What follows are a list of some of the articles which have appeared in the press, television and radio about the Lost Canadians. This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you know of an article that appeared in the newspaper, in a magazine or on the radio or television, please let us know by sending me an email at dcinbc@yahoo.ca
Vancouver Observer: February 13, 2014 -Decades-long wait for citizenship coming to end for some Lost Canadians - "I cried when I was reading the (new citizenship) bill. I want to jump for joy, but I'm afraid to allow myself that until I can hold my citizenship card in my hand," said Jackie Scott, the daughter of a Canadian war veteran who has been waiting for nearly seven decades to receive the citizenship she was supposed to have all along. Click here to read more...
CBC Metro Morning: February 10, 2014 -Interview with Lost Canadian Marion Vermeersch - Lost Canadian Marion Vermeersch speaks about about proposed changes to the Citizenship Act that will have a direct impact on her decade long struggle to have her citizenship recognized by the Canadian government. Click here to read more....
The Tyee: February 7, 2014 -'Lost Canadians' Advocate Isn't Celebrating Yet - Changes to Citizenship Act leave Don Chapman 'guardedly optimistic', but court battle continues. - They're known as the Lost Canadians: people who have spent much of their lives in Canada, but have lost their citizenship thanks to a series of bizarre provisions in the country's antiquated citizenship laws. Each case has its own unique parameters: some are Mennonites. Others celebrated their 24th birthday in a foreign country sometime between 1947 and 1977. Many are the children of Canadian servicemen and "war brides" born out of wedlock before 1947, when the Canadian Citizenship Act first came into effect (children born within the bonds of marriage automatically took their father's nationality). Click here to read more...
Daily Gleaner: February 5, 2014 - 'Injustice' to war brides may finally be addressed - A Fredericton author who has written extensively on Canada's war brides is praising a commitment by the federal government to correct what many believe to be a "historical injustice." Melynda Jarratt, author of War Brides: The stories of the women who left everything behind to follow the men they loved, said recent comments by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander that changes to the Citizenship Act are forthcoming has left her thrilled. "I am over the moon," Jarratt said. "It remains to be seen, but I think they're going to do it." Click here to read more...
February 5, 2014:Rick Howe Show 88.9 FM - Listen to Rick Howe interview Don Chapman on 88.9 FM News Radio discuss proposed changes to the Citizenship Act which could finally solve the problem of War Bride children and children born out of wedlock prior to 1947. Click here to read more...
January 31, 2014:Rick Howe Show 88.9 FM - Listen to Rick Howe interview Don Chapman on 88.9 FM News Radio about the announcement by the Citizenship Minister that the lost Canadian issue will finally be resolved with the introduction of new legislation. Click here to read more...
January 29, 2014:The Royal Canadian Legion Dominion President, Gordon Moore, is encouraged by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander's statement that changes to the Citizenship Act are forthcoming. In particular, complicated circumstances that have barred War Brides and children of War Brides from obtaining Canadian citizenship will be fixed under new legislation. Click here to read more...
January 27, 2014: Ottawa Citizen - Canadian Citizenship Should Mean More - If there is a recurring theme in the statutory media reviews of the Conservatives on and around the eighth anniversary of their election, it is their fondness for incremental change. ...The exception is citizenship and immigration, which was long the prerogative of Jason Kenney, the most effective minister in this government. His successor, Chris Alexander, is promising “the first comprehensive reform of the Citizenship Act in a generation.” This is something to watch....let it address the injustice of the “lost Canadians” who have been denied citizenship through loopholes in the law. Click here to read more...
January 24, 2014: CBC - Canadian citizenship rules face broad reform in 2014 - The federal government will introduce several changes to Canada's citizenship rules after members of Parliament return to Ottawa next Monday following a six-week hiatus, says Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander. Alexander said the reform will aim to give Canadian citizenship to "Lost Canadians" who had seen it denied from them for one reason or another over the years. "We want to make sure that those loopholes that have done great injustice to a few people for all of those decades are closed, and that Canadian citizenship embraces all of those it should have embraced from the beginning." "Some are children of war brides, some have other complicated circumstances which should never have barred them from citizenship, and we have to fix the legislation," the minister said. Click here to read more...
January 10, 2014: Vancouver Observer - Amid deportation fears, Indigenous Lost Canadian struggles to gain citizenship - In the cold northern town of Dawson City, Yukon, 59-year-old Donovan McGlaughlin speaks with a heavy voice as he describes what it's like to wake up each morning, wondering if the government will deport him. McLaughlin lacks identity papers, and can't prove he is a Canadian citizen. Click here to read more....
