U.S. Senator Ted Cruz attends the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington in this May 3, 2014, file photo.Joshua Roberts/Reuters
Alberta-born Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas and a Tea Party favourite that many expect to run for U.S. president in 2016, is no longer a Canadian.
Senator Cruz had vowed to renounce his Canadian citizenship and has now paid the fees and received the official certificate signed by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander confirming he no longer owes any allegiance to the Queen.
Millions of Americans are dual nationals. Mr. Cruz was one of them. But the renunciation won't entirely end the debate on whether he can run for president. The Constitution requires that to be eligible to be president, a person must be 35 years old, a resident of the United States for at least 14 years, and a "natural born" citizen.
The last element – never formally defined – is the issue.
Senator Cruz insists he qualifies and most legal scholars agree.
"Nothing against Canada," Mr. Cruz said when first told he was also a Canadian citizen by virtue of being born in Calgary. "I'm an American by birth and as a U.S. senator, I believe I should be only an American," he added when the Dallas Morning News first raised the issue last year.
Mr. Cruz is hardly the first presidential candidate to face scrutiny over his birthplace, the citizenship of his parents and thus his eligibility for the Oval Office.
So-called birthers claimed Barack Obama wasn't eligible to be president because, they said, he wasn't born in Hawaii as he claimed but rather in Kenya, his father's homeland.
Finally in 2011, the president arranged to have his Hawaiian birth certificate made public. Even that didn't satisfy some hard-core birthers.
Mr. Obama now jokes about the lingering controversy. "You'll miss me when I'm gone," the president jibed to right-wing Fox News which gave much prominence to the birther campaign. "It'll be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya," he said.
But even if Mr. Obama had been born in Kenya his claim to U.S. citizenship would be exactly the same as the Texas senator's; the foreign-born son of a mother who was a U.S. citizen and a father who was not a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth.
Mr. Obama's father was Kenyan and a student studying in the United States. Mr. Cruz's father was Cuban, came to the United States in 1957 and was working for oil companies in Calgary as a consultant when Rafael Edward Cruz was born Dec 22, 1970.
The Cruz family returned to the United States when Ted was four.
When his dual citizenship was made public last summer, the senator quickly responded by saying he was unaware he was also a Canadian and would take steps to renounce it.
Detractors still delighted in dubbing him as "Canadian Ted" but the brouhaha never approached the levels surrounding Mr. Obama's citizenship status.
Other U.S. citizens born abroad have run for president.
Senator John McCain was born on a U.S. military base in Panama where his father was stationed. The younger McCain became a decorated naval aviator who was held prisoner in Vietnam for years. Mr. McCain was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008 and lost to Mr. Obama. Although a handful of critics claimed Mr. McCain wasn't "natural born" as is required by the Constitution, most legal scholars believe the wording only excludes those who weren't U.S. citizens from birth and only became citizens later by "naturalization."
Other presidential hopefuls born outside the United States include Michigan governor George Romney, who was born in Mexico and lost the Republican nomination to Richard Nixon in 1968, and Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in 1964 who lost to Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Questions about Mr. Goldwater's eligibility – also never tested in court – were based on the fact that he was born in 1909 in Arizona when it was not yet a state.
Earlier the 'natural born' question arose when Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., son of the four-times-elected Democratic president, was briefly considered as a possible presidential candidate. The younger Roosevelt had been born in New Brunswick, on the family's summer compound on Campobello Island.
If Mr. Cruz makes it to the White House, he may not be the first 'born-in-Canada' president.
Birther rumours and eligibility questions date back to the 19th century.
Chester Arthur, the 21st president was 'officially' born on 1829, in North Fairfield, Vermont. But his father was an itinerant pastor preaching on both sides of the border and some historians believe the future president was born in Bedford, Que., where his mother was living with her family.
President Arthur, a Republican, always denied he was born in Canada but if Mr. Cruz is right, it wouldn't have mattered.
Paul Koring reports from The Globe's Washington bureau.
This story has been corrected to show Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential race to Democrat Lyndon Johnson, not John Kennedy as was previously reported.