This fiscal year, or 2022–2023, Canada hopes to award citizenship to 300,000 immigrants. By March 31, 2023, the document advises the IRCC to process a total of 285,000 determinations and 300,000 new citizens.
For a senior official, the note was written by the Operations, Planning, and Performance branch of IRCC.
An application is reviewed and given a decision, after which it may be accepted, rejected, or marked as incomplete. According to the citizenship aim, 300,000 qualified applicants must take the citizenship oath. The oath can be taken digitally or in person.
This fiscal year’s 300,000 citizenship milestone represents a significant improvement above the pre-pandemic targets of 2019–2020 and 2021–2022. 253,000 citizenship petitions were processed in 2019–2020, whereas 217,000 new citizens were accepted in 2021–2022.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in March 2020, IRCC was unable to process the majority of applications and could only handle paper applications that were mailed to a single location.
This fiscal year, 116,000 more people have become citizens of Canada than during the same period last year. Only 35,000 persons had been sworn in as citizens of Canada as of 2021. The processing time grew along with the rise in online applications. 413,000 applications were in the inventory by last June.
The IRCC has added 1,000 new staff employees to help reduce the backlog. By the end of the year, minors (those under the age of 18) will be permitted to submit an online citizenship application.
Every category of Canadian visa, including applications for a job, study, tourist, and permanent residency, has an Indian as the top applicant. As previously reported, India will account for roughly one-third of landings in 2021 when it comes to applications for permanent residency (PR) in Canada.
IANS stated that 1.4 million persons in Canada are of Indian heritage, based on 2016 statistics. According to the data, around 100,000 Indians entered Canada last year through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, and roughly 130,000 received work visas through the International Mobility Program. Over 210,000 permanent residents also became Canadian citizens in 2021–2022.
The end of 2022 is when Canada intends to resume its usual visa processing processes, according to Cameron MacKay, its high commissioner to India. He stated, “We process about 10,000 visas for Indian nationals a week, and that is not fast enough”. In comparison to the number of visa applications the nation received in 2019, there was a dramatic increase of 55% in 2022. Experts attribute the rapid increase in visa requests that have contributed to the backlog to the pandemic.
News Mania Desk
