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From the moment she arrived last month, Noelle Rose became one of the joys of my life. And a source of sadness.

Her mother – my daughter Madeline – comes from a long line of Scottish immigrants who settled in the Ottawa Valley in the 1840s. We are proudly Canadian, and have been since before Canada was, well, Canada.

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But due to a 2009 change to the Citizenship Act, lovely Noelle, the seventh generation of our Canadian family, is not a Canadian. And her mother, it turns out, is a second-class Canadian, unable to pass her citizenship on to her daughter.

The reason: they were both born in the wrong country. And that, apparently, trumps all.

Here’s how that happened. In 1977, I went to Washington as a correspondent for The Canadian Press news service. I met and married my husband, Vincent Mosco, there. Our daughters, Rosemary and Madeline, are U.S. citizens by birth, but I registered them as Canadians too. I hoped we might all move north. Even if we did not, I wanted them to have the same citizenship I had. The photo on Madeline’s citizenship card is of a bald-headed baby who looks vaguely confused by the whole business.