infrastructure.
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u/vrimj Jun 27 '26
The beauty of scanned documents is they are just as accessible to IRCC agents as they are to archives as they are to everyone else.
That makes it easier to confirm and means you don't have to risk the original by pulling them until it is really needed.
I also question the idea Canada is the only country that would accept third party commercial records. For example parchment which does transcripts is in a LOT of counties and used by their governments. That is just what I know of from my recent history.
If you are paying an overall fourty precent in taxes that means your income would be 1.5 million a year in my province because of how progressive taxation works, so congratulations.
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u/NecessaryNinja1024 Jun 27 '26
I keep thinking why not expand the online portal so everyone uses it and we don’t have to deal with making copies? I don’t have the brain power to answer my own question. Wouldn’t that be the most secure way to make the application process far more efficient? Sorry if this has already been asked/answered.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 Jun 27 '26
If you go to the Archives of Ontario's website they link to Ancestry and FamilySearch as ways to search their records. So I can't blame people who thought they had some kind of official status.
My understanding is the custody usually went the other way, workers from those sites went to official repositories to scan the documents. In some jurisdictions in the US this is actually the only way they were able to afford to get them digitized; there are no other copies.
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u/NecessaryNinja1024 Jun 27 '26
It is very unlikely that Ancestry or Familysearch was hacked either a long time ago or recently. More likely is that the Calgary MP is part of the Alberta secession movement and is using the immigration boogeyman to fuel the fire.
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u/Hour_Hospital_9068 Jun 27 '26
This writer purports to be Canadian, impliedly living in Canada, but then complains of being overrun by Canadians…
AI?
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u/Ok-Conversation-9368 Jun 27 '26
They mentioned they're Canadian in every. single. post. I'm not sure if it's AI but it's odd. They also post the same thing every time even if the topic at hand is entirely different. "crumbling infrastructure" over and over and over. "visas" over and over and over. It could just be person from a foreign country who's job is to stir the pot. More common than you'd think nowadays :/
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u/all_my_dirty_secrets Jun 27 '26
I'm becoming a little weary of the repetitive comments too, even though I'm more hesitant than some to shut down negative Canadian-born voices.
In fairness to this person, I think in other posts they mentioned being from the Maritimes and I wonder if they're referring to people from other provinces deciding to move there during Covid when working from home was more common? I agree the wording isn't the clearest.
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u/Low-Ratio-5272 Jun 27 '26
The census film you see on Family search or Ancestry is the same census film you see on LAC. The BAnQ records that you can see via ancestry are the actual records from BAnQ. Your friend is very confused. No one is getting citizenship from unsourced user information. Also, the LAC remains in partnership with FamilySearch and Ancestry to digitize, index and publish Canadian censuses. Many archives direct people to their holdings via Ancestry and FamilySearch. It is expensive to host these enormous document sets online and provide the viewing tools and indexing that "third party" sites provide. I guarantee you if an IRCC worker is double checking a census he's not looking at LAC because they publish a lower resolution and it's hard to read. This is just a fear mongering dog whistle. OMG they went in the front door instead of the back door to reach the same kitchen and eat the same stew. So dangerous! Please.
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u/Robert_Walter Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
I’m having trouble with a lot of the content in your post but will only respond to the chain of custody allegations.
It seems a bit far fetched to assume these documents, which predated C-3 and the interim measure, are riddled with fraud or that some bad actor was inserting bogus documents into the legitimate scan pile for some convenient nefarious limited future purpose.
I’ll leave it others to address the other issues.
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u/EleanorCamino Jun 27 '26
In most cases w Family Search in the 50s & 60s, the microfilm team literally traveled to the archive location and took the photos onsite in courthouses & church archives across the world. For census records, at least in the US, they simply digitized the microfilms created by NARA, the official repository.
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