If through bad luck or bad planning you or your significant other gave birth while on vacation in Bali, you would not expect your baby to be given Indonesian citizenship. Yet in Canada, a baby born to a tourist mother is instantly a citizen.
Canada is one of a handful of countries that grants citizenship to anyone born on its soil. Ending this approach would be good policy, simple, and popular.
Though it receives little media coverage, birth tourism hums along under the radar year after year, showing no signs of abating.
Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows that, after briefly dipping during the pandemic as international travel nosedived, non-resident births have rebounded.
Nationally, non-resident births now make up 1.5 percent of total births, roughly the same proportion as in 2019–20. This national average obscures the scale of the issue, since birth tourism tends to be concentrated in specific hospitals, where non-resident births are very high.
In Richmond Hospital in Richmond, B.C., non-residents accounted for 24 percent of births in 2019–20 – nearly one in four. After dropping during the pandemic, this figure rose again to 7.3 percent in 2024–25. In St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal, 9.7 percent of births in 2024–25 were from non-resident mothers. For Humber River Hospital in Toronto, that proportion was 8.8 percent.
But the effects of Canada’s unconditional birthright citizenship policy stretch beyond birth tourists flying in on visitor visas.
There’s also the little-discussed fact that thousands of temporary foreign workers, international students, and asylum seekers give birth here every year. These are temporary residents, but their babies are instantly full Canadian citizens. Upon reaching adulthood, they can theoretically bring members of their family here through family sponsorship.
Annually, this works out to around 4,000 births from temporary foreign workers and over 1,000 by international students. Another 1,000 per year were from refugee claimants or from people on Temporary Resident Permits, which are discretionary visitor permits for foreigners who would otherwise be inadmissible for criminal or medical reasons.
So, what is preventing us from ensuring that babies born to birth tourists and temporary residents are not automatically Canadian citizens?
This historical anachronism is a holdover from the colonial period, when authorities in the New World sought to attract new settlers through generous citizenship policies.
In Canada and the United States specifically, an added reason is the common law, the British legal system which both countries inherited. Birthright citizenship has a lengthy precedent in common law, being solidly grounded in Calvin’s Case, a dusty old court decision from 1608, which established that a child born in Scotland was also an English subject.
Britain in 1981 was a different place than in 1608, when the typical person did not stray far from their community. Globalization and cheap, easy intercontinental travel meant birthright citizenship could be used by illegal immigrants or for birth tourism.
The outcome of the case is uncertain, hinging on language in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution stating that “All persons born or naturalized” in the United States are citizens. The Trump administration argues that U.S. birthright citizenship was created to grant citizenship to freed slaves after Emancipation, not to the children of illegal immigrants or visitors.
Canada has no such snag. Birthright citizenship is nowhere to be found in our constitutional documents. There is no Charter right to it. All that would be required to end it would be an amendment to the Citizenship Act.
Such an amendment would likely receive broad support from the Canadian public.
In a world of complex problems with complex solutions, we should never turn up our noses at a problem with a simple policy fix. Tackling the historical anachronism of unconditional birthright citizenship is just such a case.
