I am indeed astounded at our new pending Canadian Citizenship Act. How it escaped the attention of the adopted families community, and hence the media, surprises me!
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There may be some anecdotal rational for this new provision; but it does make our children second-class citizens.
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Our children have had enough injustice in their short lives to date, why treat them as 2nd class Canadian Citizens when they are old enough to start their own families; we have all bent over backwards filling in paperwork and exposing our personal facts and figures as instructed by our Canadian and Ontario Governments to create our families so we think it is time for our Governments to stand up for our younger Canadian Citizens.
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I wanted to alert you to alarming new rules to Citizenship and Immigration laws which will have a profound negative affect on our adopted children.
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...the new law makes our adopted daughters second-class citizens! The attached Vancouver Sun article published today gives some background rational, also noting that all internationally adopted children are clearly targeted and quite inappropriately. Please make some effort to bring this situation to the attention of your local MPs, and help make this a front-burner issue in parliament. Otherwise, this act will simply become law on April 17th. An overwhelming outcry from the adoption community, supported by the media, may cause enough embarrassment to the Harper government to amend this Act before it takes effect. We can hope that clear thinking will prevail. This is another opportunity for the opposition parties to demonstrate their ethics.
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It appears that this about to be enacted law discriminates against adopted children by making their citizenship a 2nd class to children born in Canada.
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I am to the point of tears after reading the posting on the Sunrise Family Services Society's website. If my son chooses to adopt his own children when he is older, which is what some adult adoptees do, his adopted children cannot be granted Canadian citizenship. I cannot bear to think of the sadness he would feel! He would have every right to be furious with the government of Canada and their lack of understanding and compassion.
Bureaucracy is sometimes very necessary, such as all the paperwork, interviews, statements, police reports, medical reports, etc. required just to be prospective adoptive parents. The Hague Convention requires this to ensure the safety of the children to be adopted. However, now someone is denying our child the right to feel legitimate -- of being a Canadian.
When he comes of an age when he needs to figure out what it means to be himself, his citizenship should not be in question nor the citizenship of his potential children. Quantifiably, he is our son, regardless of what any piece of paper or any law states: I hope that Canadian law will always reflect that. We have worked so hard to legitimize our family in the eyes of our family, our peers, and our country through conversations, questions and answers and finally more paperwork. We are a "real" family with "real" toddler issues like tantrums, Raffi playing in the background, reading the same books over and over again, skinned knees, playdate scuffles, and most importantly love. We are no different from any other family on our block and we honestly feel that way in our community.
How we as individuals "fit" is always something that young people explore. I remember a class project in High School where we each had to define who we were: eg. I am a girl, I am Canadian, I am a soccer player, etc. The exercise was to teach us to begin questioning who and what we were. When the time comes for my son to explore who he is, I had always hoped that somewhere in that stream there would be the word "Canadian." Will he feel proud of his adoptive country? Will he feel like he "is" Canadian?
We are so proud to call this beautiful, inquisitive, and active little boy our child. If I was to answer that High School exercise today the first thing I would say would be, "I am the Mother of my son, and I am married to the man who is his Father, I am proud to be a family, a real family."
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.hmmessage P { PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; MARGIN: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px } BODY.hmmessage { FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: VerdanaI am outraged and appalled by this news! I cancelled my daughter's PR route one month ago and she just got her citizenship a few weeks ago. I go to get her next week. I feel I have failed her! I feel betrayed by my government. I just spoke to Immigration Canada and asked why no one told me about this "loophole". I was told because even they didn't know about it! Now it's too late to go the PR route even though she's still in Haiti. As you can see I've written my MP. What else can I do? Go to the papers?? Or just hope she has her children in Canada? She is 10 years old and my "class A" daughter is 7. Who knows what the laws re sponsorship will be in 20-30 years?
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