VANCOUVER – A lawsuit brought by Jacqueline Scott to obtain recognition as a Canadian citizen will be heard today by the Federal Court. Ms. Scott is the daughter of a Canadian WWII war veteran and British war bride. She was born in 1945 in the United Kingdom and came to Canada as a child in 1948. Her parents married later that year. In 2004, when Ms. Scott applied for a Canadian passport, she discovered for the first time that she wasn’t a Canadian citizen. Ms. Scott is one of countless “Lost Canadians” – individuals stripped of citizenship under discriminatory and unjust laws.
Lost Canadians include those who are denied citizenship for being born abroad and out of wedlock in the case of those with a Canadian father, or for being born to a Canadian mother who had no right to pass citizenship down to her child. In 2009, after years of determined advocacy on behalf of the Lost Canadians, including submissions by the BCCLA and other allies, the government finally passed legislation that restored citizenship for some, but not for all. The government arbitrarily restored citizenship only for those born after January 1, 1947. People born before 1947 – like Ms. Scott – continue to be denied citizenship.
After eight years of attempting to secure recognition as a Canadian citizen, Ms. Scott has taken her case to the Federal Court. She is seeking judicial review of a 2012 decision by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (“CIC”) denying her status as a citizen. In that decision, Ms. Scott was told she could not derive citizenship through her father because she was born out of wedlock. Ms. Scott was also told that her father was not a citizen when she was born because before 1947 persons born in Canada – such as her father – were considered British subjects.
Raji Mangat, Counsel at the BCCLA, reacted today to the injustice of Ms. Scott’s situation:
“Children born abroad to Canadians should be Canadians, plain and simple. It doesn’t matter if your parents were married or what the gender of your Canadian parent is. In the past, Canadian law discriminated on this basis but we cannot allow the effects of these discriminatory and archaic attitudes about entitlement to citizenship to continue to affect Canadians like Ms. Scott today. The 2009 changes to the law were necessary, but by picking 1947 as a cut-off to fix this problem, they did not go far enough. The government’s approach wound up discriminating against children born prior to 1947, and risks making these individuals stateless – citizens of nowhere. Ms. Scott and those in her situation who were born to Canadians abroad should be recognized as Canadian citizens.”
See the BCCLA’s submission to Parliament on Lost Canadians here.
