My point is the 4 year police record made sense under 3/4 rule (max requirement) and 4/6 rule (min requirement). Why change 4 year under 4/6 when it covered, at least, the minimum. There is some form of relationship of 4 years to 3/4 and 4/6. Now with 3/5, 4 years is neither min or max. Actually it makes more sense to change it to 5 years to cover the max period.
The prohibitions period is
independent of the residency or presence qualifying period. Period.
In particular: "
My point is the 4 year police record made sense under 3/4 rule (max requirement) . . . "
Except there was no such thing. This is related to
NOTHING. This has nothing to do with any Canadian citizenship requirement or application at any time. You just make this stuff up.
There was
NO police record or police certificate requirement under the pre-Bill C-24 citizenship qualification rule. No such requirement under the old 3/4 residency rules.
The reason why is simple, there was
no prohibition for foreign convictions prior to Bill C-24 changes to the
Citizenship Act. In contrast,
Section 22(3) of the Citizenship Act was ADDED as part of Bill C-24. This provision came into force May, 2015, and the item in the application regarding police certificates was not added to the application until the June 2015 version. Police certificate requirements for citizenship applicants
did NOT exist prior to that.
Bottom-line, there was no prohibition for criminal convictions outside Canada
, for any period of time, until
Section 22(3) of the Citizenship Act was ADDED as part of Bill C-24, and correspondingly there were NO requirements for submitting a police certificate under the 3/4 residency requirements.
In the meantime, there is no get out of jail free card for anyone who has a conviction within the preceding four years. Even if they spent less than 183 days total in the country where they were convicted of an offence in the preceding four years. In contrast to lots of unfounded, hyperbolic fear-mongering about the government revoking someone's citizenship for misrepresentation, failing to disclose a prohibition is indeed actually one of those things which, if discovered, the Canadian government has prosecuted for misrepresentation, and it is highly likely will continue to prosecute for misrepresentation.
And the thing is, records of these things tend to be well-kept by most countries in the world (not all, but most), and there are all sorts of ways in which the Canadian government can be made aware of an individual's foreign record. This is a real reason for which Canada can and will revoke citizenship. (Only residency fraud, and concealment of serious crimes like war crimes before becoming a PR in Canada, are pursued more zealously than misrepresentations related to the prohibitions.)
But sure, except for the most obvious scenarios (conviction in country where one spent six months consecutively, conviction in the U.S.), applicants willing to make misrepresentations about prohibitions, not disclosing charges or convictions in foreign countries, it is very easy to skirt the police certificate requirements by checking "no" to the 183 days total in a particular country during the preceding four years and fudging information about the destination country in the presence calculation, and the odds are very high that the processing agent going through the presence calculation and the applicant's passport stamps will not notice. Easy to slide by -- slide by the police certificate requirement that is. But also easy to get caught, not for the misrepresentation in checking "no" about 183 or more days in another country (and correspondingly dodging including a police certificate), but easy to get caught on the misrepresentation about no prohibitions, no convictions in another country. Either while the application is in process (since at the least the CSIS clearance checks INTERPOL records among other resources) or sometime in the future, anytime in the future . . . remembering, again, this is one of those kinds of misrepresentation which Canada will actually prosecute.
As for those whose objective is to avoid the inconvenience of submitting a police certificate (rather than to conceal a foreign conviction), hard to be any more stupid than to make misrepresentations (which is itself criminal, which can lead to being denied citizenship and a five year ban on applying for citizenship, or which forever could lead to revocation of citizenship) just to avoid the inconvenience of obtaining a police certificate.
In the meantime, there are
NO changes pending for Section 22(3) of the Citizenship Act, none tabled, none being proposed or even discussed. The applicable prohibitions period of time, for foreign convictions, is four years and there is no prospect that will be changing in the near future.
In this regard, IRCC
cannot change this period of time. It is prescribed by statute. Only Parliament, with the approval of the Senate and Royal Assent, can change this, and that would require going through the whole legislative process for revising statutory provisions. Any such changes are simply NOT on the horizon.
