Opposition party members are publicly calling on the Conservative government to take action and address the nearly 6 year waiting time for citizenship application processing.
Kevin Lamoureux and Jim Karygiannis, two Liberal Members of Parliament, are asserting that over 300,000 applicants are currently “in limbo,” waiting for a decision on their citizenship application. They are calling for action on the government’s part, calling the situation “dismal.”
However, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration maintains that this is not the case and that most applications, in fact, are processed within 21 months. The Department says that this figure is based on the amount of time taken to process 80 percent of the applications filed between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012.
“The Liberal critics have cherry-picked times from extraordinary cases in which CIC has had to undertake an investigation to determine whether an applicant has satisfied the residency requirements for citizenship,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. “The current processing times for cases in which residency is not in question are much lower — only a few months higher than those we inherited from the Liberal party — but we are committed to lowering them even further.”
The spokesperson also pointed out that under the previous Liberal government – the party to which the recent critics belong – waiting times for permanent residency and citizenship applications were comparable at 17 months.
Source: Calgary Herald