On New Year’s Day, relate The Press“Jean-François Munier experienced an incredible situation when Air Canada refused him boarding to return to [Canada], at the airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. The reason: his permanent residence card had expired.”
After seeing his 4-year-old son and his mother leave without him, Jean-François Munier took a flight to Plattsburgh, Vermont, and from there, in the middle of winter, he crossed the Canadian border on foot by the Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle substation, in Quebec. “The customs officers at Lacolle were really amazed because I’ve been waiting for three years. There were several of them looking at my file without understanding why I had not [encore] my citizenship.”
“My passport expires in September”
His application, explains the Quebec daily, has been in the background check stage since June 2019. Yet, says the 34-year-old Frenchman, immigration authorities have never asked him to provide more documentation and his appeals to the ministry remained unanswered.
This father is worried about his status:
“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’.”
According to data from the Department of Immigration, the number of people to whom Canada grants citizenship hovered between 20,000 and 25,000 per month in 2019. But the pandemic cut this figure by half in 2020, before resuming a normal pace towards the end of 2021, notably with the introduction of virtual citizenship ceremonies. At the current rate, calculate The Press, the department will process approximately 208,000 citizenship applications this year.
In Quebec, 27 months to process an application
The newspaper reports that the average processing time for a citizenship application is twenty-seven months in Quebec and twenty-six months elsewhere. Surprisingly, the publication adds, the department is currently processing filed cases”almost a year after Jean-François Munier’s request”an iniquity “which has already been publicly denounced regarding applications for permanent residence”.
Joined by The Press, a spokeswoman for the Department of Immigration, Béatrice Fenelon, explains that several factors can vary the processing time of an application, including “the type of request submitted, its complexity, the speed of response from applicants and the ease of verifying the information provided”.
Toronto radio CityNews reports that the ministry “recently received an injection of [61 millions d’euros] for 2022-2023 to reduce processing times in the main areas affected by the pandemic”. With the result that he now invites between 3,500 and 5,000 candidates to virtual swearing-in ceremonies every week.