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If you’re born in Canada, you’re Canadian.

It doesn’t matter who your parents are, or when and how they came to Canada. If you are born here, we claim you as our own.

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It was the fundamental compact we made with the immigrant settlers who left their homelands behind to take a risk on a new life in a new land.

Yes, we told them, it may be tough to start over again in a different country. But your children will be Canadians, no matter what, equal to all other Canadians.

For me, that commitment to birthright citizenship has always been a point of patriotic pride. Citizenship by birth is part of our Canadian identity, something that sets us apart from many other countries that simply don’t work that way.

Of course, Canada didn’t make up that rule. It’s a British legacy, a legacy of Empire. Anyone born in the British Empire was a British subject — whether they wanted to be or not. The British, in turn, borrowed it from the Roman Empire. It was the Roman emperor Caracalla who established jus soli, or right by soil, which made every free person born in the Roman Empire a Roman citizen — largely so he could tax them and add them to his armies.