Recently, several approved citizenship-by-descent applicants (the exact number is unknown) — people who applied under Bill C-3 , were approved, and received Canadian citizenship certificates from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) — have now received letters from that same department informing them that their files have been reopened and asking them to surrender the certificates IRCC itself issued. Those who received a physical certificate are being asked to send it back. A sample surrender and reopening letter appears below.

This was understandably a shocking development, both for the individuals affected and for the broader C-3 community. Canadian immigration lawyers may have been surprised, but few were likely shocked as IRCC’s reputation has slid badly over the past five years, with substantive and procedural problems being common. In addition, we had expected the evidentiary requirements to tighten but not retroactively.

Even so, it feels like a new line has been crossed as many recipients had already relied on their certificates — making travel plans, relocating to Canada, accepting employment, purchasing property, or otherwise ordering their affairs around what they reasonably believed was a final determination of their status.

If you have applied under Bill C-3, or are considering it, it is worth understanding what appears to be happening — not because the law has changed, but because of what these letters suggest about how IRCC is now scrutinizing the evidence behind a descent claim.

If you have received a surrender letter, you are welcome to book a consultation with our firm to discuss a response strategy.

Your Canadian citizenship and your Citizenship certificate are different things

If you qualify under Bill C-3, you are a citizen by operation of law from the relevant statutory moment. It is important to keep in mind that the certificate is evidence of that status, not the source of it. So even someone who receives a surrender letter may well remain eligible — and is entitled to an opportunity to respond before anything is decided.

It also helps to understand how the government can move against a certificate, because there are two different routes, with two different sets of safeguards.

The first is a formal process known as Canadian citizenship revocation, generally used where citizenship is alleged to have been obtained through fraud, false representation, or the knowing concealment of material circumstances. Under the revocation process, there is an option to have the matter decided either by the Minister or by the Federal Court of Canada. The process before the Federal Court is quite involved and affords significant due process rights, including a hearing before a judge.

With the surrender letters, the Minister is stating that the certificates have been issued in error. There is no misconduct allegation. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you retained an experienced immigration litigation lawyer to respond to any concerns IRCC puts forward, as the subsequent decision will have to be responsive to your submissions and evidence before IRCC, as well as the guidance provided by the agency at the outset. In plain terms, the stronger your response is, the more likely IRCC is to back off, and if they do not – your Federal Court case will be stronger.

What the Surrender Letters Likely Mean?

Bill C-3 enabled a large population to reclaim their citizenship, and as far as we can tell the demand has been high, quite possibly exceeding IRCC’s own expectations. IRCC continues to approve citizenship-by-descent applications, including complex multi-generational claims within the scope of Bill C-3, so this is not a wholesale retreat from the law Parliament passed.

While the issuance of these retroactive letters is highly problematic, the concerns they raise appear to be evidentiary rather than a change to the legal framework. The letters are issued under subsection 26(1) of the Citizenship Regulations, which permits the Registrar of Canadian Citizenship to require surrender of a certificate where there is reason to believe the holder may not be entitled to it. The substance of the concern appears to center on whether documents were obtained directly from the authority responsible for the original civil record, rather than from secondary or compiled genealogical sources, and on how applicants handled gaps, where IRCC now expects a clear explanation of why a record is unavailable together with evidence of the efforts made to obtain it.

The government has now stated its position publicly. On June 16, 2026, pressed in question period by Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner, Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab said that having a Canadian ancestor does not by itself make a person eligible, that applicants must definitively prove their link to Canada at every generation, and that “Genealogy websites are not enough.” The Immigration Department characterized the exercise as an individualized review to confirm whether each certificate was properly issued on the evidence required by law, said that only a limited number of letters had gone out, later quantified by the Minister’s office as a few dozen, and stated that the matter is not directly related to the recent legislative changes. The number of letters issued appears to be significantly greater than the Minister suggests.

That explanation sits awkwardly with the department’s own account of how these files were handled. The same statement maintains that trained officers review all evidence before a certificate is issued. If that is so, a later conclusion that a certificate may not have been properly issued points to an administrative failure within IRCC rather than a deficiency in the applicant’s entitlement.

