on new year’s day, regards The press“Jean-François Munier experienced an incredible situation when Air Canada refused him boarding to return there [Canada], at the airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. The reason: his permanent residence card had expired.”

After seeing his 4-year-old son and mother leaving without him, Jean-François Munier took a flight to Plattsburgh, Vermont, and from there crossed the Canadian border on foot on the Saint-Bernard -de- in the dead of winter Lacolle substation in Quebec. “The customs officials in Lacolle were very surprised because I’ve been waiting for three years. Some looked at my file without understanding why I hadn’t [encore] my citizenship.”

“My passport expires in September”

His application, the Quebec daily explains, has been in the background check phase since June 2019. However, according to the 34-year-old Frenchman, immigration authorities never asked him to provide any further documentation and his appeals to the ministry went unanswered.

This dad worries about his status:

“My French passport expires in September. At the French consulate it is complicated to do it again because it is not considered an emergency. In the end, i [risque] to be ‘landless’.”

According to the Department of Immigration, the number of people granted citizenship by Canada ranged from 20,000 to 25,000 per month in 2019. However, the pandemic halved that number in 2020 before picking up a normal pace again towards the end of 2021. especially with the introduction of virtual naturalization ceremonies. Calculate at the current rate The press, The department will process approximately 208,000 citizenship applications this year.

In Quebec, 27 months to process an application

The newspaper reports that the average processing time for a citizenship application is twenty-seven months in Quebec and twenty-six months elsewhere. Surprisingly, the publication adds, the ministry is currently processing submitted cases.almost a year after Jean-François Munier’s request”an injustice”which has already been publicly denounced in applications for permanent residence”.

Accompanied by The press, An immigration spokeswoman, Béatrice Fenelon, explains that several factors can vary the processing time of an application, including “the nature of the application submitted, its complexity, the speed of response of the applicants and the ease of verification of the information provided”.

Toronto radio CityNews reports that the ministryI recently got an injection [61 millions d’euros] for 2022-2023 to reduce processing times in key areas affected by the pandemic”. As a result, he now invites between 3,500 and 5,000 candidates to virtual swearing-in ceremonies every week.