Edward Jeep had been carrying his Canadian passport for barely a month when the government told him it was no longer valid.

The fifty-five-year-old Washington, DC–based US military retiree was travelling in Europe. He had flown from Cardiff to Amsterdam and entered the Schengen Area using the Canadian passport issued to him in May. While he was abroad, two messages arrived from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. The first, on June 13, said IRCC had placed the proof of citizenship issued to him under review and required him to surrender his certificate. A week later, another notice said his passport had been revoked and had to be returned within fifteen days.

Jeep’s was one of 100 similar cases that were flagged, with the number of those whose proof of citizenship was revoked remaining unclear. The suspensions came as IRCC’s proof-of-citizenship processing has been under strain. The department’s public processing-time tool recently showed a projected wait of about nineteen months, with nearly 100,000 people in line for a decision.

Jeep returned to the United States using his American passport. “Nobody has given me a conclusive answer whether there’s some database someplace that thinks I’m still in Europe,” he told me. He worried the mismatch—with him having entered the Schengen Area as a Canadian but having left an American—could create problems if Canada later issued him another passport.

Jeep had applied for and gotten citizenship under a recent law. Since 2009, Canada’s Citizenship Act had limited citizenship by descent to the first generation born abroad. A Canadian born or naturalized in Canada could pass citizenship on to a child born outside the country. But if that person, too, later had a child outside Canada, the offspring could not claim citizenship by descent. That rule became known as the first-generation limit. After an Ontario court found parts of that limit unconstitutional, Parliament passed Bill C-3, which came into force on December 15, 2025, expanding citizenship by descent to people who had previously been excluded.