Grant of Canadian Citizenship | A mountain of files waiting

Dramatic delays accumulated by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) during the pandemic are disrupting the lives of thousands of permanent residents awaiting Canadian citizenship.

Lila Dussault
The Press

Jean-François Munier, of French origin, has been waiting for an answer to his citizenship application since December 2018. This is the last step to becoming Canadian and having the same privileges as the rest of the population, such as the right to vote and the passport.

The backlog of citizenship files in Canada is monumental: 405,189 applications as of March 16, 2022, according to data provided by IRCC. It’s hard to see how this number could decrease when, for the whole of 2021, IRCC processed 203,000 applications, and 80,000 in 2020, according to Béatrice Fenelon, of IRCC’s communications service. In comparison, for the year 2019-2020, IRCC received 216,800 new citizenship applications, and more than 217,000 the previous year.

The expectation of citizenship has concrete consequences for thousands of immigrants. On New Year’s Day, Jean-François Munier experienced an incredible situation when Air Canada refused him boarding to return home, at Honolulu airport in Hawaii. The reason: his permanent residence card had expired. Mr. Munier believed that his permanent resident status and his French passport were sufficient for travel. He had to watch his 4-year-old son, accompanied by his mother, leave without him.

To return to Quebec, the 34-year-old man resigned himself to taking the plane to Plattsburgh, in the United States, before returning on foot by the border of Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, in Montérégie. In the middle of winter.

As of June 2019, his citizenship application has been stuck at the background check stage (then considered complete). In February 2021, this verification officially became “in progress” again. His file is simple, however, he says, and IRCC has never asked him to provide more documents. His numerous appeals to the Ministry went unanswered.

The experience shook the resident of Magog, in Estrie, who has invested heavily in Quebec and started a family here. “My French passport expires in September. At the French consulate, it’s complicated to do it again, because it’s not considered an emergency. In the end, I [risque] to be ‘without a fixed country’”, he laments.

Accumulated delays

The pandemic has certainly disrupted the work of IRCC officers. The in-person granting of Canadian citizenship declined dramatically as of March 2020. In 2019, nearly 21,000 people per month became Canadian citizens during face-to-face ceremonies. This figure more than halved in 2020 and did not rise again until the end of 2021.

However, the Ministry began to organize virtual citizenship ceremonies in April 2020, specifies Béatrice Fenelon. According to data provided by IRCC, more than 177,000 people took the oath of citizenship online between April 2020 and December 2021. Currently, “the Department invites approximately 3,500 to 5,000 applicants per week to participate in citizenship ceremonies “says M.^me Fenelon.

However, the cruising speed for processing applications for Canadian citizenship does not seem to accelerate significantly in 2022. Indeed, from 1^er January to March 16, IRCC’s backlog of files fell by almost 43,000. According to our calculations, at this rate, the Department will get through just over 208,000 citizenship applications in 2022.

The number of cases is the highest in Ontario, with 187,173 people waiting. Quebec comes in second place, with 76,236 files.

To overcome what seems like an impassable mountain, the Government of Canada announced on January 31 that it was injecting an additional $85 million into IRCC in 2022-2023.

Disparity of treatment

The average processing time for a citizenship application is 27 months in Quebec, and 26 months elsewhere in Canada. IRCC is currently working on the files submitted from November 17 to 23, 2019, according to its website, almost a year after Jean-François Munier’s request.

However, on the Facebook group entitled Francophones in Canada/Canadian Citizenship, The Press found that many applications filed in 2020, and even 2021, were also on their way to completion. This inequity is similar to that which has already been publicly denounced regarding applications for permanent residence.

A number of factors can affect the processing time of an application, explains Béatrice Fenelon of IRCC, in response to the request for information from The Press. For example, the type of request submitted, its complexity, the speed of response from requesters and the ease of verifying the information provided.