Ottawa: Following a historic change in Canadian citizenship laws, there has been a huge increase in the number of people applying for citizenship certificates.
New official figures show that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada issued 28,940 citizenship certificates in the five months between January 1 and May 31, 2026. But a much larger number of applicants are still waiting for approval. As of May 31, 82,020 Proof of Citizenship applications were pending.
That means that when an application is finalized, approximately three applications remain in the queue. The processing time, which was nine months before Bill C-3 came into effect in December 2025, has more than doubled to 19 months. Provincial archives, which applicants rely on to prove their ancestry, are also experiencing heavy congestion. This congestion is due to changes in the citizenship law that came into effect on December 15, 2025.
This law removed the first-generation restriction on the transfer of citizenship to those born outside Canada, opening the way for the new generation to also be eligible for citizenship if they had Canadian parents, grandparents, or any previous generations with ties to Canada.
The beneficiaries are mostly the hundreds of thousands of French-Canadian Americans who immigrated to the US from Quebec between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. People are applying en masse because these certificates are required to prove citizenship and apply for passports.
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