Press & Media

TORONTO, ON, September 15, 2026. Weeks after his twin daughters were born in Mombasa in November 2018, Joseph Tito stood outside the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi with his mother and two newborns and was told they were not Canadian. He had been born abroad himself, and under the citizenship rules of the day that made his girls, born through surrogacy in Mombasa, ineligible to come home with him. The suggestion from the consulate was that he sponsor them as immigrants. That could take a year.

What happened next made national news. Tito, a television producer who had spent years running his own production company in Bahrain, posted a video from Kenya asking for help. Within hours, strangers were emailing the embassy and calling their MPs. News outlets across Canada picked up the story of the father and the twins who could not get home. When they finally landed at Toronto Pearson, there was a scrum of cameras waiting.

The headlines ended there. The book does not.

The Dad Diaries: Because Real Risks Are Worth Taking (Cormorant Books, September 26, 2026) is the memoir behind the story, and the story is bigger than Kenya. It begins with a gay Italian-Canadian kid from Richmond Hill who built exactly the life he thought he wanted: a production company in Bahrain, shoots in Istanbul, a condo on the 28th floor over the Persian Gulf, and no one to answer to. It follows the death of the man he spent ten years with, a question from his niece he could not shake ("Why don't you have kids?"), and the decision, at 37, to try for a child through a fertility clinic in Kenya. Five embryo transfers between December 2016 and March 2018. A relationship that did not survive them. A best friend who flew in and posed as his wife to get through the paperwork. And then two daughters, a redacted birth certificate, and a government that did not recognise them.

Then the part no headline covered: moving into his parents' basement in Richmond Hill with two infants, the postpartum year, the silence from his father, and what it took to become the father he had been so certain he would be.

"Getting the girls home was supposed to be the ending," says Tito. "It turned out to be the setup. Everything I was sure of about myself got taken apart in my parents' basement by two babies who did not care about any of it. That is the book. The headlines were the easy part."

The timing is not incidental. The citizenship rule that stranded the Tito family, the first-generation limit on citizenship by descent, was declared unconstitutional by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in December 2023, and Parliament's fix, Bill C-3, came into force on December 15, 2025. The book closes with a note on that law. "I do not pretend that our story alone changed the law," Tito writes. "But I know this: families like mine exposed the human cost of rules that had failed to keep up with the lives Canadians were actually living."

Written with the bite of someone who spent twenty years in television and the exhaustion of someone who now has twin seven-year-olds, The Dad Diaries is a memoir about wanting something for years before you can say it out loud, and about what it costs to trade the life you built for the one you actually wanted.

About the book: The Dad Diaries: Because Real Risks Are Worth Taking. Joseph Tito. Cormorant Books, September 26, 2026. Trade paperback, $24.95 CAD. ISBN 978-1-77086-829-8.