Ottawa hiking citizenship fees for second time in a year | various

Whenever governments have bad news to convey, they either cloak it up with good news, or try to bury it before a long weekend or holiday.

In this case, raising citizenship fees, the Government has done both: burying the announcement in a press release announce success in addressing the backlog (some 260,000) new Canadian citizens, and issuing the press release just before Christmas.

One has to ask whether this further increase was already planned but, for a political management perspective, the Government decided better to increase fees in a two-step process.

Or was it simply incompetence in that the earlier calculations of citizenship processing costs underestimated the true costs, and over-estimated the savings from the revisions to the Citizenship Act?

My normal preference is to assume incompetence (having seen it in myself) rather than more Machiavellian interpretations.

But in any case, the increase makes Canada significantly more expensive than Australia ($AU 300 or CAD $282). Moreover, comparison to the USA ignores the fact that the US Citizenship and Immigration Service retains any fees for operations (hence the Republican frustration with President Obama’s immigration initiative as they have no funding levers available to counter them), whereas in Canada the $60 million the increase generates would normally go to the consolidated revenue fund and not to CIC to cover additional costs).

More substantively, this and other changes will continue to erode the Canadian model of immigration as a pathway to citizenship. As indicated in the StatsCan chart above, the 85.6 percent naturalization rate trumpeted by many a CIC Minister only applies to previous waves of immigration, with more recent waves having much lower rates (37 percent).

An area of concern and one to monitor, given that it moves us towards more disenfranchised residents who cannot participate in the political and democratic processes:

In February, Citizenship and Immigration Canada already increased the fee from $100 to $300 in order to recover its administrative costs. The upcoming raise means it will now cost applicants five times the money for their citizenship applications within a year. Successful candidates must also pay another $100 rights of citizenship fee to become citizens.

Officials said the fee changes are necessary to pay for the more stringent citizenship process introduced by the government to clear a backlog it created with the “residence questionnaire,” which is used to scrutinize if applicants have physically spent enough time in Canada to qualify for citizenship.

In August, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander also announced a new streamlined decision-making process to cut the backlog, which has since been reduced by 17 per cent. In total, Canada welcomed more than 260,000 new citizens this year.

“With a record number of new Canadians this year, it is clear that our government’s changes to the Citizenship Act are having a real impact,” Alexander said in a statement.

“We are fulfilling our commitment to reducing backlogs and improving processing times.”

Based on citizenship projections from 2014, the fee raise could bring in an additional $60 million to the federal coffers in 2015.

Hard not to think of this as more of a “cash grab,” given that the changes were partially sold on efficiency grounds and that CIC received an influx of $44 million in Budget 2013 to address the backlog.

Ottawa hiking citizenship fees for second time in a year | Toronto Star.

Record number of new citizens welcomed in 2014

Graphic – Changes to Canada’s Citizenship Fees: A Comparative View – Relieving the Burden on Canadian Taxpayers (6 February 2014 press backgrounder).

And the latest article complaining about citizenship processing times:

Want-to-be Canadians frustrated by citizenship processing delays

And the public statement regarding the results of CIC’s analysis of the further increase:

In its analysis, the department said the fee jump may impose additional financial pressures on some people or families.

“While the analysis assumes that there will not be a reduction in overall demand for citizenship as a result of the fee increase, it is acknowledged that some may be required to delay their application as they will need more time to save for the new fee,” the analysis says.

“Overall, in the long-term, this will likely not have a significant impact on the uptake for citizenship.”

No acknowledgement that naturalization rates have dropped from the public – and obsolete – 85.6 percent rate often quoted.

And it would be interesting to see the assumptions behind the analysis that this will not reduce overall demand for citizenship.

Conservatives Hike Citizenship Fees.. Again