Recent claims suggesting Ottawa’s 2025 immigration cutbacks have outlived their usefulness and that it’s time to get immigration going again—miss a glaring legal reality. As the federal government prepares to table its 2027 immigration levels this fall, it shouldn’t loosen the taps. The government needs to freeze economic immigration intake and redirect its resources toward a massive, self-inflicted crisis: nearly 140,000 citizenship-by-descent, “Lost Canadians”, caught in a skyrocketing administrative backlog under Bill C-3. These aren’t foreign nationals seeking asylum. They are primarily U.S.-based descendants of historic families from Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritimes. By operation of Canadian law, qualified applicants are already citizens. Yet thanks to poor departmental planning following the passage of Bill C-3 in late 2025, they are waiting up to 33 months just to get a piece of paper confirming it.
This is a massive failure of statutory duty. Unlike immigration visas, which the minister can cap, pause or cancel at will to meet annual quotas, issuing a citizenship certificate is a mandatory legal obligation. The government cannot quietly impose a quota on recognizing its own citizens by failing to adequately staff its department. Yet, it already has the required resources if it simply caps its immigration levels. The 2026 target for economic immigrants is 239,800, encompassing multiple federal, provincial, and pilot pathways that Ottawa could easily pause.
From an economic perspective, clearing this backlog makes far more sense than chasing new global talent pools. This specific group shares deep ancestral ties, language, cultural overlap and organic ties with Canada dating back to the 19th century. While many are simply securing their rightful status, those who move here are likely to quickly assimilate into our labour market, bypassing the credential-recognition bottlenecks that often slow down international skilled workers lacking North American experience.
Ottawa cannot keep prioritizing discretionary foreign recruitment while stonewalling the fundamental rights of its own people. Reallocating IRCC’s processing capacity to fulfill its statutory duties under Bill C-3 over the next 1-2 years, is not merely sound administrative management—it is a legal necessity. With CTV and PBS estimating this eligible demographic to be in the millions, clearing this backlog will simultaneously satisfy Canada’s economic needs to attract international students, help combat declining enrolments in publicly funded schools and fill labour shortfalls of high, semi and low skilled workers without straining public systems.
But the government must act before the Federal Court forces its hand. A 33-month—and rapidly growing—delay in processing Bill C-3 citizenship confirmations transcends mere administrative incompetence. It triggers severe breaches under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. By stalling these applications, Ottawa functionally perpetuates the very Charter violation it was ordered to correct. The 2023 Bjorkquist decision was supposed to dismantle 76 years of arbitrary restrictions imposed by successive governments since the 1947 Citizenship Act—not replace them with an endless administrative waiting room. By stonewalling a C-3 applicants’ ability to prove and exercise their citizenship, IRCC is guilty of treating these specific citizens—identifiable solely by their foreign birth—as second-class compared to citizens born on Canadian soil who face no such barriers. An explosion in processing delays – which has grown from 9 months earlier this year, effectively nullifies the legislative remedy intended to restore their equality.
More importantly, under Section 6 of the Charter, every Canadian has the fundamental right to enter, remain in, and leave Canada. But a right is meaningless if you don’t have the practical means to exercise it.
For Bill C-3 applicants, a citizenship certificate is the absolute prerequisite for obtaining a Canadian passport. By trapping these Canadians in a rapidly growing administrative bottleneck, Ottawa is effectively withholding their passports—actively preventing them from exercising their Charter mobility rights.
Bureaucratic failure and understaffing cannot legally justify the ongoing suspension of a citizen’s fundamental rights. Ottawa needs to stop making excuses, properly reallocate its existing resources, and give these Canadians the documentation they are constitutionally owed.
A pause on discretionary intake would also give policymakers the breathing room needed to restore public trust in its failed immigration policies and overhaul a broken system. Instead of arbitrarily chasing high quotas, Ottawa could finally rebuild a framework based on actual economic and demographic needs—ensuring better outcomes for the newcomers who do arrive. This will go a long way toward proving that the government prioritizes the constitutional rights of its people over arbitrary bureaucratic immigration targets.
When the 2027 immigration levels are announced this fall, Ottawa must freeze its economic immigration streams, redirect its bureaucracy and finally hand these citizens their rightful paperwork.