Canada will grant citizenship to 300,000 people in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) memo outlines the target for the number of new citizens Canada will welcome by March 31.
The IRCC memo was drafted by the Operations, Planning and Demonstration Division of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) for a senior official. It recommends that the IRCC process a total of 285,000 decisions and 300,000 new citizens by March 31, 2023.
An application is marked as either Approved, Rejected, or Incomplete. The target means that 300,000 accepted applicants must take the oath of citizenship in Canada. The oath of citizenship will be either personally or virtually.
Canadian citizenship to 300,000 applicants will exceed the 2019-2020 pre-pandemic target. In 2020, Canada IRCC could not process most applications for granting citizenship to people as the world was hit by the coronavirus pandemic and the department could only process applications online.
No interviews could be conducted and no ceremony was held to confer citizenship.
In 2019-2020, 253,000 citizenship applications were processed. The year 2021-2022 welcomed 217,000 new citizens. In the 2022-2023 financial year so far 116,000 new citizens have taken the oath of citizenship and the target of 300,000 is likely to be achieved.
In the same period in 2021, Canada had sworn in only 35,000 people as citizens of the country.
With the increasing number of online applications, the processing time also increased. Till last June, 413,000 applications were on the list.
To clear the backlog, IRCC has hired 1,000 new staff members. Meanwhile, minors (under the age of 18) will now be eligible to apply for citizenship online till the end of the year.
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