November 10, 2013: Vancouver Observer - No More Silence on Remembrance Day - Thousands of legitimate Canadians, including war veterans and their children, have been denied Canadian citizenship due to arcane provisions of the Citizenship Act, some of them blatantly discriminatory. Known as the "Lost Canadians", these people are still waiting for justice from a federal government that has promised change for years while refusing to act. Two minutes of silence on Remembrance Day? Not me. Why? Because I think the best way to honour our war dead is to speak out on their behalf. And they need a voice in the worst way. Click here for more...
August 6, 2013: McLeans Magazine - ‘Lost Canadian’ court action looks to overhaul citizenship laws - Canadian citizenship laws may need to be overhauled if a so-called “lost Canadian” wins her legal battle. Jackie Scott, 68, was refused citizenship even though she came to Canada with her British mother and Canadian father at the age of two. A judicial review of that refusal was scheduled for July, but Scott put it on hold so she and her lawyers could broaden the court action. Click here to read more...
August 6, 2013: CTV News - 'Lost Canadian' court challenge looks to overhaul citizenship laws - Canadian citizenship laws may need to be overhauled if a so-called "lost Canadian" wins her legal battle. Jackie Scott, 68, was refused citizenship even though she came to Canada with her British mother and Canadian father at the age of two. A judicial review of that refusal was scheduled for July, but Scott put it on hold so she and her lawyers could broaden the court action. Click here to read more...
August 6, 2013: Vancouver Sun - 'Lost Canadian' court action looks to overhaul citizenship laws - Canadian citizenship laws may need to be overhauled if a so-called "lost Canadian" wins her legal battle. Jackie Scott, 68, was refused citizenship even though she came to Canada with her British mother and Canadian father at the age of two. A judicial review of that refusal was scheduled for July, but Scott put it on hold so she and her lawyers could broaden the court action. Click here to read more...
August 6, 2013: Halifax Chronicle Herald - ‘Lost Canadian’ widens action in citizenship case - Documents filed Friday in Federal Court in Vancouver show Scott is petitioning for “declarations” from the court that could have serious ramifications for Canadian citizenship, including whether Parliament has total control over who is considered Canadian. Scott said even though she would have loved to settle her own citizenship dispute back in July, her fight has become about much more than herself. Click here to read more....
August 6, 2013: Vancouver Sun - ‘Lost Canadian’ Jackie Scott kicks off citizenship battle in B.C. court - Scott was born in England in 1945 to a Canadian serviceman and a British woman and later migrated to Canada. The government claims Scott’s father was legally a British subject rather than a Canadian at the time because Canada’s first citizenship act did not come into effect until 1947 and because her father and mother were not then maried, Scott cannot automatically be considered a Canadian. Click here to read more....
July 25, 2013: Vancouver Sun - Indian status and citizenship both out of reach for desperate Ontario mom - Despite a Canadian Ojibwa bloodline spanning so many years ago that her grandmother can’t put a date on it, Heather Harnois is considered neither aboriginal, nor Canadian. It means that while she grew up in this country since her teens, the now 25-year-old mother of two can’t get a social insurance number, health-care coverage or child tax benefits even though one of her children was born in Canada. Click here for more...
July 24, 2013: Ottawa Citizen Editorial: Lost Canadians - Jackie Scott should not need to go to court to get the Canadian citizenship that is hers by right, and which she eminently deserves. Scott, who is 68, is one of the thousands of so-called Lost Canadians who have been denied citizenship because of a quirk in the law that should not be countenanced in today’s Canada. Click here for more....
July 22, 2013: Globe and Mail ‘Lost Canadian’ hopes to overhaul Canadian citizenship laws through class-action lawsuit - A woman who has waited years to establish her Canadian citizenship in court is considering expanding her case into a class-action lawsuit to include thousands of other so-called “lost Canadians.” Jackie Scott, 68, was refused citizenship even though she came to Canada with her British mother and Canadian father at the age of two and spent most of her life here. A judicial review of that denial was to have started on Monday, but as the proceedings got under way, Ms. Scott put it on hold so she and her lawyers could broaden the court action. Click here for more...
June 6, 2013: Ottawa Citizen - NDP tries to fix "Lost Canadians" quagmire They are men and women who have been denied citizenship because their fathers were technically British subjects when they got their would-be war brides pregnant while serving during the Second World War. Click here for more....
June 6, 2013: Canada.com - NDP makes pitch to fix "Lost Canadian" citizenship The NDP will table a motion before a Commons committee on Thursday - the
anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-Germany occupied
France - to recognize that the situation of the remaining Lost Canadians
"has gone unaddressed for too long." Click here for more...
