Ottawa: Canada will grant citizenship to 300,000 people in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) memo has outlined the target for the number of new citizens that Canada will welcome by 31 March.
An application is either approved, denied, or marked as incomplete. The target means that 300,000 approved applicants must take the oath of citizenship in Canada. The oath of citizenship would either be in person or virtually.
The Canadian citizenship to 300,000 applicants would exceed the pre-pandemic targets of 2019-2020. In 2020, Canada IRCC could not process most applications to grant citizenship to people as the world was hit by the coronavirus pandemic and the department could only process the online applications.
In 2019-2020, 253,000 citizenship applications were processed. The year 2021-2022 welcomed 217,000 new citizens. In the 2022-2023 fiscal year so far, 116,000 new citizens have taken the citizenship oath and the target of 300,000 is likely to be achieved.
With the increased number of online applications, the processing time also increased. By last June, 413,000 applications were in the inventory.
To clear the backlog, the IRCC has hired 1,000 new staff members. Meanwhile, minors (those under the age of 18) will now be eligible to apply for citizenship online by the end of the year.
