This was an excellent point! IMHO, everyone should be treated absolutely equally when applying for citizenship! In a sense, just before applying for citizenship, any permanent resident in Canada should be treated on exactly the same foot, no matter if (s)he was a refugee/FSW/CEC etc, so it should not matter at all how the PR was obtained. Also, after becoming a citizen, it shouldn't matter at all if the person wants to leave Canada. So what?! Many times expats make their country a favour by leaving, doing something great in another country and be considered a "Canadian that did this and that". Once you obtained a citizenship you should be proud of it, no matter where in the world you live!Imadassadi said:You are mixing between two things,
Visitors comes to visit Canada not to reside,however, refugees come to reside and settle in canada. What I am saying is simple, both imgrants and refugees should be treated equally and have the same period of residency in order to apply for citizenship. It is not fair that imgrants granted citizenship in 3 or 4 years while some refugees wait for 6 or 7 years to apply because they have not credited the days pre-Pr. Also refugees should not be considered and treated as second class Permenant resident because simply other PRs afraid of the delay of processing time and want to grant thier citizenship in short time no matter how long the other PRs suffer and wait. When it comes to the comitment and the intention to reside , I am pretty sure that refugees are more committed than the others because most of them fled from thier countries and sell their properties and come to live here for ever, while some imgrants came to get citizenship and leave.
About pre-PR credit, things are tricky. Indeed crediting students with as much time as possible should be a desideratum, because most of them are already contributing to Canadian economy. On the other hand, there are also long time work permit holders that should as well be credited (in my case, I was a WP holder for 5 years before becoming a PR). How much each should be credited/who is worth more is a complicated decision, and probably un-satisfactory to 50% of the applicants. So the pre-C24 rule of 1/2 days per 1 full day made sense. You want a bit of commitment from a prospective citizen.
However, to conclude, I think those are actually relatively minor issues in the long term. Again IMHO the most important thing is to have a SOLID citizenship law, which treats naturalized citizens on the same footing as naturally-born citizens. That is, a strip of citizenship SHOULD NOT be allowed unless the case proven in a court of law. No one should be able otherwise to decide they don't like you anymore and you should be a non-Canadian. I'd very much like to wait a bit more and make sure that the amendment will pass (either as an amendment or as a different bill) before being satisfied with a compromise. I know that many of us can hardly wait to be a citizen (myself included), but let's think about it in the long run!