IWK

Canadian citizenship for 300,000 people by March 2023, Indians to benefit

Written by IWK Bureau | Oct 20, 2022 10:50:08 AM

Canada aims to grant citizenship to 300,000 people in fiscal year 2022-2023, a move likely to benefit many Indians.

The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) memo recommends processing a total of 285,000 decisions and 300,000 new citizens by March 31, 2023.

A decision means a review of an application, which is then approved, rejected, or marked as incomplete.

The citizenship target means that 300,000 approved applicants must take the citizenship oath, which would be done either in person or virtually.

IRCC also said minors under the age of 18 will be eligible to apply for citizenship online by the end of the year.

This is a significant increase from fiscal 2021-2022 and even surpasses the pre-pandemic goals of 2019-2020, when 253,000 citizenship applications were processed.

In March 2020, due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, IRCC was no longer able to process most applications. This was because the department could only process paper applications that were sent to a central location.

IRCC was unable to conduct interviews with candidates and oaths could not be taken at naturalization ceremonies.

So far in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, Canada has welcomed 116,000 new citizens and is on track to meet its goal. For comparison, in the same period in 2021, the country had only 35,000 people sworn in.

Although there is no breakdown of figures by country, Indians are the largest immigrant group to take up residence in Canada in 2022.

About 1.4 million people of Indian descent live in Canada, according to the country’s 2016 reports.

In 2021, nearly 100,000 Indians moved to Canada under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and around 130,000 received work permits under the International Mobility Program.

Over 210,000 permanent residents also acquired Canadian citizenship in 2021-2022.

It also issued 450,000 study permit applications, according to figures released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). There are over 622,000 foreign students in Canada, of which 217,410 are Indians as of December 31, 2021.

Given that Canada continues to suffer from labor shortages, many Indians can be expected to move to Canada to work and study in the years to come.

With the growing number of online applications, in addition to the backlog of paper applications, IRCC is taking steps to clear the backlog and process 80% of all new applications to service standards.

To this end, over 1,000 new employees have been hired and there are plans to expand access to the citizenship application status tracker to representatives.

Canada’s immigration backlog remains at 2.6 million people, new IRCC data shows.

As of June this year, Indians accounted for more than a quarter of the 2.4 million pending cases, with approximately 700,000.