RESCHEDULING OATH TAKING DATE: PROCESS? CONSEQUENCES?

[Canadienne]

We need to reschedule our citizenship oath taking ceremony. We are currently working as expats in China and have professional and financial issues preventing us from attending the ceremony next week.

Our questions are:

1.how do we reschedule?
2. can we rescehedule it to a preferred date? Say 6 months from now?
3. If we can not attend this time, would our file be "lost in the system" as some friends have warned us. Meaning that we may not get another call for 2-4 years or have the citizenship oath get postponed indefinitely?

This is really urgent and any anwers would be very gratefully received.

Thank you
Stuck in China.

[Leon]

My letter of notification to attend the ceremony said that if you cannot attend the ceremony, you can write them a letter within 60 days and convince them that you had a good reason why you could not attend and they will give you another date.  If they did not think you had a good reason, you can forget your application and apply again.

I phoned the CIC call center before I got this letter because I was planning to travel around that time and I wanted to know if I could pick a date later that would be better for me and they said no, if you can't make it on the date they give you, they will give you another date when it is suitable for them.  If you write in your letter of why you can't attend that you will be back in 6 months, they may take that into consideration.  Then again, they might feel that you are not really interested anymore.  Who knows. 

I don't know anybody who had to reschedule but I heard about somebody who had failed the test and was waiting for his interview and he had been waiting for a year.

If you are a couple and one of you can make it to the ceremony, as long as you are together, the other one will not lose their PR due to residency requirements.  Just a thought.