Personal I want to apply for citizenship ASAP because I worry that Liberal Party will lose election and Conservative may change citizenship law again to enforce 4 years out of 6 years in Canada. If that happen, it could make me wait 2 more years.
I didn't travel a lot, I was pretty sure I logged all my travels, and I was 100% confident that I could sign my application just at 1095 days.
Then I find this forum and see many people miscalculated and forgot one trip. I was thinking, how could I make such mistakes, until I found that, I did miss one trip.
I did log all my international travel in a spreadsheet and I tried to put travel log after I came back. However, I just missed one trip to US, somehow, and I cannot figure out how I miss that one.
If I have not found this forum, I would not have double checked my spreadsheet and my air tickets, probably I would sign my application at the beginning of next month May 2024 and I would not realize I miss that trip until IRCC find out.
Now I think I should sign my application in the middle of May to be safe.
Margin, Margin, Margin.
Sure, many here think an extra week to ten days is enough. But more and more it is clear that no matter how many are successful
cutting-it-close,
it is just plain foolish to not wait at least an EXTRA MONTH, and for many applicants, more than that.
Applying for citizenship is NOT like baking, where the recipe calls for a teaspoon, which means a teaspoon and a half is too much.
Applying for citizenship is more like preparing evidence to go to trial: preparing just enough evidence to meet the burden of proof is very likely to not be enough. The more evidence, the stronger the case. And especially more
BETTER evidence will help to make a stronger case, and more days in Canada is better evidence. A good margin over the minimum physical presence, and I do not mean just a week, allows the total stranger bureaucrats to do their job a whole lot easier and typically faster, the job they
MUST do in evaluating the evidence of presence.
Sure, meeting the requirement (1095 days within five years) should mean the application succeeds.
EVENTUALLY. Eventually with some risk otherwise if IRCC sees any reason to question the applicant's actual presence in-between known date of entry and next reported date of exit.
Way too many rely way too much on the inference of presence in-between a known date of entry into Canada and the next known date of exit. Yes, this inference is almost always made, at least if ALL the other evidence and indicators are totally consistent with and support that inference. But the bigger the margin over the minimum, the less IRCC officials will need to examine and assess the evidence of physical presence in-between entry and exit dates in order to rely on that inference.
Make no mistake, travel history is NOT direct evidence of presence in Canada except for the date of entry and the date of exit. Absent evidence and information that constitutes evidence of presence in-between dates of entry and exit, travel history will NOT be enough. This is why to even make a complete application the applicant must provide information about address and employment history for the full five year eligibility period, with NO gaps.
Thus, for example, if the applicant made twenty trips outside Canada during their five year eligibility period, and reports all those trips accurately, and that is verified by the CBSA travel history, that is direct proof of just 40 days physical presence in Canada. Way short of proof of 1095 days.
BTW, just curious, do you think if Liberal loses and Conservative take the administration, will government change presence requirement to 1460 days again?
That is a hard call to make, but as others have pointed out
doing so takes time. YEARS. Even if there is an election fairly soon, and amending the grant citizenship rules is a priority for the new government, it is not likely any major changes to the grant citizenship requirements would take effect before sometime in
2026, let alone 2025. At the soonest.
Even when the Harper Conservative government had a solid majority government and the need to overhaul the grant citizenship requirements had been a salient issue (previous
*residency* requirement alone had been a big problem for over a decade, with persistent and very loud demands for it to be amended), and Harper was overtly aggressive in pushing through its proposed Bill C-24
Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act (SCCA) (cutting short debate just one example), it took them
YEARS to even table that legislation, which they did in
February 2014, not resulting in the change to a physical presence requirement and the 4/6 rule (no credit for any pre-PR time) until June 2015 (although the Bill itself was adopted and given Royal Assent by June 2014).
Similarly, despite some of the more draconian elements in the changes to the Citizenship Act included in Harper's
SCCA being among the major election issues in the 2015 election, Trudeau vowing to roll back some of those changes including the 4/6 presence rule, despite wasting little time in tabling Bill C-6 (in the 42nd Parliament) by February 2016, that Bill did not get adopted and Royal Assent until June 2017, and the newly elected majority Liberal government's changes to the physical presence requirement, implementing the current 3/5 rule, did not take effect until October 2017.
Will a Conservative government even try?
This too is a hard call to make. Virtually NO CHANCE at all unless the election results in a majority conservative government. Odds are a newly elected Conservative government is likely to be a minority, not a majority government.
But even beyond that, while there have been various minor amendments many times, basically tweaking the system, actually Canadian citizenship law has been very stable for more than four decades. Only twice in the last forty years has the government made major changes. Harper's changes in 2014 (with the 4/6 rule taking effect in 2015), which as previously noted came after more than a decade of loud and vehement demands for major changes (biggest problem was totally inconsistent standards for determining if the applicant met the residency requirement, with different Federal Court justices applying different interpretations of the law). Then Trudeau's changes in reaction to what the majority of Canadians believed was Harper's overly strict revisions. That's it.
That is, beyond tweaking the law some, the law governing grant citizenship tends to be long-term, stable in Canada.
I am not at all good at forecasting political events, but it sure looks like the odds are high the current physical presence requirement will remain the law for some time to come.
IN CONTRAST . . . a Conservative government is, however, far more likely to implement policies and practices that are far more strict, including more extensive and probing investigation. It is probably worth remembering that for a time under the Harper government that ONE in FOUR citizenship applicants were subject to full blown RQ, and not only did that dramatically increase processing timelines for those directly affected, but it slowed the whole process down for everyone. No doubt it severely punished way, way, way more genuinely qualified applicants than it caught those gaming the system.
EDIT to ADD:
I am not sure to what extent it is still a big issue for the Conservatives, but the extent to which it appears people are
passport-shopping, or
applying-for-citizenship-on-the-way-to-the-airport, has been a pet peeve on that side of the aisle for a long time. Trudeau's government immediately ceased enforcing (and as of October 2017 fully repealed) a provision in Harper's
SCCA that gave CIC (before name change to IRCC) the power to deny a citizenship application if the applicant was living outside Canada after applying. That is perhaps one aspect of the grant citizenship law a Conservative government might be more motivated to change.
Moreover, for those who do relocate outside Canada after applying for citizenship, probably no stretch to anticipate a Conservative government would likely approach such cases more aggressively, increasing scrutiny, and causing such applicants to have a much longer processing timeline.
