85,000 people are stuck in backlog?
Are these numbers accurate? I read somewhere in this forum (according to someone's calculations) that it was in excess of 200,000.
I don't know which number to believe. Hopefully it isn't 200,000+.
Hey, I am the person in question; I was the individual who provided the 200k estimate.
The 85k statistic comes directly from the IRCC via Minister Mendicino. Naturally, I won't contest a primary source, especially one from such a high ranking officer at the IRCC. Nonetheless, I find the statistic to be somewhat curious.
You might wonder how I arrived at the estimate I provided? Fortunately, we are part of one of the most transparent democracies globally, and therefore, have open access to many government datasets. Here is a
link to the page containing the dataset in question, titled as follows: "
Source Countries (Country of Birth) - New Canadian Citizens (in Persons) by Month."
When you open this dataset, you'll notice that we are given the total number of Citizenships
granted for the years 2017, 2018, 2019 & 2020. I wish to emphasize on granted, i.e., this does not tell us how many applications have been submitted. To discern this, we will have to head to this
link and open the dataset titled as follows: "
[ARCHIVED] Citizenship Applications Overview."
In this dataset, you will find the historical percentage of Citizenship applications that were successfully granted for 2016 & 2017. Both years had a
98% approval rate. Unfortunately, I cannot access data for subsequent years. However, due to no drastic changes in the political climate between 2016 to 2020, I would argue it is reasonable to take this approval percentage as a given for the years beyond 2017.
What this essentially means is that practically all applications submitted get approved. Therefore, for estimation purposes, I take the number of Citizenships granted per year to be approximately equal to the number of Citizenship applications submitted per year. Of course, this number is a lower end estimation since we fail to account for applications on which a decision has not been declared. There are also other caveats, but for estimation purposes, this assumption is fairly reasonable since it only gives the lower estimate. Therefore, I estimated that the number of Citizenship applications submitted for the years 2017, 2018, & 2019 to be 105k, 175k & 250k, respectively. As you can see, the number of applications has increased by approximately 70k per year since 2017. Therefore, if we assume a similar trend, we would expect the number of applications by the end of 2020 to be around 320k!
Up until October of each year, the number of citizenship applications submitted was 87k, 140k & 210k; i.e., nearly 80% of the total applications were done by October. Taking the estimate for 2020 as given, this would mean that approximately 250k applications should have been submitted
by October 2020. We see in the above dataset that 60k applications were granted so far in 2020. These approvals, therefore, leave us with approximately 190k applications still pending. Even if IRCC has granted 10k more since the last data point in June, this still leaves us with 180k applications pending. I do want to point out that this is just the
lower end of my estimate.
Therefore, you may be wondering where I went so wrong; why does IRCC provide a number equal to more than half of the estimate I provided?
Of course, I made a strong assumption that the yearly increase in the number of citizenship applications would remain the same for 2020. It may be the case that people did not apply as much this year, possibly due to the pandemic. However, I believe that's a pretty weak argument since simply sending a courier for something this important shouldn't be affected by a pandemic.
The more reasonable cause for this discrepancy is possibly due to the devil in the details: IRCC is only providing the official numbers of the applications they have
acknowledged to receive
AND amongst those, the ones they consider to be "backlogged." As you may already know, the timeline for AORs has blown out of proportion. While it is still getting better, I believe only half of the June applicants have received their AOR thus far. Further, IRCC may not consider any applications past, say, March, to be backlogged. I don't think there are any nefarious intentions behind this - in fact, they are entirely truthful. August's applications aren't overdue their due date. I may consider them backlogged since IRCC has done crapshoot to mend the backlog, but I can understand their reasoning.
So with all these points in mind, I wish to conclude by saying one thing that remains most important: we are in a horrible, horrible position, be it 85k applications overdue or 180k applications overdue. In June, this was not the fault of IRCC - this was the fault of the pandemic. In October, however, this is the fault of IRCC alone. No one else.
No one. Every month that goes by with IRCC twiddling their thumbs, the backlog continues to increase and increase and increase... Just imagine the situation of the applicant at the end of this pileup. All of this, just because IRCC couldn't make an idiot-proof test online in the worry of integrity. It is truly a shame and very disappointing. I hope that interview is an indication of amendments to come.