September 22, 2012: The National Post Thousands of ‘Lost Canadians’ struggling to achieve citizenship stuck in legal quagmire - It was a remarkable exchange, caught on tape. Jason Kenney, Canada’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, was confronted in June by a 67-year-old woman to whom his department had denied citizenship, thanks to circumstances surrounding her birth. Circumstances that were not extraordinary.
Jackie Scott was born out of wedlock in England, to a Canadian soldier and his British lover, just before the Second World War had ended. She is a war bride child. Canada has thousands of them. Click here for more...
September 1, 2012: Vancouver Observer Kafkaesque bureaucracy denies citizenship to legitimate Canadians - Jackie Scott and Linda Missal De Cock have collectively lived in Canada for over a century. Scott, the daughter of a war bride and Canadian soldier, arrived in Canada from England in 1948, and resided here for 57 years. De Cock, meanwhile, has lived in Canada for 69 out of 70 years. The women, living on opposite ends of the country, went to school, married, and carved a life out for themselves in Canada. But bizarrely -- even as Canada accepts 250,000 new immigrant Canadians a year -- government has denied such individuals citizenship. Click here for more...
July 8, 2012, Toronto Sun: Second World War not over for would-be Canadian - It’s pretty hard to believe that Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney would
tell the daughter of a Canadian war veteran in Vancouver that her
father, who was born in Canada and had never set foot out of the country
until it asked him to go to war, was not, in fact, a Canadian citizen
but a British subject.
Insulting, degrading ... and wrong. This is a theme Kenney and Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) have been
pushing for some time. It’s not just a slip of the tongue or a
misunderstanding, but a considered view to which the government is
apparently committed. Or, as Jason Kenney told Jackie Scott, who confronted him: “(Soldiers)
are heroes, but at the time they were British subjects.” He said prior
to 1947 there was no such thing as a “Canadian” citizen. Click here for more...
May 25, 2012, Toronto Star - Citizenship Insane: Here we go again. This week we ran the story of Lawrence Connelly, born in 1967 to a Canadian military family based in Germany, who found out this year that he cannot get a passport unless he can prove he’s a citizen — and the DND certificate of birth isn’t proof. Click here for more...
Jackie Scott in a recent photo.
The Canadian government will not
grant her citizenship because
she was born out of wedlock.
Jackie Scott with her
parents at Niagara Falls in 1948.
May 10,2012 - Status of Illegitimate Child 1948: A ruling has been
received from the Citizenship Branch concerning the status of an illegitimate
child whose father is a Canadian citizen. The case upon which the ruling is
based is as follows: “A Canadian born citizen was living in the United States out of wedlock with
an American born woman. They had an illegitimate child born in the United States.
Subsequent to the birth of the child (three weeks thereafter) the parents were
married. The father returned to Canada
and his wife and child later applied for entry to join him. Our examining
officer at the port of entry took the view that the child, having been born out
of wedlock, came under Part 1, Section 4, (b) of the Canadian Citizenship Act,
deriving citizenship from his mother. Therefore, the child was regarded as an
immigrant, of American citizenship, and admitted as such. However, when the
facts were submitted to the Citizenship Branch for review the Registrar
furnished the following ruling:-Click here for more....
March 8, 2012: Vancouver Observer - Discriminatory laws against unwed mothers leave Lost Canadian Ken Smith out in the cold - Ken Smith and his wife Liz Johnston love to travel. But recently, planning a vacation has become a nearly impossible task. “Lately, we’ve had some problems at the border because of my weird situation, where I can’t say I’m Canadian but I’ve lived here the majority of my life,” said Smith. The 68-year-old White Rock resident is one of a number of Lost Canadians, excluded from citizenship due to the country’s archaic laws. Despite having lived in Canada since 1945, he’s been rejected twice by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. And ever since border security ramped up after 9/11 he says he’s had terrible experiences with customs officials. Click here for more...
March 7, 2012: Lost Canadians Say Citizenship a Battle for Women’s Rights - As Canada prepares to observe International Women’s Day on Thursday, some Canadians are still excluded from citizenship solely because they were born to unwed mothers over 65 years ago. They are part of a group known as Lost Canadians: people who are excluded from citizenship or are having difficulty claiming it because of the date or circumstances of their birth. Click here for more....