The standard the Minister describes is also more difficult to meet than it sounds, and in some cases impossible. Many qualifying lines run back to ancestors born before civil registration existed. Ontario only began registering births and deaths in 1869, and the other provinces adopted civil registration on their own timelines through the late nineteenth century. For an ancestor born before registration began, there is no vital statistics record to obtain from any source authority, because none was ever created. The only contemporaneous records are church or parish registers. Even within the registration era the position is not straightforward. Ontario, for example, does not make its historical registrations available directly online and directs researchers to platforms such as Ancestry and FamilySearch, while still issuing a certified copy of the registration on request for the years that have been released to the public.

IRCC’s own instructions contemplate this. Where a record cannot be obtained, applicants are directed to explain why and to set out the efforts they made to find it. From the responses recipients have shared publicly, a number of applicants appear to have done exactly that. It is therefore not yet clear what additional evidence IRCC expects in at least some of these files. Given the department’s documented capacity and governance problems, there is a real prospect that a careful, fully documented response will resolve many of these matters without further proceedings.

Holding IRCC to its own decisions

Applicants and their counsel are entitled to be told the case to be met. People who relied on published guidance and complied with it should not be exposed to retroactively tightened requirements — least of all where citizenship itself is on the line.

A decision to recall a certificate is not beyond review. Like any administrative decision of this kind, it must be reasonable in the sense the Supreme Court described in Vavilov — and reasonableness is not a rubber stamp. A reasonable decision is one the decision-maker has actually justified, through reasons that hold together and engage with what is at stake. In practice, that means:

• The reasoning must add up. The decision has to rest on a coherent, rational chain of analysis, not a conclusion asserted without explanation.
• It must be justified against the facts and the law. The decision has to grapple with the evidence the applicant submitted and the legal framework that governs — not a requirement introduced after the fact.
• It must engage the central concerns. A decision-maker who does not come to grips with the key points raised — including a person’s reliance on the government’s own earlier decision — risks having the decision quashed.
• The stakes raise the bar. The more serious the consequences for the individual, the more the law expects by way of justification. Few consequences are graver than losing one’s proof of citizenship.

We note that this is not the first time IRCC’s actions have drawn serious criticism. From assigning tens of thousands of files to inactive and placeholder officer codes, to the roughly 2,900 Afghan applications the NDP alleged had been lost, to its failure to curb LMIA fraud and its response of stripping arranged-employment points from the entire Express Entry pool — this latest episode adds to that record and, like the others, does Canada’s reputation no favours.

We have repeatedly taken IRCC — and its sister departments ESDC and CBSA — to the Federal Court on both substantive errors and breaches of procedural fairness, and succeeded; we also resolve many concerns before litigation becomes necessary. A few examples of our recent work:

a. ESDC changing LMIA requirements mid-stream. Our client applied for an LMIA that did not require advertising, relying on a published exemption. The LMIA was nonetheless refused because the officer took the position that the exemption applied only at certain wage levels. The matter was settled and the LMIA approved.

b. Visa refusals premised on unproven fraud allegations. Numerous refusals alleged that bank documents were fraudulent, without any proof provided. Cases settled; visas issued.

c. Reliance on undisclosed sources. Failure to disclose material, non-publicly-available sources relied on in support of an inadmissibility decision. Overturned by the Federal Court. (Khramova v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 FC 353.)

d. No opportunity to respond. Failure to give the applicant a chance to address document-genuineness concerns. Decision quashed; the client obtained permanent residence after five years of litigation. (Cesar v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 FC 716.)

e. Procedural fairness responses. Responses to numerous procedural fairness letters on misrepresentation and security inadmissibility.

The Federal Court will likely be asked to review decisions arising from these surrender letters. Where many applicants are in materially the same position, the Court has a well-established tool for handling them efficiently. Under Rule 105 of the Federal Courts Rules, related applications for judicial review can be consolidated and run as a single set of procedures. The Court looks at whether the files share common parties, issues, facts, and remedies, and at whether consolidation would prejudice anyone, with the onus on the party seeking it. A wave of challenges to the same kind of recall, argued on the same legal footing, is exactly the situation that test was built for — cutting cost and delay for applicants and producing consistent outcomes across files, while each person still receives their own judgment. (Apotex Inc v Bayer Inc, 2020 FCA 86; Brake v Canada (AG), 2019 FCA 274.)

If you have received a letter, or require any other advise regarding citizenship by descent, feel free to contact us.

A Sample Certificate Surrender Letter from the IRCC