Tens of thousands of people who assumed they were Canadians have had their citizenship thrown into question by a federal court ruling on the status of Second World War brides and their children.
On Friday, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the decision of a lower court that in 2006 ordered Ottawa to grant immediate citizenship to the British son of a Canadian war veteran.
This latest judgment says that brides of veterans, and their children born overseas -- who had been granted citizenship by a special wartime order in 1945 -- lost that status if they left Canada after 1947 and did not sign a form to have their citizenship reinstated.
The man at the centre of Friday's ruling is Joseph Taylor, a resident of England.
Taylor was born in 1944. His English mother married his Canadian father in 1945 after returning to England from the war.
After the war, Taylor and his mother sailed to Canada to join the father in B.C. Like 63,000 other war brides and their children, both were given instant Canadian citizenship.
The marriage, however, didn't last, and Taylor and his mother moved back to England.
Then, in 1947, Canada passed a new law that effectively cast aside the wartime order. The new law said war-bride children who had left Canada, or children born out of wedlock to Canadian fathers and foreign mothers, must declare their Canadian citizenship by their 24th birthday or they would lose it.
Taylor has argued in court that he was never aware of this 1947 statute.
Federal officials acknowledged in March that they knew of about 450 people who were struggling to obtain Canadian citizenship because of the 1947 statute. A recent CBC investigation, however, says that up to 200,000 war brides and their children may be affected.
The appeal court ruling may not be the final word. The New Brunswick-based group Canadian War Brides posted an angry note on its website hours after the decision was released, calling Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government a "gang of bullies".
"Supreme Court, here we come!" the note said.
-- CanWest News Service
PREVIOUS
