Applying for Your Child's Canadian Citizenship Certificate

If you're Canadian by descent, your children may be Canadian too. The same CIT 0001 form used to obtain your own citizenship certificate covers minors. A parent fills it out, signs it, pays the $75 CAD fee, and submits it as a separate application. There are a few meaningful differences from an adult application, plus one rule that applies only to children born on or after December 15, 2025.

Any biological parent, adoptive parent, or legal guardian can submit a CIT 0001 for a child under 18. You do not need the other parent's cooperation or consent. IRCC does not require custody documentation unless the person applying is neither a biological nor adoptive parent.

If your child is 14 or older, they must also sign the form alongside you. Their signature goes on the declaration page. A child under 14 does not sign.

Every field on the CIT 0001 is answered as if you are the child. The child's name, date of birth, place of birth, and address fill the personal information section. Section 9 traces the ancestry chain from the Canadian citizen down to the child.

The immigration history fields refer to the child's travel and time in Canada, not yours. If the child has never been to Canada, mark those fields not applicable.

Each child requires a separate CIT 0001 and a separate $75 CAD payment. Two children from the same family cannot share one application. You submit two complete packages: separate forms, separate fee receipts, separate photos, separate envelopes.

The Document Checklist (CIT 0014) specifies what to include. For a child born outside Canada to a Canadian parent, the core documents are:

• The child's birth certificate issued by the vital statistics authority for the jurisdiction where they were born. Hospital-issued birth records are not accepted.
• Proof of the Canadian parent's citizenship: a citizenship certificate, Canadian birth certificate, or valid Canadian passport.
• Ancestry documents tracing the chain to the original Canadian citizen if the claim runs through a grandparent or further.

As of June 2026, IRCC's updated CIT 0014 no longer accepts genealogy website records as standalone evidence. Every link in the document chain must come from an official government-issuing authority.

Children born before December 15, 2025 are exempt from the physical presence requirement. If you hold Canadian citizenship by descent and your child was born before this date, your citizenship flows directly to them. Gather the documents, complete the form, and submit.

Children born on or after December 15, 2025 face an additional requirement under Bill C-3. For citizenship to pass to the child, the Canadian parent must show they spent at least 1,095 days in Canada before the child's birth. The days do not need to be consecutive.

Acceptable evidence of that physical presence includes Canadian tax records, employment records, school transcripts, lease or mortgage documents, provincial health card records, or sworn affidavits from people with direct knowledge. The days can come from any period in the parent's life before the child was born.

This rule exists to prevent citizenship from passing indefinitely to people with no real connection to Canada. If you lived there for three or more years at any point before your child was born, you meet the threshold. See the full breakdown of who the 1,095-day rule actually applies to and what evidence IRCC accepts.

David's mother was born in Manitoba and passed Canadian citizenship to him by descent. He lives in Wisconsin with two kids: Sophie, born in 2022, and Ben, born in March 2026.

Sophie's application is simple: David's citizenship certificate, Sophie's Wisconsin birth certificate, and the documents tracing the ancestry chain.

Ben's application requires one more layer. David needs to document 1,095 days of physical presence in Canada before Ben was born. David spent four years at the University of Toronto in his early twenties. His transcripts, an old Ontario lease agreement, and several years of Canadian tax filings total well over 1,095 days. That evidence goes in Ben's application package.

Both applications run in parallel and are reviewed independently.

You need documented proof of your own Canadian citizenship before IRCC can process your child's application. In most cases, that means waiting until your own citizenship certificate arrives. That certificate then becomes the anchor document linking your child to Canada.

Processing for CIT 0001 currently runs around 19 months. Once a child's certificate is issued, it has no expiration date. It remains valid for life, and the child can use it to obtain a Canadian passport when they're ready.

Use MaplePass to confirm your child's eligibility before you apply. The eligibility check maps the citizenship chain for both you and your children and takes about two minutes.