ADAMS: Why Michelle Rempel Garner Has It Wrong on Jus Soli
The latest Conservative call to restrict birthright citizenship under the guise of “restoring the value of being Canadian” is a masterclass in political sleight of hand. Michelle Rempel Garner's recent piece on X dresses up an age-old nativist argument in the respectable clothes of immigration reform, hoping voters won't notice this is yet another attempt to expand the political aristocracy's power to decide who belongs, who's deserving, and who's expendable.
Let's start with the premise of her case. Rempel Garner claims that Canada's “unrestricted jus soli,” better known as the constitutional guarantee that anyone born here is a citizen, is somehow the source of our national woes: housing shortages, overwhelmed hospitals, and an alleged “loss of shared identity.”
What Rempel Garner doesn't tell you is that every one of those problems was manufactured by government policy, not by the babies of temporary workers.
If Ottawa actually invested in building homes instead of just cutting ribbons at groundbreakings, we wouldn't be in this mess. The Conservatives could propose we finance large-scale construction on public land like Carney did. Additionally, they could propose reviving federal vocational training and offer incentives for people to pursue college education to address the throttling supply of workers in healthcare & the trades.
Instead, Tories would rather pander to the PPC & shout about “too many immigrants” rather than do their job as the Official Opposition & demand Ottawa actually does its job: build housing, train workers, and stop pretending scarcity is inevitable. It's the same tired scapegoating used for centuries to distract from government failure.
Citizenship as a Political Commodity
Rempel Garner's argument turns citizenship into a transactional privilege, something granted only to those who meet the conditions of the day set by the political aristocracy. The Conservatives want to replace a simple, automatic, equal rule, you're born here, you’re a Canadian citizen, with a maze of paperwork, proof, and suspicion.
For a party that claims to believe in limited government, this proposal reeks of state overreach. Imagine the surveillance and paperwork required to vet every newborn's parentage, immigration status, and residency record before issuing a birth certificate. Conservatives want to shrink the state until it fits in your wallet, but apparently not until it fits in your delivery room.
Citizenship is recognition of a natural fact. You're born here, you live here, you grow up here. That's the foundation of civic equality. To additionally carve exceptions based on your parents' paperwork or nationality of origin is to potentially reintroduce a caste system by stealth, one where a child's legal worth depends on bureaucratic or ethnic classification.
The Phantom Menace of “Birth Tourism”
This propagandist garbage article from Rempel Garner leans heavily on the spectre of “birth tourism,” warning of an organized campaign to “exploit Canada's system.” But where's the evidence? Even her own writing admits that the number of such cases are not tracked. What we actually have are anecdotes, YouTube videos, and a few hospitals charging higher rates to non-residents, hardly the makings of a national crisis, let alone a reason to push moral panic absurdity.
And even if some families do come to Canada to give birth, what's the real harm? The child still has to live here for years before accessing most benefits. The parents do not get automatic residency. If they stay illegally, that's a matter of enforcement, not citizenship law.
To treat every birth on Canadian soil as a potential fraud is to weaponize paranoia against the innocent. Conservatives say they want to “restore the value” of citizenship, but they're the ones cheapening it by wanting to turn it from a recognition of belonging into a bureaucratic prize. Citizenship should be rooted in the principle of freedom, not fear. It should affirm that this country belongs to those who live and work within it, not just those with the right stamp on their paperwork.
Post-Nationalism, Pluralism, and the Strawman Factory
The Conservative Party is taking great pains to paint the Liberal Party as “post-national,” claiming that Trudeau, Carney, and company have “eroded Canada's pluralistic values.” Now, I have no love for the Liberals; they've run the largest deficits in Canadian history, inflated the cost of living, and expanded the surveillance state into every corner of life, much like Pension Poilievre wishes to continue doing. But to claim that Canada's multiculturalism is a Liberal invention is is ridiculous. Canada's pluralism predates Trudeau by a century. It's a product of free association and voluntary migration, people came here to be Canadian because Canada didn't demand ideological conformity. Conservatives like Brian Mulroney understood that.
If anything, this obsession with “defending Canadian identity” against newcomers betrays a deep insecurity about what that identity even is. The Canadian people do not need the government of the day to define it for us. We believe identity is lived, not legislated. Identity is shared experience built through free exchange, community, and tolerance.
The idea that the political aristocracy should decide whether your child belongs here violates everything that Canada stands for.
The Real Crisis: State Mismanagement
It's telling that Conservatives are beginning to frame almost every single social issue as a direct result of mass immigration. Housing shortage? Too many immigrants. Overburdened hospitals? Too many immigrants. Job competition? Too many immigrants. It's as if the government's chronic incompetence on both the provincial & federal levels in managing land, budgets, and licensing suddenly disappears when there's a foreign scapegoat to point at.
Here's a radical thought: what if we blamed the state instead of the stranger?
The housing crisis exists because zoning boards make it nearly impossible to build, foreign investors by all of our affordable houses, and private developers building houses no one can afford. The healthcare crisis exists because governments keep wasting public dollars on private healthcare, refuse to build more hospitals, and refuses to train Doctors. The job shortage exists because taxation and regulation strangle small business growth. Immigration did not cause these problems.
But “end the political aristocracy” doesn't make for a good campaign ad. “Blame the baby,” apparently does.
My Case for Jus Soli
Birthright citizenship is the most efficient, least coercive, and most just system available. It avoids surveillance, paperwork, and government interference in private life. It guarantees equality before the law from the moment of birth. It's a simple, objective rule that protects individual rights from bureaucratic discretion.
Every alternative invites state intrusion into hospitals, family life, and the most intimate moments of human existence. The Tories may not realize it, but their proposal to restrict jus soli would require federal monitoring of every newborn's immigration lineage. If that doesn’t sound Orwellian, nothing does.
Moreover, the moral case is clear: a child born here didn't choose the visa status of their parents. Punishing them for bureaucratic classifications they had no control over violates the core legal principle of the legal rights we have in this country.
Inheriting guilt for crimes you did not commit is not a Canadian value.
The Hypocrisy of “Protecting Citizenship”
Finally, it's worth pointing out the hypocrisy of Conservatives invoking “citizenship integrity” while also supporting Bill C-3 amendments that would deny citizenship to people born in Canada, yet extend it indefinitely to people born abroad to the children of Canadians, even if they never set foot in the country.
So a baby born in Calgary is not Canadian, but a baby born in Tel Aviv to a Canadian executive who's never even lived here is Canadian? Yeah, that makes so much more sense.
If citizenship is supposed to mean something, it should be rooted in presence, participation, and contribution, not heritage or paperwork. Jus soli embodies that principle better than any alternative. It recognizes the people who are actually here as belonging, not just those who can afford the right visa lawyer.
Canada's greatness has never depended on who it keeps out. It depends on who we let in, and how free they are once they get here. The newfound obsession of the Conservative Party with restricting birthright citizenship is about preserving control. They want a Canada where the state gets to decide which Canadians count as Canadians. The Tories' proposed fix for so-called “post-nationalism” is to turn Canada into a fortress of paperwork and surveillance.
And suppose we're serious about restoring the value of citizenship, the first step isn't restricting it, it's remembering what we stand for: freedom, equality, and the right to call this place home without asking permission from the government.
This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times and Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.
