Bill C-3 (2025) and Searching for Birth Registrations in Ontario

Ever since Royal Assent was granted on 20 Nov 2025 to Bill C-3, An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025), there has been a steady increase in the number of posts seen in the various Ontario genealogy groups on Facebook I participate in, and also by the branches of Ontario Ancestors.

Screen capture of the start of An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025), Assented to 20 Nov 2025 as Bill C-3 in the First Session, Forty-fifth Parliament 3-4 Charles III, 2025.

This change to the Citizenship Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-29) for Canada removed the first generation born outside Canada limitation of Canadian citizenship in some situations.

Note those very important words, "in some situations," that is on the page from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. In looking at the "Document Checklist: Application for a Citizenship Certificate (Proof of Citizenship) (CIT 0014)" form I noticed this very important note in Scenario 3 on the paper form:

On December 15, 2025, the Citizenship Act was amended requiring that applicants who are born outside of Canada to a Canadian parent who was also born outside Canada must demonstrate that at least one of their Canadian citizen parents has 1,095 days of physical presence in Canada prior to the birth of the applicant. 

I have a feeling this is a very important note. However, I am not a lawyer, nor do I portray one on TV. So I don't pretend to understand the gotchas involved not only when it comes to applying for a citizenship certificate but also who can make use of this claim of Canadian citizenship through descent beyond the first generation. If you have any questions about doing this process, I'm definitely the wrong person to ask. Instead, I recommend contacting a law firm that deals in Canadian citizenship and immigration for guidance. The money and time spent talking with a competent legal expert many save you grief and disappointment later.

One of the key document that folks are often having challenges with locating is evidence of a great-grandparent's birth. With birth, marriage, and death registrations in Canada being a provincial concern, each province started civil registrations in different years. You will need to first brush up on when registrations started where your ancestor was born and then figure out where to find those documents.

Since I deal with Ontario genealogy the most, although I am familiar with other provinces, I'm going to focus on those who are seeking to use Canadian citizenship through descent where their ancestors were born in Ontario. Although similar challenges exist for all the provinces when it comes to civil birth registrations.

The key thing to know about Ontario civil birth registrations is that it didn't start until 1 Jul 1869. What is frustrating to many is even then it took many years before there was full compliance with the law. As an example of that lack of compliance with registering births, it is estimated that the birth returns for 1898 were only 80% complete. It's no wonder we sometimes have challenges looking for an Ontario birth registration prior to the 1900s. I've written about finding Ontario civil birth registrations in my blog back in 2022 and I updated it in 2024. Please take a few minutes to read the post to understand what is available and where.

Also, don't just rely on transcriptions and indexes to find your ancestor's birth registration in Ontario. If you can't find the civil birth registration by using the computer aided search feature on the various sites, then take the effort to browse the digitized birth registration index created by the government of Ontario that is found digitized on FamilySearch in their "Births, stillbirths, and delayed registration with indexes, 1869-1912" collection. That digitized material is generally grouped by the first letter of the last name, and then by year. Within the those groupings, the names are order alphabetically.

If you do find the birth registration in the digitized material and you are wanting a certified copy, then read the "Birth, marriage and death registrations" page on the Archives of Ontario site in the section under "Order a certified copy of a registration".

However, if a birth registration can't be located, that means folks will be looking for church records in the hopes that a baptism was performed around the time the person was born.

The challenge then really begins since many of the parish registers are not online and name indexed for searching. If we are lucky, the ancestor might have been baptized by a Wesleyan Methodist minister. Why lucky? Wayne Bower has generously digitized and made available those Wesleyan Methodist baptism registers now held by the United Church of Canada on his page "Wesleyan Methodist Baptismal Registers
1825-1910". You might also come across some parish registers on FamilySearch and Ancestry. But those are more the exception than the rule.

Instead you will need to research the family to figure out the following from around the time of the birth:

• What religion was the family following?
• Did the denomination the family followed practice infant baptisms?
• Where was the family was residing?
• What churches may have been in existence in the area?
• Where are those records now held? 
• Have the records for that time period been made available online? 

You might have noticed I emphasized the word "research". That is because the answers to those questions require us to find other documents such as census and land records, read and understand what has been recorded in those other records, possibly use maps to find the family on the ground to identify nearby churches, reading local histories to figure out what churches were in existence at the time, and contacting existing churches or archives to find out where the records may have ended up. You might even have to research that religion to get some of those answers.

For example, the Methodist Church, Canada, the Congregational Union of Canada, and about 70% of The Presbyterian Church in Canada came together to form The United Church of Canada in 1925. There have been other congregations brought into that union over the subsequent years. That means, for those congregations you might need to contact The United Church of Canada Archives to find the records. But what about the 30% of the Presbyterian Church in Canada that didn't join in that union? Then you might need to contact The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives. 

What if the family attended the Church of England? You will need to figure out the diocese that church was in and contact the appropriate diocesan archives in the hopes that they will be able to locate a baptism record. 

If the family was Roman Catholic you might find the parish registers in the digitized material held by the Drouin Institute on their site Généalogie Québec. Ancestry also has many of those same registers in their copies of the Drouin collection in "Ontario, Canada, Catholic Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1802-1967", "Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968", and "Acadia, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1757-1946". Ancestry also has a "Ontario, Canada, Roman Catholic Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1760-1923" collection that includes Ontario parishes not found in the Drouin collection. Don't forget that FamilySearch also has digitized copies of various Roman Catholic parish registers on their site. 

Even Library and Archives Canada has a number of parish registers either on microfilm or made available in an online digitized format courtesy of their partner CRKN's Héritage in their "Parish and related birth, marriage and death records" collection.

Just a word of caution — I have found that when dealing with any handwritten parish registers, transcriptions or indexes can be a bit iffy. So you quite often have to dive into the weeds and actually browse the images for the parish in the hopes of finding the baptism of your ancestor.

 

I wish you best of luck in your efforts to find those sometimes hard to locate birth and baptism records. And, if it applies, I also wish you luck in your endeavours to establish your lost Canadian citizenship.