MasterGeek said:
I have an idea: Using the Access to Information Act, anyone could request from CIC to send internal information and emails related to the preparation of bill C-24 implementation
This may offer some insight. And for those affected, those on the cusp in 2015, perhaps worth the effort.
But, frankly, so much is likely to be redacted or excluded it will be difficult to draw conclusions beyond the obvious: they are working on it, with little or no indication as to when the Governor in Council (in practice meaning when Harper) will order the amendments to come into force.
Moreover, this government tends to approach such transitions intensely top-down, the key decisions and actions taken within a very small, close-knit circle, often right within the PMO (and not in the respective Minister's department), so it is likely there will be minimal CIC
chatter, so to say, about what is being done . . . that is, right up to the time the changes in forms, guidelines, instructions, and so on, are ready to rollout, which is likely to not happen until there is very little time left before the order is made for the remaining amendments to come into force.
In particular, it will be difficult to time the ATI request to capture relevant
chatter in time to get much advance notice of the impending implementation of the amendments. Would not surprise me that useful information will not become available, through the ATI process, until less than four or five weeks before things really happen, and that is about how long it takes to get the ATI report in the most prompt instances . . . in other words, the revealing ATI report is not likely to get into a person's inbox (or mail box) until about the time the information becomes public anyway.
The Access to Information system in Canada is broken. The Harper government has done a lot to break it . . . or at least undermine its usefulness for journalists or the public. The trend toward less and less transparency is not just a Harper, Canadian phenomena however, but appears to be widespread across western so-called democracies.
I do not mean to discourage people from pursuing access to information requests. By all means, even the poor service and restricted access currently available is well worth using and pursuing to the extent one can.
But I would be shocked if an Access to Information request resulted in the disclosure of the date that the Governor in Council will order the amendments to come into force, even though I have little doubt that the date is already determined.
By the Way: For those who wonder how it is possible that the PMO (Prime Minister's Office) could do what is necessary to make such a huge transition without involving CIC personnel, watch them. And be wary about the results. Yes, it is a recipe for disaster. Any time those who do the real work are excluded from the process of revising how to do the work, things tend to go badly. But that is this government's
modus operandi. There are, for example, credible suggestions that the whole OB 407 process was engineered by a single individual within the PMO, and simply delivered to CIC to implement (then Minister Kenney apparently having some input, but high-level policy wise, not in terms of practices and procedures). Result: disaster. Citizenship application processing was virtually broken for nearly a year. Tens of thousands of PRs on the path to citizenship were victimized, suffering inordinate delays, and overly intrusive RQ for little or no substantive cause. Thousands swept into the mire by the rollout of OB 407 are still in limbo, still "in process," while tens of thousands (like me) who applied later have sailed through the process in seven or eight months and taken the oath already.
There were, undoubtedly, scores of CIC workers who could have helped develop a far better plan than the intial OB 407 rollout, but Harper and company believe in keeping what's coming, and when, a secret. They have their reasons, their rationalizations. But, bureaucratic efficiency suffers, and often suffers badly.
The saving grace is that once these amendments come into force, the flow of new citizenship applications should decline dramatically, to a small percentage of the number that generally flow into Sydney most months. This is because there will be a full year, plus, group of PRs who will suddenly have to wait another full year to apply. (If, for example, the coming into force date is July 1st 2015, all PRs who landed between early 2012 and the summer of 2013, who would have become eligible to apply between July 1st 2015 (assuming many of those landing in early 2012 have some travel abroad) and the summer of 2016 under the current residency requirement, will all of a sudden have to wait another full year, until after July 1st 2016 at the very soonest, before they are eligible.) Thus, during this transition CIC should have a relatively small number of applications to process for the first year. Hopefully this will be enough of an offset to overcome the inevitable bureaucratic inefficiencies which will beseige the new process due to its intensely top-down engineering.
On the other hand, between now and next summer, a large number of PRs who have not been in a rush or have been procrastinating (like I did), are likely to recognize the urgency of getting their application made before the amendments take effect, and so there is likely to be at least somewhat of a surge in new applications between now and the date the amendments come into force. Many PRs will recognize if they snooze they lose, lose up to a full year, and will be getting their applications in sooner than they ordinarily would have. In conjunction with this surge, there is the possibility that there will be a large number of applicants applying with a very small margin over the 1095 day threshold, PRs rushing to get the app in before the changeover. This will put pressure on CIC's resources since many of these applications will require more scrutiny.
In particular: this is now no time to procrastinate. It is still best to have a decent margin (my opinion), but the further into next year we go, the higher the odds that new applications are going to be caught in a messy transition period.
Those on the cusp have little choice, unless they are willing to wait the extra year or so, and will need to make their application as soon as they reasonably can (hopefully with at least some margin), but of course not before they meet the requirements including, especially, the actual physical presence for 1095 days requirement.
And for some others, they can hope the window remains open into July or August, but they probably should not plan on it, or even make significant life choices based on it. (For example, for someone who will be eligible to apply in August if the amendments do not take effect before then, and so long as they do not take a planned holiday to see parents or such, probably better to plan on having to apply after the amendments take effect and take that holiday.)
