Press & Media

TORONTO, September 16, 2026. In December 2018, Canadian newsrooms carried the story of a Toronto father stuck in Kenya with twin daughters the government would not recognize as citizens. Joseph Tito had been born outside Canada to a Canadian mother, and under the first-generation limit in the Citizenship Act, citizenship by descent stopped with him. His daughters, born through surrogacy in Mombasa, had no claim to it. Kenya would not claim them either. For three weeks, on paper, two newborns belonged to no country.

A video Tito posted asking for help was shared across the country. Within hours, strangers were emailing the High Commission and calling their MPs. The family landed at Pearson in January 2019 to a scrum of cameras.

The Ontario Superior Court struck the first-generation limit down in December 2023. On December 15, 2025, Bill C-3 replaced it: a Canadian parent can now pass citizenship to a child born abroad if they can show a substantial connection to Canada.

The Dad Diaries is the account of everything the headlines did not have room for. It begins years before Kenya, with a niece asking, “Why don’t you have kids?”, and a globe-trotting television producer with no answer. It follows Tito through coming out in an Italian-Canadian family in Richmond Hill and the four years his father did not speak to him, ten years in Italy, the death of his partner at 44, and the decision at 37 to become a father alone. It covers five embryo transfers at a clinic in Mombasa, a breakup in the middle of them, a best friend who flew in and posed as his wife to get through the paperwork, and then the return: two infants, his parents’ basement, and his father building cribs upstairs.

“The headlines had two babies and a roadblock,” Tito says. “The book has the five years before it and the seven years since. The rule that stranded us doesn’t exist anymore. I wrote this so my daughters would have the other version.”

The book closes with a note on Bill C-3 and what it changes for Canadians by descent with children born abroad.

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.