Data most closely associated with birth tourism shows the practice is back on the rise in B.C. and across Canada following a sharp decline amid pandemic-related travel restrictions.
But in B.C., where “self-paying non-resident” births took the biggest tumble since 2020, such births have yet to recover as much as elsewhere, as one city in particular has lost the moniker of being the “epicentre” of the controversial cottage industry.
Between April 1, 2019 and March 31, 2020, 868 non-residents of Canada paid to give birth in local B.C. hospitals, in turn garnering automatic citizenship for their newborns. Over the five years before the pandemic, B.C. saw an annual average of 661 such births.
Across Canada, such births numbered 4,656 annually, on average, during the five preceding years, while reaching 1.6 per cent of all Canadian births by April 2020. (In 2010, the rate of such births was only 0.5 per cent — see figure above.)
But those numbers dropped to 2,339 in Canada and 152 in B.C., in 2021-2022. Where B.C. saw a 77 per cent decline, Ontario witnessed only a 51 per cent decline and across Canada the rate of decline was 50 per cent.
However, last year (2022-2023) the numbers began to rise again, to 3,575 across Canada (1.0 per cent of total births) and to 312 in B.C., according to immigration policy expert and researcher Andrew Griffith, former Director General for Citizenship and Multiculturalism.
“The question now is, how quickly does it start to pick up? After two years, you start to see a pickup, albeit not back to previous levels — that will take time,” said Griffith, who described the COVID-19 pandemic as “the perfect natural experiment to assess the extent of birth tourism in Canada.”
Decline in B.C. corresponds with lower Chinese tourism
The sharp decline in B.C., Griffith hypothesizes, is likely a result of a more pronounced decline in tourist visas from China and the corresponding geopolitical tensions between the nations.
Of B.C.’s 868 “self-paying non-resident” births the year before the pandemic, 502 took place at Richmond Hospital, the Canadian city with the largest proportion of immigrants from China and one where a booming industry of short-term rentals, or de facto birth hotels, servicing pregnant Chinese nationals once existed.
Whereas Chinese nationals once represented 24 per cent of all births in the city, they only numbered four per cent last year, Griffith found via data supplied by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
“In Richmond, there as you see the number of visas issued to Chinese nationals decrease, the number of birth tourists in Richmond decreased. So it’s no longer the epicentre; now it’s one of the Toronto hospitals,” said Griffith.
The researcher points out that while visitor visas overall have largely recovered after pandemic air travel restrictions lifted, to 93 per cent of former levels, and the number of temporary foreign workers increased significantly, visitor visas for Chinese nationals have only recovered to 18 per cent of former levels.
Last August, China left Canada off its government-approved list of approved countries for group travel amid geopolitical tension, including: diplomatic rows stemming from allegations of foreign interference, undue foreign influence in Canadian diaspora communities, cyberwarfare and the detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou and subsequent retaliatory imprisonment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
“This suggests a variety of Chinese restrictions and tensions between China and Canada played a role in reducing the interest of Chinese nationals to travel here to give birth,” said Griffith.
What are the concerns and will there ever be a solution, if warranted?
Since there was more significant media coverage on the matter prior to the pandemic, Griffith notes the federal government has not done anything to curb the issue, despite public debate, while B.C. Minister of Health Adrian Dixhas dismissed concerns about problems such as Canadian mothers being diverted from hospitals such as Richmond.
Griffith says, “given the current and planned increases in immigration, it is highly unlikely that the government will act as the numbers are a rounding error compared to overall immigration of 500,000 by 2025.”
But to Griffith, stopping the practice is more a matter of principle.
“I still think it’s important on principle and for the value of citizenship; it’s one of those things that can irritate, with people going around the system, taking advantage of the system,” said Griffith, who believes amendments to the Citizenship Act — requiring one parent to be a citizen or permanent resident to grant the baby citizenship — are warranted.
Several polls on the topic show significant support for amendments. In 2019, Angus Reid Institute, for example, reported "two-thirds (64%) say a child born to parents who are in this country on tourist visas should not be granted Canadian citizenship, and six in ten (60%) say changes to Canada’s citizenship laws are necessary to discourage birth tourism."
Some critics of proposed changes contend people are unfairly targeting disadvantaged foreign women.
University of Carleton associate law professor Megan Gaucher was provided $223,328 from the federal government in June 2021 to research “how constructions of foreignness undermine the longstanding assumption that formal legal citizenship is an uncontested condition for membership to the Canadian state and explore how political and public discourse around birth tourism ultimately reproduces settler-colonial imaginaries of ‘good’ familial citizens.”
Gaucher says proposed measures "risk being driven by polarizing narratives about borders and citizenship rather than by evidence."
Griffith has contested such views, noting birth tourists are “not disadvantaged women; they are people who have money to travel here and pay all the related expenses.”
In B.C., refugees and temporary foreign workers would not be categorized as self-paying births. And figures in B.C. also do not count international students, who are covered by the province's Medical Services Plan. Hence, the "non-resident self-pay" numbers are a more accurate depiction of the practice, Griffith notes.
Conversely, others such as Michael Juneau-Katsuya, CSIS's former chief of the Asia-Pacific, have shared contrasting opinions on the emerging phenomenon.
Juneau-Katsuya told Glacier Media he sees birth tourism as a national security threat. He suggests the People’s Republic of China may document and monitor returning children and utilize them as agents of the communist state should they return to Canada as adults.
Still, others have expressed concerns that there may be a cumulative impact on returning citizens who may utilize Canada’s social safety nets and reap benefits of citizenship without investing time in the country. Those concerns are in addition to the added stress birth tourism places on the health-care system.
