Canada will grant citizenship to 300,000 people this year, an Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada internal memo said. Canada will process a total of 285,000 decisions and 300,000 new citizens by March 31, 2023, CIC news reported quoting the memo.
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The citizenship target implies that 300,000 approved applicants must take the oath of citizenship, either in person or virtually, the report added.
This marks a significant increase over the last year and even increases the pre-Covid pandemic targets of 2019-2020 when 253,000 citizenship applications were processed by Canada.
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In 2021-2022, Canada welcomed 217,000 new citizens. In this year, Canada has granted citizenship to 116,000 new citizens so far.
Canada is “well on track to hit target”, the report said.
The memo also informed that the process currently faces many challenges but easing it is one of the aims of Canada so that citizenship can be granted within a reasonable timeframe.
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IRCC has also moved away completely from paper applications and made the citizenship process digital which has helped in expanding the process for the applicants and reducing backlog, the memo noted.
The changes were made after massive backlog owing to the Covid pandemic.
“As of last June, there were 413,000 applications in the grant inventory,” the memo said. But the memo said that processing of almost 80 percent of the new applications will be done within the service standards.
