Citizenship Processing – Improvement

In anticipation of the tabling of the revisions to The Citizenship Act tomorrow, some significant improvements in number of applications processed this January:

Investments announced in Economic Action Plan 2013 have helped make the system more efficient and strengthened the integrity of Canada’s citizenship program. The immense popularity of Canadian citizenship, though, has hampered efforts to tackle long processing times.

The government will take additional steps in the coming days to reduce backlogs while further strengthening the value of Canadian citizenship. As announced in the October 2013 Speech from the Throne, these measures – taken together – will form the first comprehensive reforms to the Citizenship Act in more than a generation.

While welcome, understates just how bad both 2012 and 2013 were: 113,111 and 128,94 compared to the previous years which varied between 143,595 and 199,866. However, the trend line is improving, thanks to the temporary funding increase that should largely eliminate the backlog and improve processing times by 2015.

The longer term issue is to ensure a business process and ongoing funding that prevents future backlogs from emerging. CIC has traditionally underfunded citizenship (under current business processes), waiting until the backlog increases to unacceptable levels, and then finding temporary funding to address the backlog.

And citizenship applications, as they come from permanent residents, generally do not fluctuate that much year-to-year, and thus are easier to predict, and manage, than previous immigration regimes, where demand was always greater than CIC’s ability to manage (recent changes to Canadian immigration policy have a large “demand management” aspect).

News Release — Welcoming new Canadians.