In Australia, you're ineligible to be a member of parliament if you're a citizen of another country. Which sounds like a good rule until you realize how easy it is to become a citizen of another country, with changes like these.
1I highly recommend giving something like this series of prompts to your favorite LLM, if you like exploring absurd geopolitical dramas:
In Australia, you're ineligible to be a member of parliament if you're a citizen of another country. What happens if some country passes a law that all Australian MPs are automatically citizens?
What if Monaco offered each MP $5 million to visit Monaco once and confirm their citizenship for a period of 5 years, with no other requirements?
Suppose that 15% of MPs take the payment and argue they should keep their seats. Monaco publicly announces that the payment was to cover the large travel cost between the nearly antipodal countries, and that many MPs conducted globally beneficial diplomacy and cultural exchange with them and EU countries as part of their trips. What action do AFP and ASIO take?
Suppose that no state action was found, but the payments were found to be linked to a billionaire Hong Kong businessman who covertly bought Monaco real estate in exchange for this scheme. His motive seems to be differentially removing corrupt officials from Australia, whose bureaucracy he felt once harmed his business interests. Obvious suspicion on the Chinese government, but nothing concrete is found. What happens next?
What about the requirement that the parent must have had "at least 1,095 days (three years) of cumulative physical presence in Canada"?
I'm in a somewhat similar position as a British citizen with an Irish grandparent - I'm entitled to dual citizenship. I got the passport even though I live in the UK - the option value of being able to easily move to the EU is valuable. Given recent developments in the USA, I would think that the option value of having a plan B is even higher.
Relatedly, anyone with a single grandparent who was an Irish citizen born on Irish soil can get Irish citizenship, so there's probably a good number of Americans who qualify. The application process was cheap and relatively easy. At the time it was slow - there was a long post-Brexit backlog - but that may have eased now.
I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, both of which had American parents. You don't normally suddenly become a citizen of another country! But with Bill C-3, anyone with any Canadian ancestry is now Canadian. [1]
In my case my mother's, mother's, father's mother's mother was Canadian. While that is really quite far back, there isn't a generational limit anymore.
Possibly you're also a Canadian citizen? Seems worth checking! With how much migration there has been between the US and Canada, and citizenship requiring only a single ancestor, this might mean ~5-10% of Americans are now additionally Canadian, which is kind of nuts.
I very much think of myself as an American, and am not interested in moving to Canada or even getting a passport. I am planning to apply for a Citizenship Certificate, though, since it seems better to have this fully documented. This means collecting the records to link each generation, including marital name changes, back to my thrice-great grandmother. It's been a fun project! I'm currently waiting to receive the Consular Report of Birth Abroad records for my mother and grandmother, since they were both born outside the US to American parents.
[1] This is slightly too strong. For example, it doesn't apply if you're born after 2025-12-15 (I'm guessing you weren't), and no one in the chain can have renounced their Canadian citizenship. But the caveats all exclude very few people.