ERJOPA said:
However, when it comes to presenting your passport to the CIC officer in the interview, will the extra stamps in the passport (because of the vacation) be a "red flag" for the officer to ask for more documentation (or worse)?
Ordinary or typical holiday or brief business trip travel is the norm, and stamps reflecting such travel should not arouse any concerns at all.
Sure, if an applicant is abroad for an extended period of time and there are stamps indicating this and indicating a return to Canada just in time to appear for the test and interview, that is something the interviewer
might notice and which in turn might raise a flag. CIC tends to get suspicious if an applicant appears to have, as one Federal Court justice put it, "
applied-on-the-way-to-the-airport" (or otherwise appears to potentially be an individual seeking a passport of convenience).
But things which indicate ordinary, typical,
normal patterns of travel for an immigrant will not raise suspicions.
In contrast, there is another recent post (different thread), in which someone indicated they were a U.S. citizen
and did not leave Canada even once for three years. Depending on where this individual has been living in Canada,
that might raise a red flag, as in
really, that close to home, to friends and family and former acquaintances, not to mention shopping in the U.S., and not a single trip to the U.S.?
CIC not only reacts to anomalies and incongruities, something that does not fit, CIC looks for these things. They do not necessarily cause CIC to overtly doubt or question the applicant's case, but they will often invite CIC to take a closer look.
I left out a key observation relative to the OP's query:
plus said:
. . .
Should I wait for my file number to arrive before informing them? I am not too sure if they provide the file number or AOR so soon
Unless it is something urgent or time-imperative,
wait to send any further information, documentation, or notice to CIC until
after the application is in process. Bureaucracies work best when everything is according to the
routine, all the parts and actions are in order, well connected,
on track so to say. Attempts to supplement, modify, or otherwise contact CIC regarding an application CIC has not yet opened and created an in process file for, risk tipping things off the track.
Juney said:
Officers only go through the 4 year period relevant to application.
This appears to be
usually true, as is indicated by the majority of anecdotal reports from those who have attended an interview.
But it is
not always true, and in particular it is only true relative to verifying the declarations of travel in the residency calculation.
The citizenship officer
might at least glance at information in a passport entered
after the date of applying, and actually it is very likely the interviewer at least briefly examines such information. The interviewer will
not be interested (ordinarily) in post-application stamps unless there is an anomaly, incongruity, or otherwise an indication of an extended absence reflecting residing or working abroad.
In particular, to the extent we have known actual CIC practices in the past (CIC no longer shares this information publicly), interviewers specifically looked for stamps indicating a return to Canada just in time to take the test or attend the interview (for example, a stamp indicating recent return to Canada before the test was an explicit reason to question residency, as enumerated in the operational manual CP 5 since 2005 and applicable until at least April 2012). There are many indications CIC citizenship interviewers often, if not usually, continue to at least glance through post-application pages of passports looking for indications of extended absences (reflecting residing or working abroad) or indications of having obtained status to live or work in another country.
My personal experience was that the interviewer clearly examined my passport looking for post-application information, since I had obtained a new passport
after applying and the interviewer glanced at every page in that new passport. (Interviewer also took a copy of all those pages.)
Nonetheless, even extensive travel abroad after applying should raise no flags, be of minimal interest to the citizenship interviewer. Thus, for example, stamps reflecting ordinary holiday travel after applying should garner little or no more attention than the interviewer flipping through the pages of the passport.
