Thank you Dpenabill for the Detailed Response.
I am giving myself about 100 additional days . ( I qualified to apply for Citizenship based on presence/days by Dec end). I am planning to apply by April Mid.
I have a detailed account of the daily crossing that I do ( Plus cross referenced with Nexus Crossings ,US entries and Canadian Entries) . I do know of at least 7 to 8 people ( Given that i stay in Windsor
,of applying and successfully getting it , the recent case being 2 months old but you never can be complacent
I will update this thread on my how my application goes .. Thank you again.
It has been awhile since I have seen reports from Canada-to-U.S.-commuters regarding impact on citizenship application. This scenario has shown up in some documented actual cases addressed by the Federal Court, but none that I have noticed (I watch and try to read every citizenship decision that is published but perhaps occasionally miss one) dealing with the requirements under current law.
The problem is that obviously this scenario will draw far more intense scrutiny than the routine citizenship application and on the
deserves-citizenship-scale it is most likely dominated by a waving big red flag . . .
unless there are other factors and circumstances which in effect offset the negative optics of being barely half-settled in Canada.
In other words, it is easy to anticipate a high probability, in this scenario, that the applicant will face RQ and skepticism.
Of course there is no formal
deserves-citizenship requirement. Only fools, however, will overlook how much this factor can impact the process.
In terms of submitting additional documents with the application, I strongly doubt that will have much if any impact on how things go. Maybe including Notices of Assessment will help, but for the most part it appears that the upfront screening does not assess residency/presence qualification beyond determining if the applicant has declared sufficient presence to qualify, and if yes, then determining whether there are any factors which warrant further inquiry, such as whether there are apparent ties abroad suggesting that IRCC needs to more thoroughly investigate presence. And it seems unlikely that IRCC will consider additional documents in making this preliminary assessment. That is, it is easy to guess the likelihood your employment in the States will trigger RQ. Maybe not, but that is what seems most likely. No matter what you include in the application.
Note that in the past, it was clear that the submission of additional documents would rarely, if ever, make any difference in whether or not RQ was issued. There were multiple cases in which applicants essentially submitted everything that would be submitted in responding to RQ and
still were issued RQ and were compelled to respond . . . in addition to anecdotal reports of this, there was a Federal Court decision about this and there were internal CIC memos (this was back in 2013 when a number of us were making multiple ATI requests for general information related to the RQ process implemented by OB 407) in which local offices were instructed to require full response to RQ despite the inclusion of those documents in the original application.
Technically citizenship qualification is
now based on
presence, which the PR Residency Obligation has long been based on. So, the Canada-to-U.S.-commuter has a stronger case now than under the prior law when citizenship qualification was based on
residency (albeit primarily calculated based on days present). One of the more salient Federal Court decisions did turn, in large part, on residency: the applicant acquired GC status and the CJ and the Court both totally discounted the time the commuter-applicant claimed to be present in Canada after that based on the applicant becoming a resident of the U.S. (even though his home continued to actually be in Canada) and therefore he was not entitled to credit for that time as a resident of Canada.
To be frank, I have not yet seen a reliable report of a successful citizenship application by a Canada-to-U.S.-commuter. There probably have been some. But how a case like this goes will probably have a lot more to do with how a Citizenship Officer approaches positive versus negative inferences and not so much on the technicalities . . . except the obvious technicality: it is the applicant's burden to
prove presence in Canada for each of 1460 days at minimum.
Clue: if IRCC identifies any discrepancy in the declared travel, that could be enough to largely discount the applicant's accounting of days present. Unless you are absolutely sure about each and every border crossing date, be upfront about the probabilities of approximating. And, frankly, I suspect that much of a window for approximating could sabotage the application. Getting every date exactly right, or very close to that, might be important.
About discounting the applicant's travel declarations: make no mistake, if IRCC has reason to doubt the accuracy of the applicant's declarations, this can result in a determination the applicant has failed to prove presence . . . IRCC does not merely subtract questionable periods of time, but in effect can decide the applicant's account is not reliable and therefore the applicant has failed to prove presence. Some Federal Court decisions do reflect a more or less actual calculation of specific days but far more negative outcomes are based on concluding the applicant has not
proven the actual number of days present and therefore has failed to prove qualification for citizenship.
Personally, I would wait to apply until you have a huge margin. And do as much as feasibly possible to be fully accurate about all cross-border trips. But how long to wait is a decision for you to make.
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