Recently, the internal memorandum of the Canadian Immigration Department leaked, outlines the target of the number of new citizens that Canada will welcome in the 2022-2023 fiscal year .
The memorandum recommends that IRCC handle a total of 285,000 decisions and 300,000 new citizens by March 31, 2023. Approved, rejected or marked as incomplete upon review, citizenship targets mean that 300,000 approved applicants must swear citizenship in person or virtually.
This is a significant increase over the fiscal year 2021-2022 and even surpasses the pre-pandemic targets for 2019-2020, when 253,000 citizen applications were processed.
2021-2022, IRCC successfully received 217,000 new citizens. So far, Canada has welcomed 116,000 new citizens in fiscal 2022-2023 and is expected to achieve its goals. By comparison, in the same period of 2021, only 35,000 people were sworn in.
IRCC no longer uses paper applications
In March 2020, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, IRCC was unable to process most applications. This is because the department can only process paper applications for mailing. Since all in-person events were also cancelled, this means that the IRCC is unable to interview candidates and take oaths at citizenship ceremonies.
These restrictions result in a complete digitalization of the citizenship application process for some applicants starting from November 2020. This has been extended to all applicants over the age of 18. While this may simplify the process for new applicants, a large backlog of written applications remains.
The memorandum recommends that IRCC continue to adopt its current first-in-first-out system for all applications, which means continuing to focus on older paper applications while also making room for priority handling of a small number of digital applications to prevent backlogs.
In 2021, IRCC aims to complete 5,000 digital applications in this fiscal year out of 245,000 decisions. As more applications are now digital, the report says that the number of digital applications being processed needs to increase in fiscal 2022-2023.
processing time exceeds 20 months
In the subsequent report released in May, the processing time was 27 months. The memorandum said that in addition to the backlog of paper applications, the increase in online applications is expected. As of June last year, there were 413,000 applications on the grant list.
IRCC indicates that measures have been taken to clear the backlog and process 80% of all new applications within the scope of the service standard. To this end, more than 1,000 new employees have been hired and plans to expand access to the citizen application status tracker to deputies. In addition, minors under the age of 18 will be eligible to apply for citizenship online by the end of the year.
