For 44-year-old Lisa Forman, a long delay in getting her citizenship is “deflating.”
The university professor originally from South Africa never expected that getting her Canadian citizenship would turn out to be such an arduous affair.
Forman sent in her citizenship application in 2012 and got a letter advising her to take her citizenship test in December 2013. After writing the test, she was told she had miscalculated the date of her residency and would have to do a residency questionnaire. Now, it’s a year later and there’s still no word on her citizenship.
“It was a tremendous eye-opener to me to discover this is something that happens … if there is a technical error or a residency question, people get sidelined on to this path,” Forman says.
She’s not alone: hundreds of thousands of people are waiting to see their citizenship applications finalized, though the backlog is shrinking.
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In 2013, the backlog for citizenship applications stood at 396,227, according to information on Citizenship and Immigration’s website. For the first six months of 2014 that backlog was 294,762, according to CIC, down from 301,758 for the same time last year.
Backlogs have been an ongoing problem since May 2012, when the Conservative government introduced a rigorous questionnaire meant to crack down on what it described as “citizenship fraud.” But many say the questionnaire made things worse, creating problems where there were none.
More changes were introduced to the Citizenship Act earlier this year, with Minister of Immigration Chris Alexander saying they would help reduce the backlog in citizenship applications. The series of substantial changes to the act included a longer residency requirement; an expanded age range for applicants required to take a language test (now age 14 to 64); and a streamlined processing procedure that went from three steps to one-step assessments, with citizenship officers making the decisions in most cases rather than citizenship judges.
Despite continuing complaints from applicants caught up in the system and from opposition politicians and advocates, Alexander maintains the changes will reduce the backlog.
“Our government’s recent changes to the Citizenship Act mean deserving new citizens are welcomed to the Canadian family more quickly,” Alexander wrote in an email to the Star. “Because of our efforts, backlogs are reduced, processing times are improved and more new Canadians are forming a stronger connection to our country.”
Some 50,000 people have become Canadian citizens since the new act came into effect on Aug. 1, 2014 — an increase of 172 per cent from the same period last year, according to Kevin Menard, a spokesman for the minister. In total more than 260,000 people have become new citizens this year.
In late December, Citizenship and Immigration said that since streamlining the process of citizenship earlier this year more than 115,000 people have become Canadian citizens — a 90 per cent increase from the same period last year. The citizenship backlog has been reduced by 17 per cent since June and is at its lowest level in three years. And the government claims it is on track to eliminate the backlog and reduce processing times to less than one year sometime in the next fiscal year.
However, the long delays to obtain citizenship have angered politicians and newcomers alike. According to Liberal Immigration Critic John McCallum, who represents Markham-Unionville, and Peggy Nash, the NDP MP for Parkdale-High Park, complaints about citizenship applications make up a lot of the work local MPs face in their constituency offices.
“We’ve never heard of this issue before,” said McCallum, who blamed the delays on what he describes as the Conservative Party’s belief that all newcomers are “criminals,” as well as insufficient resources to meet demand.
McCallum said the changes to the Citizenship Act this summer actually increase barriers to citizenship.
“You have to declare your intent to reside in Canada,” McCallum said. “You have to pass English tests even if you’re over 55. If you’re a student, you don’t get credit. You used to get credit for time spent (in Canada) as a student. Now, there are all these barriers and impediments.”
Coupled with those changes is the fact the citizenship and language tests have become more difficult, said McCallum. “They (the Conservative Party) have this nonsensical idea that the harder it is to become a citizen the more valuable it (citizenship) is.”
Nash blames the residency questionnaire for creating lengthy citizenship wait times. About 12 per cent of the case load she and her staff handled last year at the constituency level had to do with citizenship application delays.
“If they’ve had to fill out a residency questionnaire, that stuff flags them as non-routine applications and that can further delay their citizenship application,” she said. “They may have been there for the required time, but anything that triggers a question about residency and they have to fill out the questionnaire and they get flagged.”
Neither Alexander’s promises nor McCallum and Nash’s analysis eases Forman’s mind.
“I’ve been in Canada for 12 years,” says Forman, who came here to do a master’s program at the University of Toronto’s law school.
She went on to do a doctorate at the same university and then a post-doc before she was employed at U of T, where she is the Lupina assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, as well as director of the comparative program on health and society at the Munk School of Global Affairs.
“I’ve been paying taxes, contributing to society . . . It made me feel unwelcome.”
Last time she checked, she was told there was a delay of 36 months from the date of submission of her application. That means the process could take another year. And the residency questionnaire could further delay the process.
“I’m really hopeful there will be some remediation of this, that there’s going to be some effort to resolve not just the backlog, but that people are continually put on this path. I’m being treated as a potentially fraudulent claimant.”
And she’s frustrated by her lack of citizenship.
“It means I can’t vote, and it’s a big uncertainty about my future in this country,” she says. “It’s something that takes away my ability to truly participate in Canadian life. I’d like to be able to vote in municipal, provincial and federal elections, and I can’t.”
Aric Zhang, a 30-year-old hydro engineer for Brookfield Renewable Power in Ottawa, is also caught up in the citizenship backlog. And he can’t figure out why, or what’s taking so long.
“It’s annoying,” he says. “I’ve lived here for the past 12 and a half years without leaving the country. I’ve lived here since I filed my application, and because their process is so un-transparent, I don’t know what went wrong. Everything they’ve asked for I’ve provided.”
Zhang came to Canada from China as a student. He studied engineering at the University of Alberta and then did an honours degree in engineering at McGill University. He became a permanent resident in 2008 and applied for his citizenship in May 2011. A year after he took his citizenship test, he, too, was sent a residency questionnaire. He filled that in and sent it back in May 2013. Just recently he was sent a fingerprint request.
“I never received any explanation, regardless of how much I proved I lived here — with credit cards, phone bills, university transcripts, bank statements, tax returns,” he says. “It makes me feel a little frustrated. It’s like a black box you’re dealing with. There’s nothing I can do about it. I feel loss. If I did something wrong, tell me. You might have misunderstood my application — just tell me. I’ll follow up.”
But Zhang hasn’t heard anything. So he waits.