As others have aptly observed, the idea of moving for the purpose of manipulating where one's citizenship application will be processed, hoping this will mean faster processing, is at best utterly silly. Where to live? is a question for which there are many, many other more important factors to consider than how it will
possibly affect the processing timeline for a citizenship application. Even if one could reliably forecast how it will affect the processing timeline (which one cannot predict).
And it is worth noting the fact of moving itself could have more impact (potentially negative) than which local office ends up processing the application.
Earlier, people could apply for citizenship at a place of their choice. A person I know, who lives in Mississauga, submitted his application at Hamilton office because of the faster turnaround time.
When was that?
A very old story that must be indeed.
For a long, long time the only office where a citizenship application could be submitted was the CPC in Sydney, no submissions to a local office. (In fact, I do not know if it ever was any different, that is that applications had to be submitted to a CPC rather than a local office, even if the CPC has not always been in Sydney.) And the applicant's residential address has long, long dictated in which local office the application was eventually processed.
There have been, however, anecdotal reports that CIC (before it became IRCC) allowed some applicants to choose, when they moved while the application was in process, whether to change offices or stay with an office already processing the application. That was for moves made
after applying.
It might warrant noting that a decade ago
Mississauga was considered (by many anyway)
to be among the fastest offices for processing citizenship applications. So much so that a number of consultants were advising applicants (particularly from areas like Montreal, which indeed has long been thought to be among the slowest) to
USE a Mississauga address, one provided by the consultant for a fee of course. When, ultimately, CIC finally caught on to the scheme (but not until four dozen or so applicants had applied using the exact same residential address, and hundreds overall had used addresses in what turned out to be within a single complex), it appears that some of the
consultants relocated addresses to places like Hamilton, but that did not last long since CIC and the RCMP were on to them.
Among the cases in which an applicant was identified as using a Mississauga address even though the applicant did not live there, and was therefore denied citizenship, one applicant appealed asserting that he nonetheless met the residency requirement because he was living in Montreal the whole time and had used the Mississauga address on the advice of a consultant. The Federal Court was not sympathetic. He lost. Grounds for denial was misrepresentation.
When Mississauga was discovered to be the epicenter of fraudulent applications, of course that brought processing applications in that local office to a near standstill initially, and continued to make processing there dramatically slower while CIC and the RCMP investigated the full scope of the fraudulent schemes (this was 2008 to 2012). Nonetheless, by 2014 Mississauga again was among the offices many recognized as processing applications more quickly than many other offices. Indeed, by early 2014, when CIC was posting a 18 month timeline for routine citizenship application processing, but the forums were full of whining about it taking two years, I knew applicants processed in the Mississauga office who nonetheless sailed all the way through the process in barely six months, and I myself, also processed in the Mississauga office, took the oath in early 2014 barely eight months after my application arrived in Sydney.
In the meantime . . .
As others have aptly observed, there is no reliable source of data which would support concluding which offices are slower or faster . . . except, perhaps, one might nod to the persistent anecdotal reporting about Montreal as indicating it is likely to be among the slower ones.
As others have aptly observed, there are so many other factors which can influence how it goes when a particular application is processed, including how long it takes, that
forum-shopping (as it is called when someone goes looking for which court is likely to be a more favourable forum to bring a case) is largely a futile effort, quite unlikely to have the desired impact.
Not all offices process applications at the same speed, but it is at least comparable (relatively minimal deviations), and again other factors will have a bigger impact on how quickly this or that particular application proceeds through the process.
Also note that how certain local office conditions might affect the timeline can be difficult if not impossible to predict, and they change from time to time. For example, while some local offices might have a lighter workload allowing individual officers an opportunity to get to applications sooner, many functions are done in batches, so even if an officer gets to an individual case sooner, the applicant can be stuck waiting in a queue for there to be a full batch to do the test or the oath.
As to security clearances, for example, most of these are done pursuant to the referral made by the Sydney office, prior to the application being transferred to the local office (but the clearance itself, when issued by the respective agency, RCMP and CSIS, is sent to the local office), so it does not matter which local office is processing the application. If IRCC needs to get an updated clearance, however, these too are done in batches, so a particular application can sit in a queue waiting for there to be enough applications needing an updated clearance for the local office to make the batch referral (last I knew, RCMP clearance referrals were being done in batches of up to a hundred applicants at a time). This is just scratching the surface of the variables which can affect processing timelines.
And overall, the biggest impact on the timeline is usually case-specific, whether or not there is some particular fact or circumstance in the individual case triggering an additional inquiry or non-routine processing of any sort (which can range from having a minor impact on the timeline to, in the case of full-blown RQ, perhaps a huge impact). The majority of qualified applicants who submitted an error-free application will sail through the process in roughly the same time as other similar applicants, regardless which local office handles the application, and that tends to be comparable to the fastest timelines being
regularly reported (not the very fastest, some of which are suspect on their face, and otherwise are an anomaly, but the fastest timelines being
regularly reported by numerous applicants).
During a particular time period, it is probably safe to generalize that a particular local office may be a month or two faster, a month or two slower, than this or that other one, but generally it does not vary much beyond that (except, possibly, a few like Montreal, if the reports about how slow processing is there are to be believed) and this appears to go back and forth, perhaps Ottawa
appearing to be slightly faster than Mississauga one season, but then slower in another.
And again there is no way to verify which actually was faster or slower. And no way to predict which will be faster or slower in the coming season or year.
Overall, an a prospective citizenship applicant needs to focus on making lifestyle decisions based on factors actually pertinent to the decision being made (where to work, where to live, and so on), and for purposes of the citizenship application:
-- gather and keep good records;
-- be prudent about deciding when to apply, including having a decent margin over the minimum; and
-- focus on following the instructions toward submitting a truthful and complete application as error-free as possible, and particularly so as to reporting travel dates in the presence calculator
That is far more likely to facilitate the fastest timeline.
Efforts to manipulate the facts, like moving so as to choose which local office processes the application, tend to be fraught with pitfalls and potential problems.
