Surprise, You Might Be Canadian And Not Even Know It!

A Wonkette public service announcement

Spike Lee appeared on the PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots last week and learned about ancestors who escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad, although the filmmaker wouldn’t have known when the cameras rolled this makes him a legit Canadian now too.

If you’re a progressive American who felt conflicted celebrating Team USA’s Olympic gold medals in both women’s and men’s ice hockey after beating beleaguered Canada at our own game, then you might just have a dash of maple syrup in your veins and maybe even qualify for a Get Out of Jail Free card through automatic citizenship if you can find a paper trail that proves someone in your family hails from the north.

We used to have a rule called the “First-Generation Limit” that meant, if you were born abroad to a Canadian parent, you are eligible for citizenship but couldn’t pass the sweet free healthcare down to your own kids if they were also born somewhere else. Citizenship was a bit like a lease that expires after one generation of living in a warmer country where nobody gives a shit about the Tragically Hip. But the Ontario Superior Court recently decided it’s unconstitutional to have two tiers of citizens just because someone happened to be born in a hospital that takes Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the country is now looking at a potential tsunami of instant Canucks who probably think Kamloops is a brand of breakfast cereal.

Bill C-3 — also known as the “Lost Canadians Act” — became law at the end of last year, meaning anyone born before December 15, 2025, who can prove inherited DNA with someone who spent a minimum of 1,095 days (or three years) living in Canada is now considered one of us even if they don’t know how to skate or the only word in French they know is bonjour. Hillary Clinton, for example, is now de facto Canadian through her maternal bloodline, although Calgary-born Ted Cruz is not because he renounced his own citizenship back in 2014 when the sad little man thought he had a shot at becoming president, and there’s no backsies when it comes to this sort of thing.

We’re not talking “a pathway to citizenship” here and there’s no visa or points-based score involved. This is more like retroactive birthright. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates hundreds of thousands of people could be eligible, and your odds of taking off to the Great White North are vastly improved if a relative has a French-sounding name since the Catholic Church is known for keeping precise birth records going back centuries in Quebec. A high-profile early adopter is soccer player Alfie Jones, a Bristol-born member of Middlesborough FC who will be playing for Team Canada in the upcoming World Cup after qualifying through his grandmother.

If you’re not part of the MAGA agenda and hope a distant connection to great-grandpa Jean-Luc from Trois-Rivières could be your ticket out of Dodge, you’ll first need to apply for a citizenship certificate. Which will set you back $75 CAD — a bargain for the chance to live in a place incognito gestapo won’t murder you in the street — and then apply for a passport. There’s even a woke government portal to help determine if there’s potential rungs to climb on the family tree! If granted, you can pack your bags, head for the border, and start complaining about those fucking Americans with the best of us.

Processing times are already heading toward “Maybe Your Grandkids Will See It Someday” territory due to the surge in demand, but the legal bottom line remains: If you qualify, you aren’t an immigrant. You’re a prodigal hoser coming home. Bring warm clothes.

[National Post / Sportsnet /Wonkette BlueSkies]