I’m already living and working in Canada. Why am I so excited about the Canadian by descent rule change? When I started my current job in 2023, it was on a closed work-permit. This essentially means that I’m allowed to stay in Canada so long as I am employed at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor. If I lose this job, I also may lose my right to stay and work. It’s also time limited, so I have to apply for a renewal if my status doesn’t change before it expires. Because my spouse was given a temporary open work-permit, he can work and stay in Canada, so long as my permit remains valid.
In that past, the expectation was that the university helped employees move from temporary work permit status after 1 year to Permanent Residency (PR) status. PR in Canada is very similar to a US Green Card. PR holders have the right to live and work anywhere in Canada long term (assuming eligibility requirements are met). It also offers a pathway to eventual citizenship, generally after 5 years of living in Canada.
A popular pathway to PR for people like me is through Canada’s Express Entry points based system. Points are given based on education, language ability, work experience, Canadian work and schooling experience, spousal factors, and age. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) holds regular draws, and if your score meets the cutoff, you receive an Invitation to Apply (ITA) for permanent residency. You can find your own score through an online calculator.
Applying for PR used to be fairly straight forward and easy path for university faculty members. However, Canada recently altered the point system for what it takes to be eligible in such as a way that being over the age of 30 makes it now nearly impossible to receive an invitation to apply for PR. I’ve been living and working in Toronto now for 2 1/2 years and I am still awaiting an ITA. This is slightly unsettling, as it creates some uncertainty about my legal status, but it also slows down my eventual application for CAN citizenship and delays other rights offered to permanent residents and citizens (like purchasing a home without a foreign buyer fee, preference for job applications, and voting).
Enter the citizenship‑by‑descent rule change. If I can prove I’ve been a Canadian citizen this entire time (and I think I can!), I can bypass the PR process and the time requirements before applying for citizenship. I submitted an application for “proof of Canadian citizenship,” which is essentially the official way of saying, “Hey, I think I am Canadian. Can you confirm it?” If that application is approved, everything changes. I wouldn’t need to keep waiting in the Express Entry pool. I wouldn’t need to reapply for work permits. I wouldn’t even need to apply for PR at all. I could simply apply for a Canadian passport and become a dual citizen.
What makes all of this even more meaningful is that moving to Canada wasn’t a out-of-nowhere decision for me. It was something I’d talked about for years, often half‑jokingly the way many people say “maybe I’ll just move to Canada” when the news cycle gets too bleak. But, I’d seriously considered the move twice before it finally became a reality.
And I want to be clear: I’m already in an incredibly privileged situation. I have the support of university‑hired immigration lawyers. I have a stable job at a well‑resourced institution. I’m not lying awake at night wondering if my work permit will be denied or if I’ll suddenly be forced to leave. I’m not facing the same barriers or precarity that so many other migrants experience.
Even with all that privilege, there’s still been a low‑grade anxiety humming in the background. Reapplying for a work permit isn’t just paperwork; it’s another trip to the border and a reminder that my life here is technically conditional. Even renewing something as basic as my health card is a bureaucratic time drain.
I’ve also spent a lot of time and energy trying to advocate for awareness of the changes to the permanent residency system and to push for alternative pathways that don’t shut out people over 30. Each passing month without PR is a delay in the rights that come with belonging here: the right to vote, the right to buy a home without extra fees, the right to feel settled instead of provisional.
All of this lands even harder because of what’s happening back in the U.S. right now. The political climate is increasingly hostile to higher education and to sociologists in particular. Universities are under attack, research funding is being dismantled, and even some textbooks are being policed. Watching this unfold from across the border has made the prospect of Canadian citizenship feel like a potential lifeline. It represents stability, safety, and the ability to keep doing the work I believe in.
And the impact doesn’t stop with me. If this works out, it also means that my family members who share the same ancestry can apply for citizenship too. They could choose to move here if they ever wanted to. The idea that this door might open not just for me, but for (some of) the people I love, makes the discovery feel even bigger.
For all these reasons, when I learned I might qualify as Canadian by descent, it was game changing. Just like a walk‑off win.
