You pay fees only when you complete your application. No point in paying your fees without submitting your completed application.
Source for this?
I suppose you can send the government money for anything anytime you want. I am not sure how long such a payment will be available to apply to a later submitted application.
No source necessary for the obvious, that there is no point sending an application fee without actually making an application. After all, what possible point might there be?
Note, for example, if there is any change in either the procedure or the fees, payment prior to the date of the application itself will NOT be valid or work UNLESS it complies with the new procedure and is for the amount as changed. Here too, no "
source" necessary, since this is the way CIC and now IRCC have done it across a wide spectrum of applications and, frankly, it is the only way that makes any sense.
I have a similar question - can I start the application and pay the fees before I'm eligible? I only plan to submit well after I have the min. number of days...
If your "
plan" is to submit an application only when you are actually eligible, yeah, that's how it works. That's what you do. Of course the information in the application MUST be accurate and complete as of the date the application is submitted.
So, it is not clear what you mean by "
start the application . . . before I'm eligible." If you mean doing rough drafts, that's fine. Good idea.
LONGER OBSERVATIONS (in case there are lingering questions about this):
This is an old thread and it was largely a dead end back then.
At the time of the post preceding yours in this thread there was not (not yet) an actual physical presence requirement for grant citizenship. The law then imposed a "
residency" requirement, pursuant to which scores of PRs had applied for citizenship with way fewer than 1095 days of physical presence in Canada, some successfully being granted citizenship even though they had been physically in Canada for just a few hundred days.
Even back then, and long before, and since, whether in regards to calculating residency or physical presence days, the calculation is and has been based on the date the application is actually made.
NO credit for days in Canada after the date the application is actually made. Sources: see the guide for making a grant citizenship application and instructions for completing the online physical presence calculation, which in regard to this particular element has been affirmed in literally scores of Federal Court cases, relative to both applications made when there was a residency requirement and subsequently for applications made subject to the physical presence requirement.
Make no mistake: since the implementation of the actual physical presence requirement, an application made (signed) even ONE day prior to the applicant meeting the presence requirement will fail, as it MUST BE DENIED; IRCC has NO authority to grant citizenship to an applicant who does not meet this requirement on the date the application is made.
Regarding the requirements applicable at the time of the previous posts in this thread, changes in the law had been adopted and would take effect later that year, but in the meantime the government had increasingly approached applying the residency requirement as if residency depended on actual physical presence. So, even if at the time of the prior questions asked and answered in this thread, the OP was asking about applying before being physically present at least 1095 days during the preceding four years (it was a 3/4 rule then), the responses here would have been largely the same: do not make the application unless and until you meet the physical presence threshold (even if you were resident in Canada for more than three of the preceding four years, at that time) . . . and, even then, and more so now, best to wait to have a significant margin of presence over the minimum before making the application.
Leading, finally, to some ambiguity in your query: "
can I start the application . . . before I'm eligible?"
I understand this to be asking if you can start the application
process. And there is no doubt about the answer: NO. For IRCC to even have legal authority to approve the grant of citizenship, let alone citizenship actually be granted, a PR needs to be eligible as of the date the application is made (generally based on the date it is signed, subject to limitations for stale dated applications if not timely delivered to IRCC, and also recognizing that post-dated applications are not accepted, not even processed) and also REMAIN eligible throughout the processing of the application. Here too, in regards to a "
source," there are scores of Federal Court decisions affirming this.
That is, if your question is whether you can send in an application before you meet the eligibility requirements, NO.
Well, actually you "
can" send one in. Depending on the particular reason you are not eligible at that time, the application will either be returned (not processed; such as, for example, if the physical presence calculation shows the applicant to be short as of the date the application is signed) or eventually denied (if for example the applicant did not meet the physical presence requirement on the date the application was signed but that was not apparent on the face of the information submitted with the application).
Otherwise, if you are asking whether you can download a copy of the application form and "
start" filling it in, and otherwise
start making an application by doing rough drafts of the physical presence calculation, of course anyone can do that whenever they want.
Good idea actually. Just remember, nonetheless, that the final version to be submitted must be a form IRCC is accepting as of the date the application actually arrives at the CPC, and remember that the information in that form must be accurate and complete as of the date the application is signed.
