At the public library in the town of Washington recently, Sam was sifting through reams of documents tracing his lineage, pulling out one of particular importance.
“This is my great grandfather’s death certificate here,” Sam said. “He died in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. So that’s my actual Canadian ancestor right there.”
Sam is a mariner and a farmer. He’s also trans, and asked that we use only his first name to protect his safety.
He said he and his husband began having conversations a few years ago about possibly needing to leave the U.S. in response to rising anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation.
“But in the last probably six months to a year,” Sam said, “the conversations have been feeling a bit less abstract.”
Sam said his family had immigrated to the U.S. from Newfoundland around 1890. But he said the process of seeking Canadian citizenship seemed daunting, until he learned about the new eligibility rules.
“It just felt like a golden ticket,” he said.
The change was sparked by a 2023 court ruling that Canada’s one-generation limit on citizenship by ancestry was unconstitutional. In December, a new law extended citizenship to those born abroad who can show they have a Canadian parent, grandparent, or other parental link.
“I found my grandfather’s birth certificate on the Nova Scotia archive site,” said Pam Barry-Santos of Freeport. “So that kind of made it super easy for me.”
Barry-Santos said she and her teenage son got citizenship last year under an interim rule before the final law went into effect.
She recently took her son to visit a few colleges in Canada, and she’s considering retiring there. But for now, her long-term plans are still up in the air.
“So it’s not like I got it and I’m like, ‘I’m across the border!’ like some people are,” Barry-Santos said. “It’s definitely on my radar, though.”
Through the end of January, a spokesperson for Canada’s immigration agency said 1,480 people have been confirmed as “citizens by descent under the new Act.”
The agency does not have an estimate of how many people are newly eligible.
But Amandeep Hayer, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver said, by some estimates, it’s in the millions, with a particularly high concentration in New England.
“There was a study done that 20% to 30% of New Englanders are descendants of French Canadians,” Hayer said.
At the same time, he said Canada has been restricting other pathways to citizenship, leading some immigrants and international students to question the fairness of who gets permanent status and who doesn’t.
“There are people here who have paid taxes in Canada, who lived in Canada,” he said. “Why are they being excluded from any like pathway to permanent residence?”
One immediate consequence of the new law is a genealogical gold rush of people digging through census files, provincial archives and baptismal records to prove their Canadian ancestry.
Doug Cochrane, a genealogist in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, said he used to get about ten family history research requests a month. Now?
“I’m getting at least five to six per day,” he said.
Cochrane said he’s booked out four to six weeks, with the most urgent calls coming from LGBTQ+ Americans.
He puts those requests at the top of the list.
“Because people have a right to be who they are, and if they can’t do it in their home country, well, come to Canada,” he said. “We’ll welcome you.”
Sam, the midcoast resident who’s grappling with the question of his own long-term safety and belonging in the U.S. as a trans person, said the prospect of uprooting his life has brought up a range of emotions.
“It’s great if you want to leave home to seek opportunity elsewhere. I mean, that’s how a lot of us got here in the first place, or at least our ancestors did,” he said. “But it’s another thing to leave because it’s no longer the home that you thought you had.”
For now, he’s focused on the task at hand, collecting the final documents he needs to prove his Canadian citizenship.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
