I am the third generation of my family to have been born in Canada, but only the first to have been born a Canadian citizen.
That’s because there was no such thing as a Canadian citizen until 1947, when the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect.
Until then, everyone living in Canada were considered to be British subjects.
Tim Cook, a military historian and author, recently wrote about where he thinks the road to independent Canadian citizenship may have started.
He points to 1946, when national health and welfare minister Paul Martin Sr. visited a military cemetery at Dieppe, France, where hundreds of Canadians were killed in a failed invasion during the Second World War.
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Cook says Martin was so shaken by the idea that all these dead Canadians had actually been laid to rest as British subjects that he returned home with a mission to do something about it.
The country held its first citizenship ceremony on Jan. 3, 1947, two days after the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect. Twenty-six people were presented with their certificates of Canadian citizenship, including Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who received certificate 0001.
My parents, who were six and seven at the time and living on farms in southern Saskatchewan, became Canadian citizens with much less fanfare. They likely didn’t even know it had happened.
My grandparents, who had also been born in Canada, also automatically gained what the rest of us now take for granted.
I believe that the move to distinct Canadian citizenship was an important but often-overlooked step in the country’s journey toward full independence from Britain.
The more well-known stepping stones are Confederation in 1867, the Statute of Westminster, which in 1931 gave the dominions equal standing with Great Britain, and the repatriation of the constitution in 1982.
However, the adoption of Canadian citizenship in 1947 and our own flag in 1965 also played a role in carving out a distinct identity for this country.
And that leads me to my very own contribution to the next version of Trivial Pursuit: how many Canadian prime ministers were born Canadian citizens. The answer is three: Kim Campbell (born March 10, 1947), Stephen Harper (born April 30, 1959) and Justin Trudeau (born Dec. 25, 1971).
