Back in February I sent off my application for Canadian Citizenship. I’ve been bitching and complaining (mostly inwardly but occasionally to Jen) about the lack of response from them. Today I was going to call them up to ask what was going on, but I decided to do a bit of research first.
According to the immigration website, the first stage, which involves someone looking over my application and making sure everything is there before sending me a confirmation letter, takes approximately three months. This means I should wait at least until the end of May before calling.
Three months? That seems like a long time just to take a brief look at my application and fire off a form letter. There can’t be that many people applying for citizenship can there? I went looking. Apparently there are. Every year about 160,000 people apply for Canadian Citizenship. That means those poor immigration people have to look at around 700 applications every working day. That’s 100 applications every working hour. And that’s just for the first step of the process.
About 5% of those applications get rejected, which still leaves 150,000 applications for the more detailed second step, and probably more than 100,000 for the even more detailed third step.
It looks like the CIC employ about 4000 people, and I would guess that less than a tenth of them spend time processing citizenship applications. Putting all these numbers together, it’s not really surprising that the processing takes so long.
So I’m going to stop complaining, sit back, relax, and wait patiently for my application to be processed. My Father-in-law has been here for over 25 years and he’s still not a citizen so it’s not like I’m in a hurry. I don’t envy the job those immigration people have to do, so they can take their time, and I’ll be very nice to them if they call.
