Term: Country of Citizenship
Glossary Definition
Last Updated: 2025-07-21
Definition:
A country that the individual is a national (e.g., passport holder). Citizenship or nationality is the status by which an individual has full rights and responsibilities in a country, either as a result of being born there or by having acquired it through the legal immigration and citizenship process (i.e., naturalisation or kinship ties). International migrants who became naturalised and did not give up their former citizenship are said to have ‘dual citizenship’ and frequently hold two passports.
Country of citizenship is a variable that can be found in both the
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Registry Database
Permanent Resident data files, but the variable name is different in each file, as follows:
|
IRCC File Name
|
Variable Name in 2023 & later versions
|
Variable Name in 2019 version
|
|
LEGACY LANDING |
COUNTRY_OF_CITIZENSHIP_CD |
COUNTRY_OF_CITIZENSHIP_CD |
|
LANDING |
COC_ID |
COUNTRY_OF_CITIZENSHIP |
Note: in the 2023 and later versions of the data, these variables are also available in the Temporary Resident data files for both time periods. The legacy time period also provides the country name as a string, but using the code enables conversion using the SCCAI_country_name, SCCAI_macro_region, and SCCAI_sub_region formats.
CAUTION:
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Country of citizenship denotes the country where an individual holds citizenship status and labelling of race, culture or ethnicity should not be used or inferred without a strong rationale.
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As with most numeric codes used in the LEGACY LANDING and LANDING files, the codes used in each file have different values and have their own unique formats to convert codes to country names.
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While the LEGACY LANDING variable name is the same in the 2019 and 2023 versions, the type changed from numeric to character in 2023.
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