I'm a bit late in this seeing as my spouse received citizenship last December. But I thought I would offer a couple tips from our experience, based on things we wondered about or neglected to think about at the time. They are probably well-covered on this forum, but the more examples of the actual process there are, probably can't hurt.
1) We applied for citizenship and then about a month later my employer decided to transfer me abroad so that we were actually not living in Canada for the entire duration of the citizenship adjudication process. Thankfully because the government had removed the intent to reside aspect, this was not a problem. (Also, we had intended to reside in Canada when we sent the paperwork in. Also the job transfer is only supposed to be for a few years.)
2) I spent a ton of time going back over every trip we took outside the country for the five years we lived here before applying in order to calculate the amount of time to meet the residency requirement. I did not realize we would have to bring all of this proof to the actual citizenship interview. My spouse brought a list of all the dates and the length of time, but no actual proof beyond that to the interview. Also, I missed 2 dates that they had access to (Turned out to be day trips we had taken to Buffalo, so I had no record of them.) We were almost denied because of this, as the immigration officer only had the dates we returned to Canada available to them, not the dates we left. Bring proof to back up your residency timeline in the form of flight itineraries, hotel reservations, etc. If you travel only to the U.S., I believe you can apply to the U.S. for a record of your entry/exit dates. Definitely bring a lot of proof of your travel dates. The immigration officer cared a tremendous amount about proving you met the residency requirement.
Better yet, if you are a recent PR, keep track of all of your travel from Day One along with proof (Had I known I would have printed out all our flight/hotel bookings and kept them in a file folder. But I wasn't thinking of that until we decided to apply.)
3) The test was pretty easy, particularly if you are immigrating from a country with a pretty similar structure of democratic government. It was definitely useful to read the book and do some practice tests, however the test seemed almost designed more to test English (or French) language proficiency. Someone was caught cheating off my spouse during the test who did not appear to speak much English.
1) We applied for citizenship and then about a month later my employer decided to transfer me abroad so that we were actually not living in Canada for the entire duration of the citizenship adjudication process. Thankfully because the government had removed the intent to reside aspect, this was not a problem. (Also, we had intended to reside in Canada when we sent the paperwork in. Also the job transfer is only supposed to be for a few years.)
2) I spent a ton of time going back over every trip we took outside the country for the five years we lived here before applying in order to calculate the amount of time to meet the residency requirement. I did not realize we would have to bring all of this proof to the actual citizenship interview. My spouse brought a list of all the dates and the length of time, but no actual proof beyond that to the interview. Also, I missed 2 dates that they had access to (Turned out to be day trips we had taken to Buffalo, so I had no record of them.) We were almost denied because of this, as the immigration officer only had the dates we returned to Canada available to them, not the dates we left. Bring proof to back up your residency timeline in the form of flight itineraries, hotel reservations, etc. If you travel only to the U.S., I believe you can apply to the U.S. for a record of your entry/exit dates. Definitely bring a lot of proof of your travel dates. The immigration officer cared a tremendous amount about proving you met the residency requirement.
Better yet, if you are a recent PR, keep track of all of your travel from Day One along with proof (Had I known I would have printed out all our flight/hotel bookings and kept them in a file folder. But I wasn't thinking of that until we decided to apply.)
3) The test was pretty easy, particularly if you are immigrating from a country with a pretty similar structure of democratic government. It was definitely useful to read the book and do some practice tests, however the test seemed almost designed more to test English (or French) language proficiency. Someone was caught cheating off my spouse during the test who did not appear to speak much English.