OTTAWA — An immigration lawyer is pushing back on Immigration Minister Lena Diab's claim that genealogical records — including those from third-party ancestry sites — are not sufficient evidence for a citizenship-by-descent claim.
OTTAWA — An immigration lawyer is pushing back on Immigration Minister Lena Diab's claim that genealogical records — including those from third-party ancestry sites — are not sufficient evidence for a citizenship-by-descent claim.
While an unknown number of citizenship-by-descent claimants have recently received letters from Diab's department telling them to surrender their citizenship certificates, government practices and the department's own document checklist do not state that records from sites like Ancestry.ca cannot be used as evidence for a claim. Cedric Marin, an Ottawa immigration lawyer, says it's shocking Diab would single out records from genealogical sites and points out government archives in Quebec and Ontario direct clients to partnered websites, including Ancestry.ca, for a wide variety of documents from the early 20th century and earlier.
Genealogist Kendra Gaebe says people using resources like Ancestry.ca for a claim still need to cite the original source of the document. Diab says people making citizenship-by-descent claims need to definitively prove Canadian lineage generation by generation. Anyone who has received a surrender letter after their citizenship certificate was issued will have a chance to provide further documentary evidence, IRCC says. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 17, 2026. David Baxter, The Canadian Press
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