I am curious to understand how applications are processed and why some applicants get prioritized over others. For example, I have a friend who sent his application in Dec 2020. I sent my application in July 2020. He has now had his citizenship test and I am still waiting for my date to be confirmed. By background check was completed in Jan 2021. This is also the case when looking through the tracker sheets. There is no clear method to the madness. It feels like the workers come to work each day, throw all the applications on the floor and just pick at random which ones they process........somewhat venting here but does anyone have any insight into this seemingly 'black hole" of a process? I come from NZ, married to a Candian, lived in Canada for 6 years under PR. Clean criminal record and work as an executive for a global company.
December 2020 online applicants were the first ones in the pilot project. Several of them have even taken their oath towards the end of May / Beginning of June. Don't compare your timelines with the timelines of online applicants. I guess the workflow is different.
As for the delays in paper applications, yes - there are huge delays. This is partly due to the pandemic, partly because there was a bug in the IRCC system that prevented them from submitting RCMP clearance requests (until May last year, not sure when the problems started) and partly due to the still ongoing (and lame excuse) that the delays are because of the pandemic. You can't fix a mistake before you agree it exists. IRCC, IMO, needs to step up, accept these gargantuan backlogs are unacceptable and scale their systems/hire more staff to fix the backlogs.
Also, the prioritization is out of whack. There are 2019 applicants still waiting but IRCC moved on to 2020 applicants. Paper applicants who submitted applications as late as November 2020 have received test invites (a small number of applicants though). This is because the process of sending test invites is initiated by the local office AFAIK. Local offices that do not have enough staff / staff not coming to work because of COVID might not be able to send much or any test invites at all. The applications would sit in the office's registry collecting dust.
Let's see what the next 2 months bring. Hopefully, we'll see some good progress.
Good luck to people who are still waiting!