IRCC reveals new citizenship targets through its memo, with a target of 300 000 people in 2022. A division of the IRCC department known as the Operations, Planning, and Performance drafted the new memo to present to a senior officer. This memo suggests that IRCC must process at least 285,000 decisions and welcome at least 300,000 citizens by March 31, 2023. An application decision implies its review, and this application receives approval, rejection, or not complete. Therefore, with the citizenship target of 300,000 individuals, the same number of people will take the citizenship oath virtually or physically.
In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, the citizenship level accounted for 253,000 applications, and the current target is a drastic increase, even more than the fiscal year 2021-2022.
In 2021-2022, IRCC successfully welcomed 217,000 new citizens. According to the fiscal year data of 2022-2023, the department fulfilled a target of 116,000 new citizens. Besides this, it is still on the right track to achieve its target further. However, comparing the data in 2021, during the same time, it welcomed 35,000 individuals.
The IRCC memo even elaborates on its current difficulties regarding processing applications. It even aims to convert positive decisions into Canadian citizens within a standard timeframe.
IRCC discontinuing paper applications
IRCC initially found it difficult to process applications in March 2020 due to the rising situation of the pandemic. Moreover, the department could only continue processing the paper applications they received via mail. Any events where the person had to mark his physical presence got canceled. For instance, IRCC couldn’t even conduct the interviews and even the oath of citizenship ceremonies. These restrictions shifted the entire process to a digitalized one.
The digital process is further extended to those above the age of 18 years. This initiative proved beneficial for the new applicants. However, it created a mess for the older ones with a heavy backlog of applications.
The new memo recommends that IRCC continue processing the older applications while also taking the time to process a small portion of new applications. Hence, this will reduce backlog growth to a greater extent.
IRCC reveals new citizenship targets
In 2021, IRCC targeted only 5,000 digital applications, while the total decisions accounted for 245,000. Currently, a greater number of applications are online. Therefore, the fiscal year 2022-2023 will have to increase the number of online applications for processing significantly.
Expected processing time
Per a report released in May, the processing time for online applications stood at 27 months. However, the memo justified the processing time due to increased online applications and the already remaining paper applications. According to the data in June, 413,000 applications existed in the inventory. However, IRCC did take a few initiatives to reduce the backlog and process the new applications, at least 80 percent of them, within the fixed standard. The department hired more than 1,000 new staff members. Additionally, it seeks to provide access to more representatives for tracking the citizenship application status. Even minors under 18 years will have the chance to apply for citizenship digitally toward the latter part of this year.
