Auto citizenship - an interesting article.

Why it Takes So Long to Fix What's Broken
by ALLAN THOMPSON, TORONTO STAR, Life Section, Oct. 15, 2005

Because of the political uncertainty of a minority Parliament in Ottawa, there is not going to be a major overhaul of Canada's Citizenship Act anytime soon. Instead, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Joe Volpe is expected to go to cabinet within days to seek approval for a plan to put forward two specific and narrowly defined amendments to the existing law.

One amendment would change the rules for how children adopted abroad get Canadian citizenship. Right now, families who adopt abroad must go through a time-consuming process of obtaining permanent resident status for their adopted child before applying for citizenship. This has long been widely regarded as an unnecessary burden. Previous attempts to make citizenship automatic in these cases have come to nothing, because other aspects of the proposed overhaul of the Citizenship Act faltered for other reasons.

Volpe also wants to amend the current law to get rid of a double standard when it comes to deciding if a criminal conviction should result in someone being barred from applying for citizenship. Certain types of criminal offences, if committed in Canada, can result in a permanent resident being barred. But if the same type of offence were committed abroad, before the applicant came to Canada, it would not pose a bar to citizenship. Volpe plans to eliminate that inconsistency.

The same amendment would also offer relief to people who are convicted of trumped up criminal charges by dubious political regimes, offences that simply would not be regarded as criminal in Canada. So, people convicted of sedition while living under a dictatorship would not have to wear that criminal conviction in Canada when they apply for citizenship here.

Volpe plans to introduce these limited amendments in the next couple of weeks because there is all-party consensus on these points and a good chance the changes could become law within weeks, the current life-span of this government.

This will be a small step in the long and tortured process of updating the Citizenship Act. But critics are already lamenting the government's failure to take on a wholesale reform.

Volpe will not be tabling amendments any time soon to require would-be citizens to prove they have been "physically present" in Canada for a set period before filing their application. With an election on the horizon, he will not seek to change the wording of the citizenship oath to delete numerous references to members of the royal family and add a pledge of allegiance to Canada, in addition to The Queen.

Once again, politics has stalled plans to overhaul Canada's Citizenship Act, which is now nearly three decades old.

Shortly after it took power in 1993, Jean Chrétien's Liberal government hatched plans to revise the citizenship law. The first Liberal minister to bring the matter forward was Sergio Marchi. Remember him? But a proposed legislative package was put on ice by the threat of a Quebec referendum. Government officials feared that no matter what the change in the law, it could backfire in Quebec.

In 1996, the new immigration minister, Quebecer Lucienne Robillard, again raised the prospect of revising the Citizenship Act. This time, in a post-referendum period, the media focus was on the proposal to change the oath to downgrade repeated references to the royal family.

Robillard's bill, which also included provisions to make it easier for adopted children to get citizenship and changed the residency requirements for citizenship applicants, died when the Liberals called an election in 1997.

In 1998, like a phoenix from the ashes, the citizenship legislation rose again. Yet another immigration minister, Elinor Caplan, introduced a slightly modified version of the same package. But Caplan's legislation died on the order paper when the government went to the polls in 2000, a year ahead of schedule.

Not to be outdone, Caplan's successor in the immigration post, Denis Coderre, introduce yet another version of the citizenship bill in late 2002. And, once again, you guessed it, the bill became null and void because it didn't make it through the legislative process before the election was called in June 2004.

We will almost certainly have to wait until after the next federal election, and perhaps months or years after that, to find out how the citizenship rules are going to change.