Hi all,
Today I crashed another citizenship ceremony, and was able to have a long chat with a very, very nice and helpful citizenship officer.
Many new people are being brought in to speed up processing. In particular, the number of officers who will be dealing with non-routine applications is being increased several-fold, with the expectation being that once they are all trained and online, processing will take no more than six months from the time a file becomes non-routine.
As you may have noticed from what has been posted on this forum, routine processing times at Edmonton have already been reduced significantly, and that trend is also likely to continue.
It's a shame they didn't do this years ago, but oh well.