No worries man, but something is wrong because that day that office was full of people taking the oath, and I could even see our 2 seats empty, this is something else than an administrative error, is my thinking.
The administrative error was clearly as to scheduling YOU in particular for the oath. For some, whatever reason, the local office erroneously scheduled you for the oath when your application was not ready for that.
OR some necessary task, in processing your application, was expected to be completed by the time of the oath but for some, whatever reason, that task remained pending, so local office could not proceed with the oath.
As you should see from fairly common reporting in this forum, this sort of canceling the oath ceremony is not at all uncommon.
Bureaucracies are what bureaucracies do, and especially so for bureaucracies as large and complex as IRCC.
How long it will now be before you actually take the oath is highly variable, varying widely, and is difficult to predict. For some it is not long at all. For others it can be several or even many months. And, of course, if what tipped you out of the queue for the oath involves a significant issue, particularly any requiring "
further verifications" or a referral for investigation, the timeline is especially unpredictable and can go fairly long -- good news, however, is the latter is not usually the case UNLESS you are already aware that in your particular situation there is an issue that is potentially problematic. Odds are the glitch is minor and will not delay things much at all, so the length of time to be scheduled for the oath again is mostly about how long applicants are waiting in that queue in that local office. (Remember, most tasks actually take very little time; the processing timeline is overwhelmingly time
sitting-in-queue, waiting for an official to do the next task.)
Note: IRCC also schedules some oath ceremonies conditionally, expecting the condition to be met for most (and that was my circumstance, condition was met, so I took the oath as scheduled), cancelling the oath for in those few instances the condition is not met. And sometimes the final GCMS background clearance (done just before the applicant takes the oath, and which includes screening name record criminal history databases derived from RCMP and U.S. NCIC/FBI data) shows a hit indicating a potential prohibition, which will result in the oath being cancelled and further processing to assess prohibitions.
I am not sure how well IRCC distinguishes the various reasons for cancelling an oath in their notice, given the extent to which IRCC employs templates covering many scenarios, leaving applicants to navigate the boilerplate to identify what parts of the notice actually applies to them in particular.
Is IRCC Toying With Applicants?
I have seen some complaints about how unfair this is for applicants, some even suggesting that IRCC is
toying with applicants. Of course the latter is ludicrous. But whether the administrative policy/practices that result in these scheduled but abruptly cancelled ceremonies need to be revised to reduce the number affected this way, that is a legitimate question. Other side of this coin is that many applicants (and probably most by a big margin) would likely prefer IRCC to proceed to schedule them for the oath notwithstanding there is some chance they might be among those whose oath is administratively cancelled, recognizing most will proceed to take the oath as scheduled while a relatively few percentage-wise, but adding up to more than a few overall, will be cancelled.
Among those most adversely affected are applicants who have relocated outside Canada, who need to arrange a trip to Canada for the oath, and who will thereby be much inconvenienced if the oath is cancelled.
Spoiler-alert: IRCC is not at all likely to revise policy/practices to better accommodate applicants who have relocated abroad.