Bill C-37

Bill C-37, an Amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect on April 19, 2009. Also known as the "Lost Canadian Bill", C-37 corrected most of the quirky citizenship laws, retroactively granting citizenship to people who lost their status going back 63 years, to January 1, 1947.

While Bill C-37 solved the citizenship problems of hundreds of thousands of Canadians whose citizenship had been taken away from them by the arane provisions of the 1947 Citizenship Act, it also created a new problem of statelessness in children who are born abroad after April 19, 2009, to Canadians who themselves were born abroad.

What this means is that Canadian citizens who were born abroad (called "First generation born abroad", cannot pass on their citizenship to their children if those children are also born abroad. Hence, the "Second-generation born abroad" rule which came into effect in April, 2009 has already started to created serious problems for Canadian citizens who do not realize that their children do not qualify for Canadian citizenship.

This was an addition put into the Lost Canadian Bill by the Conservative government in 2008. It was not something that we as Lost Canadians wanted connected to our Bill.