{"id":266729,"date":"2018-11-22T05:00:56","date_gmt":"2018-11-22T10:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/hospital-stats-show-birth-tourism-rising-in-major-cities\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T22:18:56","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:18:56","slug":"hospital-stats-show-birth-tourism-rising-in-major-cities","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2018\/11\/hospital-stats-show-birth-tourism-rising-in-major-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospital stats show birth tourism rising in major cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Could a single hospital in Richmond, BC<\/a>, be the only one in the country experiencing a boom in birth tourism? This was the question many people had earlier this year, when politicians began taking notice of the unusually high number of nonresidents giving birth at the Richmond Hospital. I decided to take a close look at the available data from hospitals across the country. What I found is that the level of birth tourism nationally is at least five times greater than the 300 births captured by Statistics Canada in 2016. The impact of this practice can no longer be described as insignificant given its effect on the integrity of citizenship and public perceptions that birth tourism is a fraudulent shortcut to obtaining citizenship.<\/p>\n

The term birth tourism or birth citizenship refers to nonresident women giving birth in a country in order to obtain its citizenship for their babies. The issue has come up recently in Canada, with a petition presented in Parliament<\/a> by the Liberal MP for Richmond, Joe Peschisolido, and with Conservative Party members passing a resolution<\/a> to withhold citizenship from any child whose parent is not Canadian or a permanent resident. In the United States, President Donald Trump has promised to stop birthright citizenship.<\/p>\n

Earlier analysis (including mine) relied on Statistics Canada\u2019s compilation<\/a> of numbers from provincial vital statistics agencies, which count birth registrations, as shown in figure 1.<\/p>\n

However, the numbers reported for the Richmond Hospital<\/a> exceeded not only Statistics Canada\u2019s overall numbers for British Columbia but its totals for Canada as a whole, raising serious doubts over the validity of the agency\u2019s count. More representative numbers are available from the Discharge Abstract Database<\/a> (DAD) of the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI); it uses hospital financial data to code services provided to nonresidents (\u201cother country resident self-pay\u201d), which covers birth tourism. Refugee claimants and permanent residents who are within the three-month waiting period for coverage are coded separately. However, births to other temporary residents (such as corporate transferees and international students) and Canadian expatriates returning to give birth are also included in the data for nonresidents. This means that the DAD totals are slightly higher than for birth tourism alone.
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