A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer raises his hand as a group of 60 people take the oath of citizenship during a special Canada Day citizenship ceremony in Vancouver, B.C., on Sunday July 1, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
Photograph by: DARRYL DYCK , THE CANADIAN PRESS
I am one of the approximately 28,000 citizenship applicants per year whom Citizenship and Immigration Canada suspects of fraud. No one has told me what falsehoods I am suspected of, but I suspect the CIC may be concerned about my suspicious holiday trips to Maine to visit my aging parents with my young daughter, or our visit to my husband’s dying grandmother in the U.S. to introduce her to her only great-grandchild.
Like an increasing portion of qualified residents who apply for citizenship, I received one of Minister Kenney’s dreaded “anti-fraud” Residence Questionnaires. This means that the unspecified suspicions of an unspecified official will leave my citizenship in limbo for another four years, or indefinitely. There are no official processing time benchmarks and little parliamentary oversight for the 10-15 per cent of us who receive the RQ. We have fallen off the map.
Minister Kenney’s CIC is approving fewer citizenship applications than at any time in the last five years. So like tens of thousands of other Residence Questionnaire recipients, and the 319,517 citizenship applicants total caught in the CIC’s ballooning backlog, I will remain taxpaying interloper.
I do not begrudge the CIC their right or even obligation to issue me a Residence Questionnaire. What I object to is their administrative mismanagement demonstrated in their inability to process applications in anything approaching a reasonable timeline. Qualified residents deserve a fair and timely path to citizenship.
Canada has long enjoyed a reputation for good governance. Unfortunately it is not strengthened by an opaque, poorly executed and seemingly capricious citizenship process rife with unknown delays. Qualified, long-time residents deserve better. Canada deserves better.
Eileen Finn
Montreal
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