Canadian Dual Citizenship
Over the last month I put about 40 hours of effort into preparing to get documentation for my Canadian citizenship. Canada changed their citizenship law in December 2025 to remove a limit on how many generations removed you can be from a Canadian citizen to still be a Canadian citizen by descent. The former limit was one generation, and now there is no limit. As a result millions of folks who weren’t Canadian citizens suddenly are. Getting that recognized isn’t automatic and requires a lot of paperwork.
In my case I have four great-great-grandparents who were born in Canada. Two of their children moved to North Dakota and were married. I’m descended from them through my mother and grandmother. We’ve always known this in the family, but it didn’t make us Canadian citizens until the law changed.
Proving that lineage requires birth records from the ancestor born in Canada all the way down to me. The birth place in Canada needs to be shown on the earliest record, and the chain of parentage needs to be shown on all the subsequent birth records. Complicating things is that birth records have varied over time. North Dakota didn’t require birth registration until the 1890s, and it was still only done for 80% of births in the 1920s. Quebec, whence my French speaking ancestors came, didn’t issue official birth certificates until 1994! Before that baptism records were the official records. When women changed their names I needed marriage records showing that too.
Other family members had done a lot of the genealogical legwork, but I had to order some color, certified copies of records we only had in black and white. The application form wasn’t too onerous, but it wasn’t designed for multi-generational evidence – that’s only newly allowed –, so a lot of extra work went into showing five generations of unbroken lineage and making it clear to the reviewer.
I got a lot of help from the r/CanadianCitizenship subreddit, which has a great FAQ and an active community of folks who will answer questions and even review your application for you before you send it. The official application was designed for a time with a single-generation limit, so it doesn’t offer a good way to show extended ancestry. Reddit users stepped up to produce some fillable forms for extra generations (another version), which I found helpful. There are also now tools for including a family tree, though I did mine by hand (see below) before that launched.
All in all, it was a small amount of effort to gain the flexibility of dual citizenship, and to prove a link to a heritage we’ve always felt close to living in northern US border states.
The new law requires that after 2025 passing on Canadian citizenship requires having lived in Canada for at least three years. If my kids want to pass their citizenship on to their children, they’ll need to spend some time in Canada, which seems entirely fair.
