Minister Alexander highlights success of Canadian citizenship program: 100,000 new citizens

On track, the additional funding is working:

Today, at a citizenship ceremony in Scarborough, Canada’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister, Chris Alexander, announced that Canada welcomed the 100,000th new citizen of 2014 last week. The number of new citizens sworn in to date in 2014 is more than double the number of new citizens admitted by this time last year.

The 100,000 new citizens, who came to Canada from more than 200 countries, were welcomed at more than 1,080 citizenship ceremonies held across the country. The citizenship ceremony is the last step before becoming a Canadian citizen and embracing the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship. This success demonstrates that changes and improvements are already doing more to help people realize their dream of becoming Canadian.

The government’s proposed changes in Bill C-24, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, will further reduce wait times by streamlining the decision-making process for citizenship. It is expected that those changes will bring the average processing time for citizenship applications down to under one year and that the current backlog will be reduced by more than 80 percent by 2015-2016.

Still, in addition to legitimate ad hoc press releases, a commitment for regular and timely release of operational statistics as in Australia would help bind the current and future governments to better and sustainable management of the citizenship program (but I am a broken record on this!)

Minister Alexander highlights success of Canadian citizenship program – Canada News Centre.