February 23, 2012: Lost Canadians sue government over discriminatory citizenship - While speaking at a press conference in Surrey, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney stated that the government does not deny citizenship based on age, gender or marital status. Yet these factors are at the heart of problem for "Lost Canadians", who are taking the federal government to court over its refusal to grant citizenship to victims of Canada's discriminatory laws of the past. Click here for more....
December 2011 - Readers Digest: How Unjust Legal Quirks Rob Canadians of their Citizenship - The world's most read magazine has finally featured the story of the Lost Canadians on its front cover this December, 2011! Written by Drew Nelles, the six page article Lost Canadians: How Unjust Legal Quirks Rob Canadians of their Citizenship, features an interview with Don Chapman, leader of the Lost Canadians and tells the the true life story of several victims, including Guy Vallieres, a Second World War veteran who died in 2009, disenfranchised from his own country. Click here to read more...
November 9, 2011 - Toronto Star: Suit seeks citizenship for ‘Lost Canadians’ - Peter Brammah had always considered himself as Canadian as it gets, enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy and serving as a police officer in Calgary. But Brammah, now 75 and in poor health, didn’t realize until 2002 that he was not considered a Canadian citizen, even though he has lived in Canada since he was six years old. His parents were both British subjects, but Brammah’s mother came to Canada with him as a child after divorcing his father and then marrying a Canadian citizen. Click here to read more...
November 7, 2011 - Yahoo News! Lawsuit aims to return citizenship to elderly "lost" Canadians - "This has got a lot of tentacles and it's going to affect a lot of people and potentially cost a lot of money," he said, adding the suit is only the first in a series of planned legal manoeuvres. Click here to read more....
November 6, 2011 - CTV: Lawsuit seeks citizenship for elderly 'lost' Canadians VANCOUVER — Peter Brammah sailed with the Canadian navy and later worked for Calgary's police force. Despite serving this country as both a naval and police officer, he can't actually call Canada his own. Click here to read more.
October 28, 2011: Coast Reporter: Back to court for Lost Canadians - The leader of the Lost Canadians, Don Chapman of Gibsons, said he once again intends to take the government of Canada to court over citizenship discrimination. Having taken up the cause of 10 people he said were undeservingly stripped of their citizenship, Chapman described the group’s position as being indisputable. Click here to read more.
November 21, 2010 Frustrated but fighting: 'Lost Canadians' push Ottawa to make them true CanucksBy Diana Mehta, Canadian Press
This article also appeared under the same headline in countless newspapers, radio, tv and internet media across Canada, including the Winnipeg Free Press, Kitchener Waterloo Record, the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal, CTV News, CJAD, 680 FM, 660 FM, etc. etc.
November 4, 2006
Toronto Star
Thousands of former citizens snared in long legal limbo; Fathers became citizens elsewhere Children stripped of citizenship
I am Don Chapman, the leader of the Lost Canadians. I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and when I was six years old I lost my citizenship. I've been fighting for it ever since.
August 6, 2013: McLeans Magazine - ‘Lost Canadian’ court action looks to overhaul citizenship laws - Canadian citizenship laws may need to be overhauled if a so-called “lost Canadian” wins her legal battle. Jackie Scott, 68, was refused citizenship even though she came to Canada with her British mother and Canadian father at the age of two. A judicial review of that refusal was scheduled for July, but Scott put it on hold so she and her lawyers could broaden the court action. Click here to read more...
June 6, 2013: Canada.com - NDP makes pitch to fix "Lost Canadian" citizenship The NDP will table a motion before a Commons committee on Thursday - the
anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-Germany occupied
France - to recognize that the situation of the remaining Lost Canadians
"has gone unaddressed for too long." Click here for more...
July 8, 2012, Toronto Sun: Second World War not over for would-be Canadian - It’s pretty hard to believe that Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney would
tell the daughter of a Canadian war veteran in Vancouver that her
father, who was born in Canada and had never set foot out of the country
until it asked him to go to war, was not, in fact, a Canadian citizen
but a British subject.
Insulting, degrading ... and wrong. This is a theme Kenney and Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) have been
pushing for some time. It’s not just a slip of the tongue or a
misunderstanding, but a considered view to which the government is
apparently committed. Or, as Jason Kenney told Jackie Scott, who confronted him: “(Soldiers)
are heroes, but at the time they were British subjects.” He said prior
to 1947 there was no such thing as a “Canadian” citizen. Click here for more...
March 16, 2012: Vancouver Observer: Lifelong Canadians face discrimination by their own government...still - Advocates for Lost Canadians – those excluded from citizenship because of obscure legal loopholes – are asking questions after citizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney seemingly admitted to discrimination recently at a press conference. Click here for more... 
